End of an era
Nov. 1st, 2024 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverIt's been a difficult past couple of days for us, though you'll probably read this post and laugh and say it's ridiculous.
So, 31-Oct was the end-of-service date for a game that my husband has played constantly for the past eight years. It's a mobile game called Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (FFBE), in which you recruit characters from the various Final Fantasy franchise games, level them up, and fight monsters with them. I also played the game for a couple of years but lost interest in it a long time ago.
My husband loved this game. He got all the cool units (and yes, this costs a lot of money - it's a gacha - and it has been his major expense over the years), and spent hours a week doing the difficult content, and followed the streamers who talked about the game, and was one of the pillars of the Reddit community. But, of course, everything has to come to an end sometime.
We're not actually sure why the game was closed. FFBE was originally a Japan-regional game made by a company called Alim, but then it was adapted to international gaming by a different company called Gumi. Basically, Alim develops the game and content for Japan, then gives it to Gumi, who adapts it for international. The international version of the game got everything Japan got and more - special units, special content, etc. The game had been very popular and profitable in both areas, but then Gumi started pulling support for it, resulting in very little special content and lots of bugs. Finally, the international version has been closed, but the Japan version is still going strong.
(My hypothesis: The model of taking an existing code base and changing it for a different audience (not just localizing it, but actually changing it) wasn't sustainable. There's evidence that they had to reapply the changes every week, so it basically took too much work to sustain the pace and quality, especially when the team kept getting reduced.)
Anyway, the problem for us, for this particular game, is that it's online-only, so now that the service is turned off, it's completely gone. It's not like a canceled TV show, where you can go back and watch exisiting episodes. FFBE's app still exists on his iPad, but it won't even start up now. Of course, we knew this would eventually happen, but it's so much worse when it actually does. My husband got increasingly depressive as the date approached, and then the last couple of days, he spent them taking videos and screenshots of everything. (And I mean everything - hundreds of units and monsters, gameplay, etc.)
(Note, neither of us object to this type of game. It had a strong online component, which requires servers to operate and manage, so when it closes, the servers are taken down and the game is no longer playable. That's just the way it is. We do not support the petition that's going around the EU right now about forcing developers to make online games playable offline after the game closes. Doing so is a ridiculous amount of effort and would only serve to prevent many game creators from creating online games, to avoid that responsibility.)
We have been through this before. Back in 2016, the Facebook game Marvel Avengers Alliance (MAA) closed, and that had been his passion for four years. MAA was a breakthrough game - maybe not the first of its kind (collect an IP's characters and fight with them, just like FFBE) but certainly the best implemented one at the time. I know that he was sad when it closed, but neither of use remember it being as bad as this time. Apparently I didn't even think to write about here. I think he was more invested in the characters this time. Also, at the time the game came out, we worked for Disney Interactive (Disney's first foray into social gaming) and worked with the team that created MAA, so we got to see behind the scenes, and well, it kind of soured the game a bit. (I actually got to do some work on the successor game, and hoooo that was bad.)
Anyway, it's been two days since it went down and he's finally feeling better. On the bright side, he has a lot more time for other things now. We actually popped in a movie last night, for the first time in ages. Things gets better with time.
So, 31-Oct was the end-of-service date for a game that my husband has played constantly for the past eight years. It's a mobile game called Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (FFBE), in which you recruit characters from the various Final Fantasy franchise games, level them up, and fight monsters with them. I also played the game for a couple of years but lost interest in it a long time ago.
My husband loved this game. He got all the cool units (and yes, this costs a lot of money - it's a gacha - and it has been his major expense over the years), and spent hours a week doing the difficult content, and followed the streamers who talked about the game, and was one of the pillars of the Reddit community. But, of course, everything has to come to an end sometime.
We're not actually sure why the game was closed. FFBE was originally a Japan-regional game made by a company called Alim, but then it was adapted to international gaming by a different company called Gumi. Basically, Alim develops the game and content for Japan, then gives it to Gumi, who adapts it for international. The international version of the game got everything Japan got and more - special units, special content, etc. The game had been very popular and profitable in both areas, but then Gumi started pulling support for it, resulting in very little special content and lots of bugs. Finally, the international version has been closed, but the Japan version is still going strong.
(My hypothesis: The model of taking an existing code base and changing it for a different audience (not just localizing it, but actually changing it) wasn't sustainable. There's evidence that they had to reapply the changes every week, so it basically took too much work to sustain the pace and quality, especially when the team kept getting reduced.)
