Phantasy Star Universe/Development

Back to: Phantasy Star Universe.

Phantasy Star Universe development
Missed release date(s):

Development process

Open beta

An open beta was held for Xbox 360 users a few weeks before it was released in North America. The software was available on the marketplace for Xbox Live Gold subscribers for download for two days starting on October 13, 2006. The trial originally ran until October 18 but was eventually extended to October 21. As of January 15, 2007 it has now been put back onto the marketplace, and the server is up and running, for players who have Xbox Live Gold to download and try. Their policy states that they will reset the servers at the end of each month, however, from the period of September 2007 to April 2008, Sega did not reset the servers.

Network Mode

In addition to an Offline Single Player campaign, Phantasy Star Universe came with a Network Mode which was touted as the successor to Phantasy Star Online, with many of the improvements introduced in Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst such as server-side saving and patch updates being present (With patch updates on the PlayStation 2 version being stored on memory cards). Furthermore, players from the PC and PlayStation 2 version could play together albeit with some graphical differences between the versions (certain newly added weapons appearing on PlayStation 2 with a 'default' model). Similar to Phantasy Star Online, Network Mode required players to pay a monthly subscription in order to play online.

Outside of Japan, the servers for Network Mode were handled in a manner similar to that of Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst's international release with the Japanese version of the game only able to connect to the Japanese servers while all versions outside of Japan connected to an international server. This structure did not apply to the Xbox 360 version of Phantasy Star Universe as Sega of Japan did not host Network Mode servers for the Japanese Xbox 360 version of Phantasy Star Universe (most likely as a result of the console's lack of popularity in the region) and instead opted for that version to use the same International Servers as the releases outside of Japan. Furthermore, the Xbox 360 version has several changes made to Network Mode. The game mode was renamed simply to "Xbox Live" and, as its name implies, implemented several Xbox Live functionalities to replace a lot of the proprietary systems other versions had for things like accounts and subscriptions as well as the implementation of new features such as voice chat and looking up player's Gamer Card.

The international servers were infamous amongst the game's community for the wide array of mismanagement that occurred during the game's run. Most of these issues were attributed to Sonic Team's management structure for versions of the game outside of Japan; The game's Network Mode was to be jointly managed by Sega of America and Sega Europe (e.g Sega of America hosted game servers and provided customer support while Sega Europe handled Billing) while Sonic Team would require all actions be authorized by them and also provided content and patch updates to the server. Sonic Team's negligent attitude towards the International servers left Sega of America being unable to address well-known issues such as server crashes, cheating, exploits, etc, and resulted in content updates being released long after they had already been implemented in the Japanese servers (content lag ranging from Months to a Year). All these issues frustrated the player base which contributed to the game's low playerbase and ultimately lead to the PC and PlayStation 2 servers outside of Japan to close on March 31, 2010. Xbox 360 servers sufferred from the same delayed updates but had a stronger player base as a result of cheats and exploits being less common and a large amount of new players introduced to the game via a free Xbox 360 demo. Xbox 360 servers would close in 2012 on September 7, weeks before the remaining Japanese servers shut down.

Reception

The game was so poorly received in Japan that it became one of the games to get the Kusoge of the Year of 2006 evaluation. .

Promotional screenshots

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