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balmong7 wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


Borderlands is preparing to release its third full game after a lengthy hiatus/development time, and it is one where I think it doesn't so much "get away" with being a shoot and loot game, it actively thrives on it and seems to garner a certain level of praise for it.

Considering Borderlands practically created the genre, or at the very least popularized it. I would hope it thrives off it. However, we will see how 3 actually does sales-wise. It's an Epic store exclusive on PC and is getting tons of microtransaction cosmetic items.

Epic store exclusive makes it atleast for my pals a year later publicly availible.

I never understood Boarderlands cosmetic DLC. Mostly because most of the cosmetics they sold were for your character which you can't actually SEE in the game save the short few seconds they get into or out of a vehicle or the small hints of wrist and hand when they hold a gun. Faces, jumpsuits, leggings etc.. .are all worthless to the player!

Not Online!!! wrote:

balmong7 wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


Borderlands is preparing to release its third full game after a lengthy hiatus/development time, and it is one where I think it doesn't so much "get away" with being a shoot and loot game, it actively thrives on it and seems to garner a certain level of praise for it.

Considering Borderlands practically created the genre, or at the very least popularized it. I would hope it thrives off it. However, we will see how 3 actually does sales-wise. It's an Epic store exclusive on PC and is getting tons of microtransaction cosmetic items.

Epic store exclusive makes it atleast for my pals a year later publicly availible.

Which is when most companies make their decisions on the success of a game or not.

Overread wrote:I never understood Boarderlands cosmetic DLC. Mostly because most of the cosmetics they sold were for your character which you can't actually SEE in the game save the short few seconds they get into or out of a vehicle or the small hints of wrist and hand when they hold a gun. Faces, jumpsuits, leggings etc.. .are all worthless to the player!

They were for playing online with other people. Especially since it was possible to have multiples of the same character running around. It helped differentiate people.

However, I also remember most of the cosmetic DLC for Borderlands 2 being disguised as level packs. Where you played through a special level and then got the cosmetics as the reward. A lot of them were super fun too.

balmong7 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

balmong7 wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


Borderlands is preparing to release its third full game after a lengthy hiatus/development time, and it is one where I think it doesn't so much "get away" with being a shoot and loot game, it actively thrives on it and seems to garner a certain level of praise for it.

Considering Borderlands practically created the genre, or at the very least popularized it. I would hope it thrives off it. However, we will see how 3 actually does sales-wise. It's an Epic store exclusive on PC and is getting tons of microtransaction cosmetic items.

Epic store exclusive makes it atleast for my pals a year later publicly availible.

Which is when most companies make their decisions on the success of a game or not.

That's rather late to figure out success. Pre-orders + first week should tell companies most of that story, the rest is a fairly predictable (and therefor something that can be mapped/projected) downward trend from there on out, with very few exceptions.

A year out, and a company is usually neck deep in the next project or has closed up shop.

Voss wrote:

balmong7 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

balmong7 wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


Borderlands is preparing to release its third full game after a lengthy hiatus/development time, and it is one where I think it doesn't so much "get away" with being a shoot and loot game, it actively thrives on it and seems to garner a certain level of praise for it.

Considering Borderlands practically created the genre, or at the very least popularized it. I would hope it thrives off it. However, we will see how 3 actually does sales-wise. It's an Epic store exclusive on PC and is getting tons of microtransaction cosmetic items.

Epic store exclusive makes it atleast for my pals a year later publicly availible.

Which is when most companies make their decisions on the success of a game or not.

That's rather late to figure out success. Pre-orders + first week should tell companies most of that story, the rest is a fairly predictable (and therefor something that can be mapped/projected) downward trend from there on out, with very few exceptions.

A year out, and a company is usually neck deep in the next project or has closed up shop.

Pre order plus first week is indeed the correct metric.

Yeah but hasn't Epic also said that they will cover any shortfall on predicted first week/month sales. Ergo if a game sells significantly less than projected Epic will make up the difference.


Of course I'd not expect that to remain, but I think they've confirmed it for several games for the moment so for hte developers having gotten a golden handshake just to go exclusive there's now not even any risk for them.