Anyway, the problem for us, for this particular game, is that it's online-only, so now that the service is turned off, it's completely gone. It's not like a canceled TV show, where you can go back and watch exisiting episodes. FFBE's app still exists on his iPad, but it won't even start up now. Of course, we knew this would eventually happen, but it's so much worse when it actually does. My husband got increasingly depressive as the date approached, and then the last couple of days, he spent them taking videos and screenshots of everything. (And I mean everything - hundreds of units and monsters, gameplay, etc.)
(Note, neither of us object to this type of game. It had a strong online component, which requires servers to operate and manage, so when it closes, the servers are taken down and the game is no longer playable. That's just the way it is. We do not support the petition that's going around the EU right now about forcing developers to make online games playable offline after the game closes. Doing so is a ridiculous amount of effort and would only serve to prevent many game creators from creating online games, to avoid that responsibility.)
We have been through this before. Back in 2016, the Facebook game Marvel Avengers Alliance (MAA) closed, and that had been his passion for four years. MAA was a breakthrough game - maybe not the first of its kind (collect an IP's characters and fight with them, just like FFBE) but certainly the best implemented one at the time. I know that he was sad when it closed, but neither of use remember it being as bad as this time. Apparently I didn't even think to write about here. I think he was more invested in the characters this time. Also, at the time the game came out, we worked for Disney Interactive (Disney's first foray into social gaming) and worked with the team that created MAA, so we got to see behind the scenes, and well, it kind of soured the game a bit. (I actually got to do some work on the successor game, and hoooo that was bad.)
Anyway, it's been two days since it went down and he's finally feeling better. On the bright side, he has a lot more time for other things now. We actually popped in a movie last night, for the first time in ages. Things gets better with time.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 07:18 pm (UTC)The only mobile games I do anymore are Word ones or things like Candy Crush or Royal Match ( which… does take a little money) but I remember when DW Legacy was thing. I played the FB version before getting a smartphone.
You played a Match 3 like Bejewel or Candy Crush and collect DW characters and play through episodes or storylines. I still miss it.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 08:01 pm (UTC)DW Legacy was my favorite game while it lasted. It's a Match 3, but it's not like Bejeweled or Candy Crush: rather than making a single match each turn, you moved a piece around the board to cause other pieces to create the match. If you were good at it, you could make multiple matches in one turn... and I was *very* good at it. I wrote some gameplay and strategy articles about it in my other journal (I had a DW journal on another site for a while), and the company that made DW Legacy found them and featured them on their site. :)
The gameplay itself (the match-3 part) was a ripoff of another game called Puzzles and Dragons, which is a Japanese mobile game that still exists. If you liked the gameplay (rather than missing DW Legacy for the DW part), you could get that, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's very PvP and not fun if you don't enjoy battling other players (which I don't). It's also very gacha.
I really loved what DW Legacy did initially with its levels. It was mirroring different seasons of DW and creating levels for individual episodes. But after its initial release, they decided to go in a different direction with the levels and abandoned that, in favor of telling their own story. I didn't find it very interesting and it kind of turned me off the game. I played for a while and collected a lot of the Doctors and characters... and then just stopped after a while. And then about a year later, they closed the game. I think I still have it on an old iPad, and if I remember correctly, they made it so that you can continue to play the existing content.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 08:10 pm (UTC)There's another game called Doctor Who: Infinity I think developed by the same people. I tried playing it once... maybe twice? It wasn't the same. The Match 3 part is still there, but this one has actual voice acting and it feeels more complex.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 09:33 pm (UTC)Oh, I remember one other thing that really turned me off about Legacy. At some point, they released some characters with art from Pixel Who (https://www.etsy.com/shop/PixelWho) instead of the standard art they were using. The characters were really popular, and so they started releasing more, to the point where it felt like they were doing more Pixel Who than standard art. Now, I like Pixel Who (I even have a poster of their Ninth Doctor stuff that I got at their booth at Gallifrey One) but I didn't like that it felt like it had taken over Legacy - I wanted the standard art. That's one of the main reasons I stopped playing - without characters that I wanted to get, I didn't feel like I had a reason to play it.
It's interesting... A couple of days ago, my husband asked me how I had weathered the closing of games in the past, and I thought about it and couldn't come up with a single instance in which I was still playing a game when it closed. We've played a lot of games together, but I just don't have the staying power and will leave when it gets boring, so I've always left those games long before they closed. This discussion of Legacy just reminded me of that, since I left that on my own long before it closed.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 10:52 pm (UTC)Then they abruptly pulled the plug. They had been promising expansions in to an area on the map that the was just for show for years, but never delivered. They could have extended their license but chose not to.
Rumor had it, it was "girl gamer" game and that's not what they wanted.
Still kind of sad about it.