Entries from August 2005
1up put up part of an interview Mr. Final Fanatsy VII, Yoshinori Kitase, did with the official Playstation Magazine.
One of the more interesting tidbits:
OPM: Hironobu Sakaguchi, who started the Final Fantasy series, recently left Square to start a new company, MistWalker. His company is making two RPGs for the Xbox 360. How do you feel about competing on next-generation consoles against the father of Final Fantasy?
Kitase: I sometimes go out to eat with Sakaguchi, so we have a good relationship. His message for me is something like, “Let’s improve each other’s quality. Let’s grow up together and complete each other’s work.”
Before Square Enix was Square Enix, when it was still Squaresoft, there were multiple key titles like Mana, Saga, and Final Fantasy within the company, so the teams were sort of competing with each other to make better games than the rest. So a culture like that already existed.
That culture’s kind of been extended, after Sakaguchi left. Our intention is still to make good games that impress each other. If you look at the market in Japan, it’s somewhat saturated, so it’s good to have a rival that stimulates you to do your best. That’s our relationship.
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One of which could be their previously heard about FPS RPG and the second could vary well be the follow up to Jade Empire, the intelligently named Jade Empire 2.
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Looks like ATI’s Xbox 360 graphics card will be more powerful than the Playstation 3’s Nvidia solution. Not that it means we’ll see better games on one system vs the other, it just gives the Xbox 360 marketing team some more numbers to throw around.
The Inquirer reports that an nVIDIA spokesperson was quoted in the magazine saying that the RSX GPU is basically a slightly less powerful GeForce 7800.
That means that almost a year before launch, there’s a PC graphics chip that is more powerful than the RSX GPU found in the PlayStation 3. And make no mistake, this is not a crazy, speculative conclusion ; this comes straight from the company that makes both parts: the RSX and GeForce 7800 graphics processing units.
Ouch. Doesn’t matter much to me though, if the Killzone 2 trailer shown at E3 was realtime, I’m sold. Has anyone heard whether this was real-time or pre-rendered?
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How much do you want to bet that they are going to wait until some Xbox 360 launch numbers and opinions come out to determine whether or not the Playstation 3 will have different models or not. For now though, Sony VP Phil Harrison has stated that they will most likely go with one Playstation 3 version as to not confuse the marketplace.
“Are there two versions of the Xbox 360 that people want to buy, is my question,” he continued. “I don’t know.”
“This is my personal view, not my corporate view, but when I look at those formats, I think it just confuses the audience. They don’t know which one to buy, developers don’t know which one to create for, and retailers don’t know which one to stock.”
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To sum up the mostly good vibes, developing for the Xbox 360 is cool and all but don’t expect us to be blowing people away with this out of the gate titles. Seems like even the developers think it will be a while until this generation’s capabilities could be reached. The tightly integrated developing evironment makes it easier to develop and port over exstitng code in to new code bases but the size limitation of the DVDs might be an issue. Sounds like we can expect a lot of multi-disc games.
From Software producer Masanori Takeuchi, who’s been working on Enchant Arm, a role-playing game slated to be an Xbox 360 launch title, said developers will also be running into issues of storage space in the next generation. While the Xbox 360 is a next-generation console, Microsoft decided to equip it with a normal DVD reader rather than give it HD-DVD or Blu-ray reading capabilities.
“The volume of data in Enchant Arms won’t fit into a single DVD. It’s an RPG, so we’re thinking it would be inevitable that we release it on two discs,” says Takeuchi. “But to be honest, that’s even looking grim.”
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Namco officialy dishes on thier Tekken 5 update, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection. The update will introduce two new characters and a number of new arenas. That’s about it though.
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World of Warcraft has hit (and most liekly passed) the 4 million subscriber mark, with 1 million of them being in the US alone.
"With the continued support of our retail partners, World of Warcraft has reached more than one million paying customers in North America well before its one-year anniversary in November," commented Blizzard president Mike Morhaime.
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