Is anyone else concerned about the game's direction?

Fate/Grand Order FGO Discussion
#1

Mainly just gauging opinions here.

Ever since Lasengle took over the game (essentially DW under new management), the game had a really good run for 3/4 of the first year…then it kinda slowed down around the time Britomarte came out with a massive slew of AOE servants, which did not slow down with LB7. Since then new servants have been coming out at a trickle pace, and now I saw that (allegedly) Takasugi is going to need an animation update at some point in the future because his animations aren’t actually finished.

For context, I love this game. Love the gameplay and have been a player since 2018. I want it to continue because I did see some QoL improvements. But signs like this do leave me feeling worried.

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#2

Wow, they really put out an official statement about it.

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As if it wasn’t obvious enough that 3-week events are just to stall for time. Now I know that the awful schedule is nothing new, but this is new low even for them.

I wonder if it has something to do with Aniplex acquiring Lasagna and Yoshinori Ono joining as COO in the late 2021. ICYDK Ono was a Capcom producer, mainly handling their fighting games, and is the reason that Street Fighter V was a laughingstock for several years in FGC. It also just so happened, that things started getting on track after he left.

I don’t want to spread misinformation, but the timing is weirdly suspicious.

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#3

I think fgo is kind of too big to fail, they can always drop a saberface or servant with massive tits to pull in a profit so my concerns aren’t for the game shutting down

I’m a long time fan too, my first event was I think the first one with Ibaraki? I’m really concerned with the direction they’re going since I haven’t seen a single positive shift since lasangle took over and it’s been getting increasingly worse as time goes on, which is a tendency I only see in fgo. None of the other gachas I play get worse, they get better lol.

My concern is it just becoming unplayable for me due to increasingly worse management, which looks like will probably happen unless they start making positive changes

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#4

Attributing a growing problem FGO has always suffered from to a single event such as the studio rebranding is kinda silly IMO. Content has always been released on the verge of unfinished, and it’s a miracle they managed to avoid major delays prior to LB6 with the way the game is run.

None of us understand in the slightest what effects DW becoming Lasengle has had on the game. None of us know how far in advance content is planned, or what troubles they run into while developing it, or how much change is demanded of the already-planned content mid-way through development.
All we have are interviews from the developers, and from those we know it’s always been a ramshackle production that cuts it close with deadlines. One missed deadline would offset future work, ushering in further and further delays on content. We can’t pinpoint a single moment to blame.

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#6

We can pin down that they claimed the lack of reruns was to churn out new content faster and with less crunch and we know both of those claims are bogus. We also know who claimed it. My hope remains that this is down to a reworking of another app to replace FGO’s horrid code, but frankly my activity will drop off pretty significantly if they don’t fix the JP content schedule by NY and will take a big dip if they’re still struggling by Summer. This is frankly an astounding level of incompetence if there’s not some major overhaul in the works given that every other gacha manages 2-3x the content consistently and with more features.

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#7

Yeah we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes but frankly, we don’t need to when the results are so clear. The fact that they make so much money but still can’t keep a game that releases content on an abysmally slow (compared to other games) basis running properly is pitiful. It doesn’t matter how close they came to deadlines in the past, what matters is that they’re now missing deadlines with the calendar collapsing which didn’t even happen during covid. There’s no explanation except incompetence

And btw I’m not saying the previous rate of content is bad, just that 1-2 characters with one event per month on average is really slow and you’d at least expect them to keep up

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#8

Source? I definitely don’t know that.
I feel like you’d have to Zelretch over to an alternate universe where they continued working on reruns in order to get an answer to whether their claims were legit or not. We don’t know what state the game would be in if reruns were still a frequent feature, better or worse.

