Yay, trivial opinions.

I wonder what the hold-up is.

Basically, the highly trained monkeys that are running Square decided that announcing a game to the public at least a full year before you actually start development was a good idea, and that working on five other games to competition before dedicating a full-sized team to that game was an even better idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiIx9VJWSl8 is what a relatively small team had managed to pull together over the last six years. At some point they moved the game to an entirely new engine developed specifically for Versus XIII, as well as using their next-gen engine Luminous Studio for the game's lighting. Whether that happened before or after this trailer was released is unknown, but the game entered full production in September.

The good news is that Final Fantasy XIII-2 only took two years to bring to market. Assuming they even have half of Versus XIII finished, it should be able to make a late 2012 release in Japan. Seeing as Square is actually halfway decent with localization times these days, we're looking at a Q1 release for North America.

In other words: Find something else to play and pray that they don't [censored] this up.

I expected 2011 to be a bit better than it was looking at the lineup back at the start of the year. There have been quite a few hyped up games that turned out to be good but not great, or worse. It's still been a good year though... and i'd say it's about tied with 2010 for best year of the 7th generation.

Compared to the 90s / early 00s though... both years were rather mediocre.

As for odd / even years... I can't say as i've noticed a pattern.

I'll bet there are at least as many "flops" or bad releases in 2012 as there were this year.

It has its own engine? Why? I thought that the Crystal Tools engine they had for XIII was already pretty well-optimized and adept for the job.

For me, the money for games isn't really the issue.


It's that I don't have time to play all of them.

Crystal Tools was somewhat of a massive failure. It was supposed to streamline/speed up development significantly, but instead took forever to actually finish (a good chunk of Final Fantasy XIII's development cycle on PlayStation 3 was finalizing Crystal Tools) and was apparently quite lacking. They seem to have improved their grasp of the engine with Final Fantasy XIII-2, but it was still a poor investment. It's why they started development on their next-gen engine (Luminous Studio) with input from Western developers (mostly Eidos), whose tech has become much more efficient in recent years.

Either way, the engine created for Versus XIII (be it a modified Crystal Tools/Luminous Studio or something from scratch) is also intended to be Kingdom Hearts III's engine.

So... aside from reduction in development difficulty and newer lighting techniques, what can this new engine do that XIII's can't? Is this thing meant to be multiplatform or is it more geared towards the PS3, specifically (given the exclusive nature of Versus XIII)? When you say it's also intended to be KH III's engine, I thought they weren't announcing anything technical, yet? I mean, this engine is supposed to carry them over to a next-generation they probably don't know much about, Wii-U excluded?

edit: probably best if we could continue this in the FF thread

If this year svcked...what the hell happens in a good year? Real Life 2.0?

I think this year was pretty very good. I also don't believe odd or even numbered years have any relevence.

This year was pretty good and I rarely play any game for more than 1 year outside of MMOs and games like Tiger Woods/Forza/ CoD and Rock Band. The only game I've been playing for 5 years is Guild Wars and Morrowind (earlier this year), I don't touch anything else usually because it's not new enough to me to find enjoyment in it. LOTRO will be 5 years this spring too.