The success of Final Fantasy XIV is something that many games nowadays should study. After all, this was Square Enix’s second attempt to make a successful MMORPG, and outside of a few rough bits at the beginning, it turned out to be one of their most successful things ever. After all, the title initially launched in 2010, and it’s going strong in 2024. Plenty of MMORPGs don’t make it past the decade mark, which is why heaps of praise need to be given to the Square Enix team behind it. However, with its most recent expansion, things haven’t gone as smoothly as past ones.
The new expansion marked a kind of “restart” for the game after the closing of a key storyline, and in a chat with Eurogamer, director and producer Naoki Yoshida admitted that how they handled the “aftermath” of all that came before could’ve gone better:
“With the new expansion, specifically regarding the first half of the story, we did receive feedback saying the tempo wasn’t good and it could have been sped up a little more, but considering this was a new adventure that we were going on, we were journeying into a new land, we were meeting new people, and we were coming into contact with new cultures, we went through a process of making sure to create and showcase these aspects in a very attentive way.”
He admitted that they spent a while trying to “set things up” for the back half of the story, and that’s likely what threw people off at the time. He also admitted that the use of the Scions arguably wasn’t handled the best, and they were “at the limits” of what they could do with them in the storyline.
The new expansion was also important on another level, as it marked the first time an expansion was officially dropped for the Xbox version of the MMO. According to Yoshida, the response to the Xbox version has been incredibly positive:
“Players have been waiting a long time for the Xbox release [of Final Fantasy XIV], but I’m happy to say that we’ve seen a really strong response on Xbox, we’ve seen communities starting to establish and now they’re growing. We’ve had a pretty good response on Xbox.”
That’s good to hear, even if it’s only because Xbox hasn’t had a lot of “big wins” recently, and the system isn’t the best regarding the JRPG community.
Either way, the MMORPG is still in good hands going forward, and that should excite players.