Plus you can be sure for all the whining most gamers will cave and just register on epic store for the game. So its likely to have only a marginal effect. Honestly Epic's huge drama could be overcome if they just spent some of their fortune on the store itself (like putting a cart into it; adding some basic review systems; improving security

Voss wrote:


That's rather late to figure out success. Pre-orders + first week should tell companies most of that story, the rest is a fairly predictable (and therefor something that can be mapped/projected) downward trend from there on out, with very few exceptions.

A year out, and a company is usually neck deep in the next project or has closed up shop.

Right that's what I'm saying. If a game is exclusive to the epic store for a year. Then the "success" of borderlands 3 will have been decided before it hits steam. So we will be hearing all about how it failed/succeeded as a result of Epic store and microtransactions pretty quickly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Yeah but hasn't Epic also said that they will cover any shortfall on predicted first week/month sales. Ergo if a game sells significantly less than projected Epic will make up the difference.


Of course I'd not expect that to remain, but I think they've confirmed it for several games for the moment so for hte developers having gotten a golden handshake just to go exclusive there's now not even any risk for them.


Plus you can be sure for all the whining most gamers will cave and just register on epic store for the game. So its likely to have only a marginal effect. Honestly Epic's huge drama could be overcome if they just spent some of their fortune on the store itself (like putting a cart into it; adding some basic review systems; improving security

From what I understand Epic is just paying a huge upfront cost to make it exclusive, rather than promising anything on release. But I could be wrong. I'm sure most people will just register on epic. But this is a multiplayer-focused game, so if your friends are waiting for the steam version, you will too. Though that works both ways, if they aren't waiting, then you will sign up for Epic to play with them.

AAA game franchises die because the market isn't willing to pay $100 up front for a video game.

Seriously, the $60 price point has been around for so long and it's killing the industry, causing crap like microtransactions and loot boxes and DLC seasons pass - nobody wants to make a complete game anymore out of the box, and the $60 price point isn't nearly enough to pay for it all. And sales are spikey - very spikey, so you go for some quarters with huge losses and other quarters with huge gains. Ever wonder why games get pushed out the door early? Because a company can't afford to have 2 quarters in a row with a -38% profit margin like EA did in 2013.

There are hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in the development of a single AAA title and the pressure to not fail far outweighs the pressure to put out a really good game. So you get 'safe' sequels that end up being milquetoast experiences until the sales drop to the point where they cannot justify risking a sequel, so they buy the rights to some successful indie game and make a AAA version of it to start the cycle anew.

 John Prins wrote:
Seriously, the $60 price point has been around for so long and it's killing the industry,

There's a video and like 5 posts about how this is a myth.

nobody wants to make a complete game anymore out of the box

This is true, but I don't think it has anything to do with development costs as much as development time tables.

A good project turns around time 10 years ago would be 5-6 years for a major project. Today, it's almost unheard of for a game from a major AAA publisher to have a turn around time of more than 2-3 years. Even games that are announced 5-6 years before release are rarely actually developed that long. Anthem is the perfect example. They announced the game way back in 2014/2015, it officially entered "development" in 2012, but on release, countless people pointed out that it felt like a thrown together project produced within 2 or so years. Low and behold, after release, this is confirmed, where somehow a 7-year development plan got reduced to an 18-month development project due to a mix of executive meddling, internal conflicts for the developer, and constantly shifting goals and priorities.

This has repeated for several other major games. Aliens: Colonial Marines, Destiny, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV (before Realm Reborn) and countless other games had years-long developments that were practically only 18 to 36 months because project management has become a crippling failure within the industry, wasting mountains of money, developer time, and work hours. So many games feel incomplete on release has nothing to do with "costs." It's just bad project management and timetables too short to ever produce a "complete" game.

And sales are spikey

This is true, but honestly, I think this is a marketing issue, not a development issue. There are a lot of great games that get poor publicity and thus poor sales, seemingly only because no one bothered to get the word out about it. This isn't entirely on publishers or developers though, because gamer communities are constantly shifting. They don't necessarily respond to traditional advertising like other groups, and they're constantly shifting in how they engage with "games news." When I was in high school it was all about the game's magazines. Then it was all about game shows and conventions. Then it became all about game websites, and now it's all about YouTube and Streamers. That's three shifts in just 10 years. Who knows what it'll be next.

