Marketing? All they have to say is "Final Fantasy 7 Remake" and the marketing is complete. Even without ANY other information there will still be 2 million pre-orders. It will make "Greatest Hits" status in the first week no matter what is done to the game.
I'm with Daniel on this one. I know I'm going to hate this remake as much as I'm already hating the upcoming Star Wars sequel trilogy. I haven't seen a single trailer for it, but from the stills and Disney I know it's going to be a big mistake. On one hand, George "More CGI" Lucas is out of it, but Walt "Make ALL the Toy Lines" Disney will just be a different flavor of garbage.[/rant]
Not really.
Marketing in the context of SE and FF7 is about more than putting out the news to engage the general consumer base - it's about the corporate structure in its entirety.
SE saw a huge increase in share value after the announcement - but the longer time passes without significant news, the more of the momentum will be lost. The shares will stabilize and then drop back to the base-line, and the lack of press coverage runs the risk of the less dedicated general public will lose interest in favor of more pressing concerns such as the new Fallout etc.
When this happens, the dev-team will face new difficulties as the above inherently leads to increase in publisher and share-holder pressure, which usually leads to an increase in production pace, and the shortening of dead-lines which ultimately harms the production-value overall.
That's why this is bad marketing - it's bad marketing because they prioritized shock value (probably due to some back-deal with Sony in order to improve the E3 presentation), rather than thinking long-term about the value of the company and the production process.
Things to "look forward to" in the remake:
-Aerith revival quest (plus she'll be named "Aerith")
-More flashy limit breaks that last longer
-Extended cut FMVs in 1080p! (Now with blood!)
-Arranged music = Better music
-Five digit damage limits;eight digit enemy HP.
-More active battles
-Smaller overworld;more dungeon crawly
-No random encounters outside of overworld
-Superboss(es?) that exceed damage limit
-Quests that have no real purpose other than to provide an achievement (Or previously existing quest with an achievement attached to it)
-Better(?) chocobo breeding experience (certainly one of the more grind-y things to do in the game)
-Alternate, or multiple, endings
-Nothing is missable
-New Game+ mode
-More Materia
-More dialogical interludes to break up the non-stop action
Yeah. Guess which FF title I've been binge playing lately.
Some of these aren't bad though.
- Blood in cut-scenes make sense. I always found it jarring how Shinra building was covered in blood after the Jenova break-out, but then the rest of the game was all PG-13, even as Aerith got stabbed to death by Sephiroth.
- Active battles can be a good thing if done right. I am not confident in this teams ability to do so, but it is possible.
Personally, I thought type-0 had a really good set-up for action battles (although a lackluster on the magic side, and terribly balanced...), and I've always greatly enjoyed the Star Ocean games (at least the first 3).
- more dialogue can be done in a great way to provide personality to a game. One of my favorite games of the newer console generations, was Sakaguchi's The Last Story for Wii. It really did everything right from a narrative and character development stand-point that later FF games have failed miserably at.
The thing that really made the characters of TLS come alive was the banter they shared throughout the game - however,
the banter very seldom interfered with the game-play. The characters would be casually conversing whether they were walking around exploring dungeons, or fighting.
FF7 could gain from such an approach, especially if they plan on scaling it up. If they remove the world-map and add a large open world instead, there is much more room for dialogue between characters being expressed as they travel, instead of the characters standing in place and the game-play coming to a halt for prolonged periods of time.
As for limit breaks lasting longer - later FFs have, as far as I know, consistently added options to skip lengthy animations, so I don't really see overly long animations as being something worth worrying about.
Hian, your summary of why things end up the way they do is spot on. It won't change, off course, because there are always people to replace the purists or the people who want strategy and so on. I think a lot of the original games had a soul because it was a time when the company HAD to create better titles to make something of itself, whereas now it's already got a name and mass market appeal - no matter what happens. I also think there's more to it than just money getting in the way (that's certainly the biggest problem) - I think it's also laziness on the part of the team. They've gotten so complacent and familiar with FF that they don't try nearly as hard.
I has a lot to do with graphics as well. Back in the NES-SNES-PS1 eras and up until the later years of PS2, games wouldn't have had mass-appeal no matter what developers did, because the average person just couldn't see the appeal of manipulating a few pixels around on a screen in either case.
Companies back then had to appeal to purists, because apart from kids, purists were literally the only people geeky enough to engage with the
strawberriesty pre-00's hardware to begin with.
Now, everyone and their grandmother can sit down with a Playstation - problem is, they aren't there for love of the medium in terms of what the medium can uniquely offer - they are there for the same reason they go to cinemas, or read the Twilight novels -
Light entertainment and quick emotional gratification.
Not judging though - good for them, and good for the devs who want to make stuff appealing to these people - however it is happening at the expense of the kind of products that established the market to begin with, all while abusing fan-nostalgia and fan-loyalty, and personally I find that to be abhorrent to be honest.
I do, however, have a morbid curiosity about how they're going to accomplish remaking FF7 with next gen graphics. Everything is telling me that a LOT of content and the basic mechanics will need cutting for them to succeed - especially in the time scale they are stating. The idea that they'd redo all of those scenes in full HD seems highly unrealistic. In fact, Kitase and Nomura repeatedly stated one of the main reasons they hadn't considered a remake was precisely because of the work load needed to recreate FF7 (yeah, they're telling you a 1997 game had more in it than modern FFs right there).
I can tell you with pretty high level of certainty some of what's going to get cut -
- Enemy model count - FF7 had tons of enemy types, not counting recolors, for a 3D game. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it had more than any other numbered title after it (although 8 and 9 might have come close), and I am fairly certain it has more than any current gen FF.
