So you're still confident that Ever Crisis won't shut-down its service after finishing its CC, FFVII, TFS stuff? I've seen some people confident that it will shutdown before ever getting to Before Crisis and Dirge of Cerberus content.
So – I'm not super confident it'll keep going long enough to actually get to the
Compilation content
despite the fact that its announcement explicitly stated that the game would cover all of that and more – as the mobile games industry is an especially ruthless & fickle one already (which
The First SOLDIER already proved), but even moreso because
the entire games industry itself is pretty cooked at the moment.
HOWEVER... I am cautiously optimistic, because it looks like the dev team is doing a LOT of things that I'd expect if they were actively focused on getting to that content in the near future.
When it comes to doing any kind of ongoing game/software development, so long as it's not a 100% certainty that it's being shut down, you're
always gonna build towards adding that as a possibility. That includes things like long-term design decisions to build a framework of something that you may end up never using or that ends up being left by the wayside depending on how the growth of that content shifts over time. For something like Live Service or Gacha they're much closer to SAAS Agile development (which is the type of software environments I work with primarily, and why I'm used to looking at small details like this to intuitively try and understand the Product & Design decisions driving them).
A good example is how that every story section of in
Ever Crisis can have any of 3 types of content: Story, Combat, & Map... but fairly early on, if it wasn't being used as a Dungeon, there were no maps being build out that allow for gameplay at all – despite that being what could likely have been a MUCH more critically central element of the gameplay with exploration & other things to give players stuff to do. As it stands, most of the maps where we see characters wandering around are exclusively locked to cinematic elements with no player control – despite the fact that EVERY SINGLE OUTFIT IN THE GAME has a chibi model version which basically only appears in those sequences. So, it's not nearly as much of a draw that justifies outfits being more rare than weapons, despite still being set-up that way.
Hell, I only really remember that this is a feature when I randomly drop into the Chocobo Ranch with a different party, since it's basically the ONLY way for you to ever see those things in a meaningful way – because there's really zero motivational structure to get players to go back through the content of the games themselves. That's because all the development effort got funneled into one-off time-locked fomo events linked to banners as a means to pump sales, because that's the sort of thing that gacha games HAVE to rely on because the mobile industry is a lot more ruthlessly unscrupulous – and that's what the investors who control the life & death of those games look at (as we saw with
The First SOLDIER), which is
So, anything that isn't locked into that content churn that prints money basically gets sidelined, so when there is something that has the backing to keep linked into the overall story-based content with new maps & things, it's largely coming out of
The First SOLDIER because it's new whereas
Crisis Core &
FFVII are retreading overly familiar ground. That means that as a game,
Ever Crisis very much feels like it's sort of desperately clinging to life because with
Rebirth coming out on PC, this means that the main playerbase now has access to all the current content for things that basically stop any more of the main
FFVII's story from being told past Aerith's death until Part 3 of the Remake Project releases... which the
Ever Crisis team would know and have a roadmap explicitly set up to work with.
And for the big overlap of the PC launch of
Rebirth into the 1.5 anniversary they ARE actually still making more content for it in a way which points to there being a concerted amount of thought & effort about the game's ongoing future behind-the-scenes. They always planned to cover
BC &
DoC – and those titles actually have a distinct advantage over
FFVII &
Crisis Core,
which is their obscurity.
Before Crisis is something that non-JP players never had access to, and even a lot of JP players wouldn't have gotten to experience.
Dirge of Cerberus existed but unlike
Crisis Core Reunion, it's not something that modern players have gotten to return to naturally. The story in
Before Crisis is already broken up into discrete chapters exactly like everything with
The First SOLDIER has been which suits the development model that they currently have, and gives them a way to continue telling the story.
The First SOLDIER also gave us Angeal as a playable character – and I'd expect at some point we're likely to end up getting Genesis as well, since the first
TFS cinematic in
Ever Crisis is Sephiroth trying to call Genesis, and that would let them have a 3-person team for the TFS missions, and get playable versions of characters who were only ever NPCs before.
This points to how, out of any
Compilation content,
Before Crisis has got the biggest potential draw in its story being a big unknown (and also hinted at in the Remake Project with Heretic Rayleigh). It's ALSO the biggest gap because it's a lot of new characters that can't build off of that existing fan attachment NEARLY as much as characters that have featured in stories like
Crisis Core with Genesis, Sephiroth, & Angeal. It's almost certain that no one's gonna be pulling for banners for Turk (Shotgun) as much as they are for Tifa – and they probably have user data on that comparing who's invested in gear for Glenn, Matt, & Lucia vs the other legacy title characters to try and gauge those expectations. That's a realistic hurdle that you need to understand from a product roadmap perspective & be able to adapt to fit the model of the game in its current state.
So, if you're gonna make that work you need something that brings more interesting elements into the interconnected teamwork of the gameplay of 10 different brand new characters –
which is exactly what the 1.5 anniversary did.
The more interesting & unique any of the given characters are, the more reason that players have to invest in getting new stuff for them, which is what drives the entire ecosystem to the point where that investment exists enough that you can play around with more of the gacha dress-up appeal, (despite not being able to lean in on the very thirst-bait-heavy way that most of that gacha market operates). IF
Before Crisis is gonna be able to work this is something that the game fundamentally needs first, and the fact that they're very actively laying the groundwork for it means that I'd expect that the
Before Crisis content is something that they might attempt to use to build up the player base as in something of a soft reset – because EVERYONE will have a ton of brand new characters who are all starting out fresh.
At the same time, all of the ranked guild missions & things still have a way for all the invested players & whales to continue dominating the leaderboards in a way that fuels that general economy of the larger team multiplayer elements of the game – which is also a lot closer to the mobile game episodic ecosystem that
Before Crisis already had. The amplification on pouring out weapons to players also means that the difficulty of boosting weapon rarity & leveling them up is something that they're trying to make more ubiquitous across-the-board which suits things for adding in a boatload of new characters.
Even the current event with the Maelstrom Tower Rampage of Ruin has missions where Levels 51-55 requires Cloud, Levels 56-59 require Tifa, etc. so they're setting up for how to do challenges that require players to integrate with a random new character – which is how you create content that makes it so that one of the Player Turks gets consistently involved, and potentially allows a way to spotlight characters for missions, while allowing the two open slots to be used by legacy characters that the existing players have got tons of high-level equipment for.
The flip-side is that there's basically no reason to really do ANY of those things if they weren't setting up the ground work for
Before Crisis stuff as the primary flow of "new" content post-PC
Rebirth launch, and a lot of different ways that they'd've approached attempting to stretch out the content if they knew they weren't gonna be able to get to that.
If you want an absolutely INSANELY optimistic prediction: Cissnei is the anomaly here to pay attention to. I'd expect her to get her
Rebirth outfit as an alternate launch costume since it's an extant asset, and she's also got a swimsuit in
Crisis Core that would link up to the same Watermelon Tonberry event with Zack's board shorts & umbrella. Summer as a launch would be surprising but not impossible and just given that as a convenient pipeline to bring players in from
Rebirth into
Ever Crisis once the appropriate window for allowing most players to complete the game, I think there's a possibility that's a window that the dev team MIGHT try to hit.
Bringing a bunch of players in with new (to them) content that links into little breadcrumbs that exist in
Crisis Core &
Rebirth are an important piece of the puzzle to consider, and announcing
Before Crisis content would potentially be the sort of refresh & soft reboot that the game needs, and that fills the most important budget window for
FFVII-related content, which is all the time until things about Part 3 start being public.
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