EDIT: There's also just plain bad budgeting. I don't know what possessed Sony in 2011 to think the 2014 remake of Tomb Raider would ever sale 15 million copies. That's what they budgeted for and it was an absolutely insane projection. To any other game, 7 million units would be a great success and profitable game. Instead, Sony budgeted for twice that, predictably didn't sale that many copies and then looked at the game as a sales failure. Sony fethed up. Raising their prices wouldn't have fixed the underlying issue that they projected wildly optimistic sales.

I do think part of the issue is that publishers try to approach games a lot like Hollywood approaches movies, but while the budgets of these projects can often be similar in total, the time it takes to make a game is much longer than the time it takes to make a movie and it involves a lot more personnel. The industry desperately needs to innovate how games are made, and arguably has needed a revolution in development cycles for 20 years. Instead companies have been content to simple compress development time into something short and financially managable, which produces games, but doesn't really produce many good ones and causes a lot of burn out in staff. Raising retail prices will not fix that problem in any way whatsoever.

LordofHats is correct here. This isn't a problem unique to video games either-- it's a problem you see in other places with established huge companies, too, like movies (where this kind of thing is almost legendary) and comic books (where editorial mandates screw over writers and cause stories to make little sense or just be plain bad).

Mismanagement in the gaming industry is hardly new, either. It's just that these days, the companies infamous for mismanagement are just too big to actually die due to mismanaging a major project. The last big company to die from mismanagement was THQ, but there were legions of others beforehand-- Sierra, Cavedog, Acclaim, the list gets pretty long if you include mid-size companies, and obscenely long if you include small ones.

 Melissia wrote:
LordofHats is correct here. This isn't a problem unique to video games either-- it's a problem you see in other places with established huge companies, too, like movies (where this kind of thing is almost legendary) and comic books (where editorial mandates screw over writers and cause stories to make little sense or just be plain bad).

I think the most obvious place to see it is in Prime Time television. The graveyard of cable TV is littered with the corpses of projects and series' that failed pretty much solely because executives mismanaged them. Wrong time slots, forced plot points, episodes aired out of order for no conceivable reason *glares at Fox*

You see the same thing in games, except its bad time projections, poor budgeting, forced mechanics/gameplay elements, and rampant impatience to turn the project into profit. I think most of the games grumblers like me complain about would probably have been much better to great had they just been given even six more months to get their polish together. Compare Anthem to any Elder Scrolls release. Even when glitch-ridden, or even broken (ESO), no Elder Scrolls game has ever come out of a 5-6 year development cycle and felt like it was thrown together in 18 months (though Bethesda seems in recent years to have learned all the wrong lessons from the market, what doesn't bode well for ESVI). I think CD Project Red, Nintendo, and Blizzard really need to be seen as the benchmarks for development right now. Like them, don't like them, whatever. They put out products, and their products are rarely half-assed and its reflected in consumer loyalty, critical acclaim, and financial success. Hell, even Creative Assembly at their worst, managed to put out a game that felt complete (it was just horrifically unpolished), and they seemed to learn their lessons from Rome II and applied them to Warhammer and 3 Kingdoms.

To the developers, I say stop bitching about how your feth-ups aren't your feth-ups and pay attention to who isn't fething up. I'm not even that interested in Cyberpunk 2077 and I bought it solely because CD Project Red doesn't make me ashamed of the human species.

I mean, that's part of why when Nintendo announced it was delaying Animal Crossing to give it that extra bit of polish and finish without overworking its workers, most people celebrated. Yes, it was also a PR stunt because overworked workers were a big topic at the time... but it was also a very Nintendo thing to do. Nintendo takes pride in its intellectual properties.

 LordofHats wrote:
A good project turns around time 10 years ago would be 5-6 years for a major project. Today, it's almost unheard of for a game from a major AAA publisher to have a turn around time of more than 2-3 years

The big name projects of companies rolling in cash perhaps, like GTA.
Most developers aren't on that scale, and weren't 10 years ago either.

A.T. wrote:
Most developers aren't on that scale, and weren't 10 years ago either.

Except they were.