Nah, context matters. Read the rest of the thread.
If people want to pin blame on a single unfounded factor, they’re free to do so, and I’ll think they’re being dumb for it.
Time isn’t a disconnected isolated concept; it goes in a straight line. The fact that they made a habit of barely meeting deadlines in the past matters a hell of a lot now that they’re failing to do so.
The established workflow for FGO relied on the fact that they were meeting the deadlines, but they were only just managing to do so. If you just so happen to disrupt that flow… say, with the example you mentioned of Covid… then that has a ripple effect on everything else. That “barely meeting deadlines” slowly becomes barer and barer.
Suddenly the development schedule is slightly off, but that means they don’t hit the planned deadlines, which means the schedule is slightly further off, which means they don’t hit deadlines, which… surely you get the point? Removing a block from a Jenga tower has an eventual impact, whether the tower falls immediately or not. Covid had an impact, the expanded LB6 script had an impact, the diverted studio attention had an impact, the game’s rushed initial state had an impact, and every single small change that puts a pause on development that goes unseen to public eyes has had an impact.

The fact that they’ve never been able to right the ship is certainly a managerial failure, but there was more than one simple factor that led them to this state.

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#9

There’s a bit of back and forth here and I’m getting some new context I didn’t know beforehand, but I also just wanna ask everyone this; do you guys think they can turn their problems around?

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#10

They can honestly if they want to but would they? They probably expect the player base to comeback whenever a new content or event releases.

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#11

If they’re still reeling from covid shutdowns years ago that’s insane mismanagement, and before you say, “Japan had more shutdowns”, their competitors who are also Japanese are doing just fine. It’s incompetence, pure and simple. Missing important events like Christmas, extending events because you have nothing planned, releasing unfinished servants, are all things nobody else on their level is doing. I’m not arguing about it, they’re just doing a pitiful showing

And I agree with this, they definitely could but they probably won’t because they’ll keep making money anyway

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#12

Literally any cursory google search. And no you don’t have to go to an alt timeline you can simply look at content the year they cut off reruns and compare it to the last year they ran reruns consistently. The number of new events are the same. Check the launch schedule for LB7 to see they absolutely crunched to get Part 2 out the door in “January.”

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#13

Riiiight… You’ve missed the point entirely.

But those aren’t the same thing. The lack of reruns isn’t the only difference between FGO now and FGO a few years ago. That’s not a solid comparison to make; do you think that a rerunless 2019 FGO would be in the same state as 2023’s FGO? That they’re identical products with identical dev teams and the same content pipelines? Of course not.
You don’t know how much impact adding reruns into the devs’ currently floundering schedules would have, and neither does anyone else. Pretending we know the answer to hypothetical scenarios is silly.
We don’t know how easy it is, or how hard it is, or how much time it would take them. Ideally the systems would be simple and reactivating old content could be done at the click of a button, but even an Emiya can tell ideals don’t make for reality.

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#14

Except they are, the entire argument you’re making is that the change in leadership isn’t necessarily the reason things look so bad right now, then you turn around and say we can’t expect them to be the same. Considering revenue has grown for the game year after year while content has slowed is absolutely an indication of incompetence and mismanagement unless something massive is in the works. Cutting reruns to focus on more content and failing to deliver more content when not running reruns is absolutely incompetence. Putting out a roadmap and being unable to deliver on it is absolutely mismanagement.

They are running a business, not a charity, and a predatory business at that so I give them absolutely no slack. This game doesn’t have massive 3d rendered cutscenes, it’s a VN. It doesn’t have huge blocks of new content design, it has inconsistently used Grail Fronts. The scenes for NPs are not in-house products by their own admission. Any failure to meet deadlines in this kind of work environment is entirely on them and poor resource management.

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#15

I’m not “turning around”; those are the same point.
The rest of your post, though I agree with it, is irrelevant to what I’m saying. I’m responding to people isolating factors, not people talking about the dire state of the game.

None of what you said explains how we somehow know for a fact they lied about removing reruns to redirect resources elsewhere, as you believe. None of it explains why the leadership change is the sole factor for why the game is in a worse state than it was previously content-wise. Those are the things I disagree with.

#16

The 7th Anni Famitsu interview is the source where they say they’re cutting down reruns in favor of new content, but the new content didn’t increase when they implemented it. Hence lie.

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#17

the are a lot of factors that can fuck the schedual a lot, like this january Nasu desided to rewrite the script if LB7 part 2 at last minute because he is kinda like that, destroying the workflow probably because they have to wait for him to rewrite it to code that stuff is on the game, or like most of 2021 because Nasu rewrited LB 6 on its entirety making a mess on the schedual even if back on newyears it was supposed to be finish, and many other stuff that we don’t know because we don’t work there.

