Square Enix game engines: Combusting money
Final Fantasy 14 Online and Crystal Tools, a Wombo Combo of failure.
Another related vice is that Square Enix can't stop making game engines. The Crystal Tools engine they made was terrible and featured in some of the consensus worst Final Fantasy games ever to grace non-mobile platforms. It took forever to develop, had to be adjusted several times, and was fairly out of date by the time it was used to make anything. There's not one good thing to say about it.
Not one to be deterred by a horrible failure, Square Enix immediately began work on another new game engine, called Luminous Studio. This is entirely separate from the other new engine they were designing for FF14: A Realm Reborn or engines used by the Western developers Square Enix acquired. Luminous Studio was intended to become a brand that would be pushed.
Surprising nobody, the Luminous engine has been giving Square Enix trouble. In fact, it has been speculated numerous times that the Luminous engine is already dead. Fuel was only added to the fire when Tetsuya Nomura confirmed that Kingdom Hearts 3 would be moving to Unreal Engine 4 because the Luminous engine just wasn't working for them. This means that the only known game to still be using the engine is Final Fantasy 15.
There's the distinct possibility the Luminous engine will be a, very pretty, massive failure.
Even then, it seems final Fantasy 15 is going to be using a modified version of the Luminous engine. All Square Enix currently has to show for all of their efforts on Luminous Studio are a few tech demos, Agni's Philosophy and Witch Chapter 0 [cry], and an early FF15 demo that was a little jank from a technical standpoint.
Developing engines is expensive work, Crystal Tools was put out to pasture after a mere four games, one of which was so bad that Square Enix themselves said it greatly damaged the Final Fantasy brand. Now Luminous Studio is looking even worse in terms of output.
Considering Square Enix already has the license to use Unreal Engine 4, it makes one wonder. Couldn't Square Enix do better by cutting their losses now instead of making tech demos your average consumer won't be able to run this decade, on an engine that already seems to be on its way out?
Seems like there's going to be a (Part 3) after all. In the finale we'll go over Final Fantasy 15 becoming the new Shenmue, and finally show some praise for things Square Enix has done right. We'll be looking at how more limited platforms have given rise to some of Square Enix's best character designs in years.
Last time we claimed that Square Enix has a problem with saying enough is enough and that they'd rather put 60,000 hairs on Dr. Aki Ross's head than shell out to give her a 3D character. With that in mind, let's continue our look at Square Enix's propensity for blowing money.
This is part two of our three part look at Square Enix, Final Fantasy, and what exactly went wrong. You can check out Part 1 here.
"What's a budget?" asked everyone at Square Enix in unison.
Costly or not at least this character isn't a waking belt buckle.
A couple of years back, Square Enix claimed that they were disappointed with the performance of Hitman, Sleeping Dogs, and Tomb Raider despite a total of 8.75 million combined sales at the time. Their sales goals for that six month period was almost 15 million units of software.
Why were their expectations so high? Because they had to be. When a large company invests money, they make estimated sales figures based on what will turn a profit and justify the investment. Even if a game turns a profit, it has to turn a big enough profit, or it wasn't worth the investment because that money could have yielded a better return elsewhere.
Simply put, sales expectations were inflated because Square Enix invested too much money into their products in ways that didn't increase sales. I'm willing to bet that their obsession with continually adding to a project is a direct cause of these inflated expectations. For example, Tress FX and hiring a popular actress to voice Lara Croft aren't likely to increase sales by as much or more than the cost of adding them.
We already covered Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It spent almost 200% of its massive initial budget. All of that hair animation and hiring a large cast of Hollywood actors did more to hurt it than it did to help. Just look at fellow 2001 CG animated movie Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, it had a budget of $30 million, crappy hair, and an entire voice cast that was probably paid less than James Woods alone, and it kicked Spirits Within's ass as far as box office gross or return on investment is concerned.
$137 million couldn't buy an emotional death.
Square Enix only half learned their lesson from that ordeal it seems, because they went out and did the same thing with Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children. It was originally going to be a 20 minute short film, but in predictable fashion, the project ballooned into a 100 minute schlock fest filled with pretty graphics.
It sounds like they learned nothing you say? On the contrary, they learned to milk FF7's name so they didn't have to come up with a coherent story or competent character development. They also used cheaper voice actors, likely helping to keep costs under $100 million. Finally, they knew when to stop with the effects, for a little while at least. They eventually went back to the well a few years later to add more details and make the fights even more over the top.
If Square Enix ever really learns anything from their previous failures to control their budget and put a products out, it must be in the manner of a student cramming for finals. All of that knowledge is gone by the next project. The Final Fantasy 13 series started strong but ended on two straight failures and one of the worst received console FF games of all time.
But what about Square's ever expanding list of game engines?