It's why we saw so many companies fold/get bought up throughout the 00s. What was a turn around time as short as a few weeks in the 80s rapidly ballooned in the 90s. You can find a few games that worked and succeeded greatly in a 2-3 year cycle then (Everquest and Lineage are great examples). But once you start moving into the mid-2000s development times started getting high. Some games were practically miracles (KotOR II was developed in basically 12 months). But those weren't normal development times. Back then 4-5 years would be normal, and a whole crap ton companies shuttered or had to sell their stocks to a larger company to weather the costs because development times were getting too long for small companies to fight through. That's how EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and THQ got so big in the first place.

It probably plays a big part in how the big three publishers look at the market too, since they got that big buying up all the companies that couldn't float such hefty costs year to year, and think they'll end up the same if they don't speed up development. Either way, raising prices doesn't fix the real problem: the development cycle needs new ideas. The current one is unsustainable and arguably has been since it first started to emerge in the 90s. It probably goes hand in hand with the fallacy that the bigger the budget the bigger the reward that perpetuates in entertainment.

 LordofHats wrote:
But once you start moving into the mid-2000s development times started getting high. Some games were practically miracles (KotOR II was developed in basically 12 months). But those weren't normal development times. Back then 4-5 years would be normal.

News to me, and i've been in the industry since 2003 with indie work before that. Only ever saw two games get to 4-5 years - one was early on, engine development across two generations of consoles with a tiny team for most of it, and the other fell into development hell and died because it was a 4-5 year project and it went from next-gen to dated before it even released.

00s were rough for a mix of reasons. Not everyone could make the tech jump, and a lot of companies would underbid to get contract work and kill themselves. Unscrupulous publishers would hold back milestone payments in the months after release (cost of release and all that) and let any small dev who had cut it too thin go bankrupt and die. And at the end of the day small devs with only one or two games on the go at a time were reliant on a continuous flow of new work which leads back around to the underbidding.
Big companies like EA buying up and running down companies was how they made money but not why the companies were folding in the first place.

Final Fantasy XIV (before Realm Reborn) and countless other games had years-long developments that were practically only 18 to 36 months

I suspect that the shorter development time is seen as a trade-off. Players want modern technology in their games. As an example, the current version of Final Fantasy XIV has issues with the game that the developers would like to change. But they can't because the game is still tied to the original 1.0 engine, and there are certain things about that engine that can't be changed, and effectively block the changes to the game that the developers want to make (or at least, block them unless the developers want to spend a ridiculously huge amount of resources). A longer development time means a more polished product. But it also ties you into older technologies that might be considered outdated by the time your game is released.

And some sub-groups within the gamer crowd are notorious for turning their noses up at anything that looks "old".

and Blizzard really need to be seen as the benchmarks for development right now

Things I'm hearing make me start to suspect that Blizzard might be coasting a bit too much on its reputation. As an example, Final Fantasy XIV has apparently received a rather large surge of players over the last while due to how strongly players dislike WoW's latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth. Players have apparently been growing unhappy with Blizzard over the last few expansions. BfA was apparently the last straw for quite a few of them, and once they make the decision to quit, they look for a similar game. Final Fantasy XIV is probably the closest thing to it right now, and has been quite popular with players under the game's current leadership. So players make the jump.

That's not to say that everyone's doing it. I don't know how many players WoW has lost or retained lately (Blizzard doesn't release subscription numbers anymore). I don't think WoW's in danger of shutting down yet (for that matter, the previous Final Fantasy MMORPG *still* has servers up for PC players, even though no further development is taking place for the game) And I suspect that quite a few players who bailed from WoW just quit playing MMORPGs. But Final Fantasy XIV has had a huge surge in players recently (even before the expansion came out; and note that what FFXIV considers "huge" would have been considered small during WoW's hey-day), to the point where the developers felt the need to add a third data center exclusively for the North American game servers. And if you read comments from new players at places like the FFXIV Reddit page, most of the posts invariably start along the lines of, "I was a WoW player, but BfA..."

In short, Blizzard *might* be coming to the same point that Bioware was at back in 2011.

Eumerin wrote:


Things I'm hearing make me start to suspect that Blizzard might be coasting a bit too much on its reputation.

Oh, they've been coasting on their reputation and blind nostalgia for years.

But it's not so bad that I feel like I can discount that they still manage to put out good products, especially compared to their competitors.

 LordofHats wrote:

Eumerin wrote:


Things I'm hearing make me start to suspect that Blizzard might be coasting a bit too much on its reputation.