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#18

Are people just saving these arguments to repost every week?

It’s ok, I saved a copy of my pro-Alter Ego rant for future rantings.

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#19

for what i have seen, probably

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#20

I feel like there is a lot of over simplifying here. I work in management in the company I work for (not upper manager, lower management put the torches down I don’t get that sweet executive pay either.) I know if one of my employees misses a deadline it causes a ripple effect, Most of my job requires my employees to do there job, until they do their job I can’t do all of my job since part of my job requires evaluating their performance and helping improve it.

Now if an employee can’t shake off a client long enough to for us to go over their performance and practice new techniques and for me to look under the hood and show them where they could pick up efficiencies at, my work is delayed, if my work is delayed my bosses work is delayed, and so and so on. There is actually a whole science to this cities use it all the time to calculate how to build roads because you can make reasonable predications that if a person even taps on their breaks this is how much time will be added to the commute of the next 100 people.

So with that in mind lets look at what major slow downs have happened that we know about as outside observers, COVID lockdowns and change of management. Anyone who has not been a part of an organization that has purchased or been purchased by another company has no idea how disruptive that is. You got two competing payroll systems, HR systems, internal tools, internal communication paths, chain of commands, logistical supply chains, ect ect ect and there is a large process to fully complete the merger on every level not just on paper and taxes. The company I work for is a fraction of the size of the full corporate chain that owns FGO and it took two years to fully fold in a smaller company we bought.

As for COVID ask your head of internal IT how much fun it was figure out in a week how to let thousands of people work from home. I promise you, they got a rant prepared.

Essentially what you have is a traffic jam which like any traffic jam takes time to clear because of the cumulative effect.

Now none of this is to say there isn’t bad management involved, in my experience most organizations are run by morons who got promoted to the level of their incompetency or until such time as the people above them are sufficiently incompotent to not get promoted so no new opening are available. Which often means the people making the real a decisions are the people who tend to not actually understand the effect of their choices.

In all likelihood its a mix of factors causing the current state not just one thing. Sadly real life is different from stories, you defeat a foe in a story and its happily ever after. You do it in real life congrats you alleviated a symptom and haven’t actually fixed the problem you may have made it suck less in the interim.

Really most likely righting the ship in this case is more a question of can FGO keep player engagement long enough for the traffic jam to ease. The answer is largely going to depend on if the customer base even wants a part 3 to the current story. I know I don’t think protag needs another journey unless they change protags I feel their story will be done with the LBs so if I wasn’t two years behind and didn’t know what to expect coming up I would probably be less enthusiastic.

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#21

New content didn’t increase in relation to previous years, sure, but that’s not what they say. If that’s why you consider it a lie, then you’ve misunderstood their statement.

You’re assuming that the amount of content we’d have gotten alongside retaining reruns is equal to the amount of content we’ve gotten without reruns, but that’s obviously not going to be the case. This year could’ve been even more barren of original content in that alternative timeline.

The only certain fact we have is that the current state of the game is what we’ve gotten as a result of them purportedly focusing on new content over reruns. Would we have even gotten this amount of new stuff if reruns were still a focus? Would we have gotten the same amount? Would we have gotten less? We don’t know.
We don’t know if they lied because we don’t have any understanding of the situation. Claiming with certainty that they did lie is disingenuous at best and spiteful at worst.

I agree 100%! Nasu’s hobby of suddenly adding to (or changing) the story must be stressful for the developers.
But Nasu’s writing is why people play the game, and Type-Moon are in control, so you can’t tell him to stop.

Historically, story releases were often barely finished on time. Whenever an NPC/enemy servant shows up in the story with missing skills/animations or a locked NP, that’s because the servant isn’t finished yet. We’ve seen this lots of times, even in the early story chapters.
The increasing size of the main story (and Nasu’s approach to writing it) is difficult for Lansengle to keep up with.

I hope they solve this problem before the next story update, but I don’t think they will.