Final Fantasy 11 was one of those games that has managed to maintain a fanbase for a really long time. I will admit that I personally spent something like 1000 days of actual playtime in Final Fantasy 11 when I was a building super. Those days are long since past. Actually, the time demanding MMOs like Everquest or Final Fantasy 11 are long past. With Blizzard dominating all MMO models, the most we can hope for is something with a large enough playerbase to maintain a server farm to keep the game running.
So, when the sequel to Final Fantasy 11, Final Fantasy 14, was announcemed, people were excited. Here was an MMO with an interesting story. An MMO that was hard, punishing, but rewarding. Here was a massive game with a massive storyline that took hundreds of hours to complete. If you loved the grind, you loved the game.
That was why it hurt so much when Final Fantasy 14 was so terrible that Square, in an attempt to make players happy, opened the game up to freeplay so they could figure out what went wrong.
After about 2 years of endless rehashes, patches, and a dwindling player base, Square did something drastic, they nuked the world. Check it out:
It will be interesting to see what comes next for Final Fantasy 14. The game was so dismal that I actually swore I would never pay for a release day game again. That's right, it ruined any future purchases for me.
However, with the reboot and the eventual release of the game on PS3, it will be interesting to see where things go. If anything, Square has proven that failure to launch doesn't necessarily mean you need to stop trying.
You can see a lot of what they hope to do with the game in the alpha test videos coming out of the Japanese alpha test group. It is somehow depressing and promising that the standard macro keys have appeared in the UI. Beta tests seem to be rumored to be beginning in December of 2012 with a release date sometime in 2013.