Oh, they've been coasting on their reputation and blind nostalgia for years.

But it's not so bad that I feel like I can discount that they still manage to put out good products, especially compared to their competitors.

Until you put the rosetinted glasses away and realize that activision-blizzard has pulled some serious gak, regarding workers, custommers and psychological exploitation.

Honestly WoW is at that age where any release is going to have a significant portion of "nay sayers". It's a huge title and the longer a title is out and the more popular it becomes the louder that voice become;s however the important thing is that it remains a minor voice next to the purchases and positive reviews.

I'd say their only real crime is that they appear to have lost their good writers and RTS feel. SC2 is a great game with a good story; its just not quite got that same feel of the old game and the story takes a few odd twists taht clearly were not intended originally.

My only worry is that Starcraft 3 (whenever it might appear) winds up being MMO RTS (online all the time) and that Diablo 4 ends up more of an mmo and thus again always online (even though those darn console users got it offline).



Also they appear to be about the only big name trying to make big strides in AI development which I really hope takes off and provides some trickle down technology and ideas for other companies. RTS AI tends to show AI at its most challenged and tends to be an area where I've not really seen it make big strides. If anything most AI in RTS appear to not really have advanced as far as areas like graphics or interfaces.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly WoW is at that age where any release is going to have a significant portion of "nay sayers". It's a huge title and the longer a title is out and the more popular it becomes the louder that voice become;s however the important thing is that it remains a minor voice next to the purchases and positive reviews.

Are they doing well, though? We don't know since they don't publish subscription numbers. People *are* leaving, and in large enough numbers to impact other games like Final Fantasy XIV. The problem is that we don't know if the numbers leaving are large enough to impact World of Warcraft. There's simply not enough data available to answer the question.

But it's not so bad that I feel like I can discount that they still manage to put out good products, especially compared to their competitors.

Which is why I picked 2011 as the comparison point for Bioware.

2011 was the first year when people looked at a Bioware game and said, "Wait a minute..." That was the year that saw the release of Dragon Age 2. The reception for that game was... considerably less enthusiastic... than it had been for previous Bioware games (note that I actually liked DA2, personally). The following year, 2012, was the year of the Mass Effect 3 backlash, which further damaged Bioware's reputation with players. Dragon Age 3 came out in 2014, and it seemed as if Bioware was back in the good graces of the players again. Everything seemed to be back on track for the company. The next release was in 2017... and that was Mass Effect: Andromeda.

In short, in 2011, Bioware was seemingly at the top of their game. They released a well-received Star Wars game that year. And they released the sequel to one of their popular in-house franchises. But that sequel also marked the point at which players started to turn against the developer. And while Dragon Age 3 was quite popular when it was released, every single *other* game since then has been attacked. All indications are that Bioware could have pulled out of the spin that started in 2011. But it didn't.

Blizzard *could* pull things off and right the ship. Or it could make things a lot worse, just as Bioware apparently did following Dragon Age 2.

Also worth noting, given one of the other threads currently popular in this forum right now -

Blizzard's active franchises at the moment are Warcraft (primarily through the MMORPG, though the rerelease of Warcraft 3 may indicate that something else is in the pipeline for the setting), Starcraft (represented by Starcraft 2; the Protoss expansion for the game left me with an "MMORPG incoming" vibe, though there's been no further sign of that, afaik), Diablo (represented by Diablo 3, and... uh... *that* mobile game), Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Hearthstone. The latter three all rely on micro-transactions as the way to pay for themselves.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Until you put the rosetinted glasses away and realize that activision-blizzard has pulled some serious gak, regarding workers, custommers and psychological exploitation.

Does every sentence in this thread need to be prefaced with "I'm not saying they're saints," or can people just assume that words only cover what they say and don't extend further? I never said Activision-Blizzard was a good company. I said they were good developers, and they are. They can put a product together on a reasonable budget, within a reasonable timeframe, and while they're certainly slipping of late they're not quite on EA's level so credit where it's due.

Eumerin wrote:

Things I'm hearing make me start to suspect that Blizzard might be coasting a bit too much on its reputation. As an example, Final Fantasy XIV has apparently received a rather large surge of players over the last while due to how strongly players dislike WoW's latest expansion, Battle for Azeroth. Players have apparently been growing unhappy with Blizzard over the last few expansions.

