final-fantasy-XIV posts

The massive earthquake that hit Japan on Friday has certainly caused untold amounts of destruction and loss of life. While it's a minor inconvenience compared to what the people of Japan are experiencing right now, players of two MMOs with servers based in Japan, Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV, will be shut down due to the effects of the earthquake.

Square Enix's PlayOnline.com web site reports that starting at 6 pm Eastern time today, the servers of both games will be shut down for at least a week due to the Japanese power companies creating rolling blackouts as a result of the quake. Players won't be billed for the person of downtime for both games.

[Via Massively]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution won't be coming out in the first quarter of 2011 after all. The highly anticipated next game in the cyberpunk action-RPG series' released has been pushed back into sometime into publisher's Square Enix's next fiscal year which begins on April 1, 2011 and ends on March 31, 2012.

In a financial note today, Square Enix cited "weak sales performance of console game titles that have been newly released during the current fiscal year" as part of the reason behind the delay. It added that it will "send additional time to further polish" the game which is being developed at Eidos Montreal.

Before today the publisher was ramping up its efforts for marketing the game including announcing an "augmented edition" of the title and launching a "viral web site" that showed some of the fictional back story behind the game.

Final Fantasy XIV has suffered though one of the worst launches in MMO history and while the fantasy game from Square Enix isn't in danger of a complete shut down like what happened to APB earlier this year, it's clear that the game wasn't ready for prime time when it launched back in September. Today the game's official web site has announced that the game's development team is getting some new members in order to make changes to the game.

According to the web site, Naoki Yoshida will take over as producer and director of the game. The web site describes him as "a passionate individual for whom customer satisfaction has always taken top priority." Other unnamed members of the company have also been moved over to the Final Fantasy XIV team. The restructred team is apparently still working on their plans for the game and until that plan is in place, the game's free online period will once again be extended.

Final Fantasy XIV Online has been slammed by players and game critics since the fantasy MMO from Square Enix launched on the PC in late September. The many bugs and lack of gameplay features are just some of the issues with the title and even Square Enix team members have apologized about the state of the game in a recent chat with PC Gamer.

Square Enix had already extended the free play time for the first time players of the game from 30 to 60 days. Today in a new update on the Final Fantasy XIV web site Square Enix announced that it was extending the free online game period for yet another 30 days. That means if you picked up and played the game when it first game out you won't have to actually start playing the monthly subscription fees until mid-to-late December. In the meantime the first major update to the game is scheduled for release on November 25.

It's been a rocky first month and a half or so for Final Fantasy XIV. The fantasy MMO developed and published by Square Enix suffered from big technical issues and bugs during its launch last September. The problems were so bad that players were given an extra 30 days of free game time.

According to Andriasang, Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada admitted in an investor conference today that the game has had issues, saying, ""We're quickly working on reforms. W'd like to put our full power into regaining trust." The game itself has shipped over 630,000 units worldwide so far, according to the report, with 230,000 copies going to Europe, 210,000 in North America and 190,000 copies in Japan. Wada seems to be pining a lot of hopes that the developer can fix the issues in the MMO saying, "If we satisfy our users, they will return. On the other hand, once the users say, 'forget this,' there's no turning back. We can only recover our trust so far."

[Via VG247.com]

Publisher Square Enix issued some revised financial numbers today. The company revealed that the company's net income for the April-September 2010 time period was down 29.2 percent from previous estimated sales predictions.

Square Enix said part of the reason for the shortfall was due to "sales of new game software releases which experienced relatively slower growth." While specific games were not mentioned in the press release it's likely that Square Enix means that new titles released in that time period such as Kane and Lynch 2 and Final Fantasy XIV Online did not sell as many units as the company anticipated.

[Via 1Up.com]

The release of Square Enix's fantasy MMO Final Fantasy XIV Online has been something of a rocky one since it officially launched in September. Early reviews of the game have ranged from mediocre to poor with much of the reviews complaining of the many bugs in the game that have still yet to be fixed.

Today the game's official web site has announced that people who have or will have purchased the game and created a character in it before October 25 will get an extra 30 days of free online play time in Final Fantasy XIV, extending the free out-of-the-box time for those players to 60 days. In addition the development team and the game's director go over their plans for how the team plans to improve Final Fantasy XIV in the coming weeks and months.

[Via Massively]

This week's launch of Final Fantasy XIV (for Collector's Edition owners; regular edition gamers get to play on September 30) comes with a unexpected side effect. Today Sunflex Europe announced plans to release a console-like PC game controller made for Square Enix's fantasy MMO game.

However, as you can see from the image above the device looks pretty much like a Dual Shock PS2/PS3 controller. In fact there doesn't seem to be any real features that make using this controller better than the normal PC mouse-keyboard set up. If you want to have a Final Fantasy XIV-branded controller it will be released alongside the regular edition of the game.

[Via Blue's News]

This week PC gamers get its single biggest release since StarCraft II shipped out in July with another installment of a classic series. There's also an MMO launch, a game that was first released for consoles back in January and much more for gamers to check out this week.

Sid Meier's Civilization V - Developer Firaxis Games and publisher 2K Games bring us the latest game in this long running turn-based strategy series. While the game uses a new graphics engine and changes some aspects of the gameplay (no more square tiles; this game goes all hexagonal on you) the early reviews of the title have already proclaimed it to be a worthy addition to the franchise.

It looks like the open beta test for Final Fantasy XIV has gotten back on its feet. One day after postponing the open beta for Square Enix's upcoming MMO, the game's official web site has now announced that it will now begin at 10 pm Eastern time for North American players (that's 7 pm Pacific time).

There's no word yet on how long the open beta will last but the full version of Square Enix's next MMO title is scheduled to being on September 22 for owners of the game's collector's edition and September 30 for owners of the standard edition of the MMO. You can check to see if your PC can run the game via the Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark Tool which you can download right here at Big Download.

[Via VG247.com]