Gaming
Final Fantasy XIV Sales Suspended On Mac
Final Fantasy XIV for Mac has had its sales suspended by developer Square Enix. The two-year-old MMO game was given a Mac version a couple of weeks ago to coincide with the release of the Heavensward DLC. However, the Mac client has turned out to have been just a crappy port of the Final Fantasy XIV PC version. The company cited problems with the Final Fantasy XIV Mac client as the main reason for the game being taken off sale, as well as user complaints over the game’s performance.
Final Fantasy XIV Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida released a lengthy statement on Square Enix’s forum about the issues, apologising to players. “We have received a great deal of feedback regarding the performance of the Mac version, as well as various problems which resulted from the information we provided prior to its release. For these issues, we apologize.”
There are numerous bugs and issues with the game that have been reported, many of them game-breaking. Compounding those issues is the fact that Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV on Mac before they’d announced the system requirements. That means people were buying the game without any way of knowing if it would run on their systems.
“I believe that the biggest problem with the Mac version release was the significant discrepancy between the performance of the product our development team produced and the expectations our customers had for it, which was due to the lack of information available on our product when sales commenced, as well as other issues,” Yoshida said.
Surprisingly high system requirements are the least of the problems. All of the issues people are experiencing can be boiled down to one simple fact – the Final Fantasy XIV Mac client is just a Windows game dressed up like a Mac game. That means the client people are running on their Macs is essentially exactly the same as the PC client. The game is broken on Macs because the client also has to translate the PC code into Mac-friendly code in real time, significantly decreasing performance on all but the most powerful machines.
But what is Square Enix going to do about it? Yoshida promised in his statement that they will “make an announcement which will include detailed information on the product, system requirements, and screen resolution.” Basically, they’re not going to fix it. They’re just going to make sure people know it’s a piece of garbage before they buy it.
Up until now, Mac users have been able to run the PC version of Final Fantasy XIV on their Macs through Bootcamp, and it looks like that’s what they’ll have to keep doing.
Square Enix should never have released this port to the public in its current state, much less charged their customers $60 a piece. It’s behaviour like this that’s become far too common in large game publishers. Last week, Batman: Arkham Knight for PC was suspended from further sales after Rocksteady received bucket-loads of complaints about the game’s performance. But not before they’d released it to the public and charged people upwards of $60 for a port that was essentially unplayable.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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