Warlords of Draenor was generally unliked. I resubbed towards the end of it, and found it fine, but that was after it got improved and I skipped the 7 months previous that people were complaining about.

Legion was a good, solid expansion I played from start to finish. Few players (but for the impossible to please ones) actually disliked it.

Battle for Azeroth tried too hard to bring back PvP and shoehorned the economy into Mythic Dungeon running, which turned off a lot of the more casual players. The storyline is good, but it was only worth a couple months before you've leveled a few toons and done all the story missions. It didn't hold me like Legion did.

Long story short, all of the last 3 expansions were easily worth the money plus a couple months of subscription. I didn't even pay for subscription with real money (selling gold for subscription tokens) through any of the last three and actually burned through some gold for Overwatch lootboxes and the last 2 expansions, so I was basically playing for zero dollars for the last 2 years.

I really can't complain about Blizzard in that regard - they got SOMEBODY's money (the person who paid real money for gold), just not mine.

Looking foward to Borderlands 3, Dragon age 4 and Xcom 3 (Eventually), so, in the run idk, but I wouldn't say so. I usually play not AAA games, but there are those I'm excited for.

 Overread wrote:
If anything most AI in RTS appear to not really have advanced as far as areas like graphics or interfaces.

It's a pretty big step between a state engine approach and a competent (and fast) analytical AI. They've currently got deepminds' alphastar playing starcraft 2 online.

Eumerin wrote:
Things I'm hearing make me start to suspect that Blizzard might be coasting a bit too much on its reputation.

Blizzard has been "coasting a bit too much on its reputation" basically for two decades.

But then again, I never bought in to the hype that was "OH MY GAWD SOUTH KOREA LOVES STARCRAFT, SO IT MUST BE THE BEST THING EVER!".

Starcraft wasn't even the third best RTS released in 1998.

Yeah, I'm not really seeing where this idea that 4-5 years was normal development time in the past is coming from.

To look at some of the biggest releases of the PS1/PS2 era:

Final Fantasy VII had effectively 2 years of development during which time Square had to learn how to work in 3D and on 32 bit hardware. Final Fantasy VIII also only had two years. Final Fantasy IX had less than two full years.

Then Final Fantasy X had two years which involved getting to grips with the new tech of the PS2. Final Fantasy XII had quite a long development, ending up at 6 years (starting in 2000 and being released 2006) but that is the longest until the massive development of Final Fantasy XV.

Another example:

There was one year between the releases of Crash Bandcoot 2 and 3.

If you are iterating on your previous concept and using the same technology (such as the yearly Call of Duty games, Fifa, Madden etc.) then you do not need a long time as you can reuse the assets you already developed with some changes and improvements.

Just a bit of a note here, that last one's not a good objection IMO. Crash Bandicoot 3 used the same exact engine and most of the exact same assets as 2 did.

Certainly a lot of sequels of that kind did go faster due to re-use of assets, but that doesn't reflect on every project.

 Melissia wrote:
Just a bit of a note here, that last one's not a good objection IMO. Crash Bandicoot 3 used the same exact engine and most of the exact same assets as 2 did.

Certainly a lot of sequels of that kind did go faster due to re-use of assets, but that doesn't reflect on every project.

Agreed, I did an edit in to mention that.

Still, though the assets and engine remained the same, a lot changed mechanically between 2 and 3 with the introduction of the power-ups and time trial relics, which necessitated a different approach to designing levels.

Then there's Crash Team Racing which had 8 months of development time.

Right, but that still reduces the effort and time it takes. That's why sequels were so popular. See also: yearly releases of sports games which are often little more than stat adjustments with a few gimmicks thrown in.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Final Fantasy XII had quite a long development, ending up at 6 years (starting in 200 and being released 2006) but that is the longest until the massive development of Final Fantasy XV.

Also worth noting -

Final Fantasy XII wasn't well-liked by players during the original release. Based on what I've heard, the rerelease has been much more positively received.

Final Fantasy XV was originally supposed to connect in some fashion (that was never completely explained) to Final Fantasy XIII. The massive snarl that the latter turned into might have something to do with why XV's development took as long as it did.