They're unlikely to pull of all those models in HD next-gen graphics especially considering the amount of unique animations they'd have to make, and it's even more unlikely if they're going for action-style game-play.
- The map will be scaled down, because having a regular world-map won't work thematically with the new visual style, and making an entire in-scale open-world version of FF7's Gaia simply isn't feasible. If the map get's scaled down, the next question becomes what happens to traveling, and what happens to locations that, in the original, were linked to exploration of the over-world? Probably cut, or changed entirely.
- Story will be cut. FF7 just has too much exposition for a modern voice-acted game. It won't make sense to leave it in as is, and so they'll change it, and whatever doesn't fit with the changes will be cut. I can imagine the flash-back scene in Calm being shortened significantly by simply having Cloud narrate over a few choice moments shown in FMVs with a tarnished sepia filter or something to that effect.
In fact, at worst, I can imagine the entire game being rewritten to allow for a more "stream-lined, fluid, and modern narrative structure" where everything that happens from the moment you leave Midgard is changed to a linear FF10 kind of set-up were you skip relatively quickly ahead to the most significant locations, and get rushed into the last battle with Sephiroth under the excuse that the devs want to avoid player "dead-time" running from location to location on a large over-world, and removing places "irrelevant to the plot" to "save time and resources better spent on more important things"(see - graphics and fight scenes).
Ironically, technology ended up being the worst thing to happen to gaming. Up to the PS2 the media was too small for a company to do as it pleased without caring about good design. Now they can bloat a hard drive or blu-ray disc. With powerful networking, DLC content reared its ugly head - another excuse not to care so much since things can be "corrected later", or added later (for a nice fee, off course!). And, as you mentioned, we now have mindless graphic-power wars between the consoles to prove who is the daddy. Well, none of them are the daddy because we're going backwards and graphics do not make a game. These days, they only break it.
This entire paragraph can be summed up with an appeal to a single game franchise - Assassin's Creed.
GG Ubisoft - please go quietly off somewhere and die.
I think this partly depends on how long they've been working on this. At the very least, we know it's been in the works since December 2014, based on what Nomura said in the Eurogamer article (it was already in-progress when they announced the PC-PS4 port). However, not much more than that is clear. For all we know, they could've been working on it for several years now, and simply lied about it when they said before that it wasn't happening.
Since Nomura was taken off FF15(former Versus13) in September 2014, I think this is the earlier date that we can possibly attribute to the beginning of the remake, but that really matters very little when you consider comment like Wada saying it would take SE ten times longer to remake the entirety of FF7 than their work on FF13.
People call this hyperbola, but I can tell you as an indie-developer who's familiar with setting up projects from scratch, that even if it wouldn't take as long as Wada said, it would certainly take longer than 3-4 years granted the source material in relation to the standard they seem intent on keeping when producing the game (unless they off course, cut a lot of content).
I think it's silly to assume it's been in development longer than this for several reasons - even if it had, that would be pointless due to hardware advances over the times (just think about FF15).
Let's say they started the production of FF7 remake somewhere around FF13, or FF Versus 13, this would mean that they were working on an engine that is now outdated, working with animations and texture etc. that would all have to replaced in either case. They'd still have their work cut out for them, adapting and transporting it over to a new engine for the new consoles.
In short, this game has definitely not been in the works from before the FF15 announce, and Nomura's transfer.
And given the re-allocation of resources to FF15, the people who did work on this cannot possibly have been given priority over FF15, which means that they probably aren't even working as efficiently. As far as I am concerned, in light of all this, it's possible that all that exists of this remake right now, despite what Nomura is insinuating, is the trailer and the resources and the environment necessary to make that trailer. Nothing else.
Now, consider the development time of FF15 - now consider the dumps they've made in that game just to make a demo for us to play (the removal of party-play, and the different mechanics associated with the party-play such as 3rd person shooting etc.), and the relatively stream-lined and simplistic game-play of that demo -
A full and true remake of FF7 would require the creation of so many new 3D resources and animations that it would amount to a work-load so huge that even games like The Witcher 3 look like a joke in comparison. Combine that with all the scenes they would have to script from scratch in this new 3D environment, the countless hours of voice-acting and sound-production, the ridiculous amount of bug-testing necessarily to clear a game of that size, and you're easily looking at a development cycle just as long as that of FF15, even without the need for the creation of a new engine (I presume they'll be using the FF15 engine, which will speed up the process quite a lot though.)
At the end of the day - I feel fairly certain that the only way we're ever going to see this remake in time for the anniversary, is if it's a completely revamped game with not even half of the content of the original one. But let's wait and see.
I'm annoyed by what was said in the Gematsu interview, because it does seem like they'll be changing more than I'd hoped, but I'm not going to make assumptions about the length of the game's development cycle when they haven't made any meaningful statements on it.
There is a problem though when no meaningful statements are made - it more often than not implies the fact that there is nothing to say.
Considering the boost in SE stock value after the announce etc. the logical thing to do, to inspire both consumer and shareholder trust would be make a strong and confident stand, sharing what you have with the public.
The reluctance to do this, seems to be an admittance of the fact that there is nothing there of substance to share.
Consider if they had added a game-play video at the end of the trailer - and that game-play video had featured some half-assed FF15-ish combat, and bit of running around in a linear environment - it would crush the entire impact the trailer had to begin with.
The devs and publisher knows this - they'd rather not say anything, than say something that is potentially damaging at this point - and that seems to indicate that something about the project being potentially damaging to the impressions of the consumers being a distinct possibility.
If they had the goods at this point - there literally is no point in not showing it - non what so ever.