Final Fantasy XIV

Overview

Few games have failed as publicly as Final Fantasy XIV, and none has recovered so completely. The original version, released by Square Enix for Windows on September 30, 2010, was meant to be the company's answer to World of Warcraft, the successor to Final Fantasy XI and a numbered entry in the flagship Final Fantasy series. It was beautiful and nearly unplayable. Within three months Square Enix had suspended its subscription fees and replaced its leadership, and at the 2011 Tokyo Game Show its president publicly admitted that the Final Fantasy brand had been "greatly damaged." Then a new team did something unprecedented: it kept fixing the broken game while secretly building a new one, destroyed the old world in an in-game cataclysm, and relaunched in August 2013 as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. By 2024 more than 30 million people had registered to play.

Origins

Planning began around 2005 under the codename "Rapture," with veterans of Final Fantasy XI: producer Hiromichi Tanaka, director Nobuaki Komoto and writer Yaeko Sato. Nobuo Uematsu, the series' longtime composer, wrote his first full MMORPG score, and Yoshitaka Amano designed the logo. Built on Square Enix's Crystal Tools engine, developed for Final Fantasy XIII, the game was announced at E3 2009 for PlayStation 3 and Windows.

What went wrong was later dissected in a Game Developers Conference postmortem. The team had an unhealthy obsession with graphics; a single decorative flowerpot had as many polygons and as much shader code as a player character, which limited the number of players on screen to about 20. Landscapes were repeated to save memory. The engine was unsuited to an online game, the team lacked modern MMORPG experience, and there was an assumption that problems could be patched later. The beta was short and buggy, and the game launched with a convoluted interface, sluggish pacing and many bugs; critics called it unfinished. It scored 49 on Metacritic. The free trial was extended twice; in December 2010 Tanaka and Komoto were removed, fees were suspended indefinitely, and the PlayStation 3 version was postponed.

The new producer and director, Naoki Yoshida, came from Square Enix's Dragon Quest team. He opened communication with players through "Letters from the Producer," patched in a job system, personal chocobos and new dungeons, and concluded that the game's code could not be saved. In January 2011 planning began on a completely new game, with a new engine and server architecture, built in parallel. The old version's story was rewritten to end the world: the lesser moon Dalamud descended on Eorzea and cracked open to release the elder primal Bahamut, an idea Yoshida said came from a television program about the supposed 2012 Maya doomsday. The servers closed on November 11, 2012, at the climax of that final battle.

How it plays

A Realm Reborn is a conventional theme-park MMORPG done with unusual polish. Players create a character from five races, later expanded, and can change classes simply by switching weapons, so a single character can eventually master every combat and crafting role. Group content follows the holy trinity of tank, healer and damage-dealer, with a Duty Finder that assembles groups for dungeons, trials against primal gods and raids such as the Crystal Tower, a homage to Final Fantasy III. Crafting and gathering are full classes with their own gameplay. The series' furniture is everywhere: chocobos, moogles, airships, Cid and summons like Ifrit and Titan.

What set it apart, especially as the expansions arrived, was the story. The main scenario is long, voiced in part and delivered in cutscenes like a single-player Final Fantasy, and later chapters are widely praised as some of the best writing in the series. Yoshida has insisted on the monthly subscription model, arguing it lets the team spend its effort on content rather than monetization.

Reception & impact

Critics were astonished by the transformation. Demand at launch was so high that Square Enix temporarily suspended digital sales while it added servers; the game reached 1.5 million registrations by late October 2013, and Square Enix credited it with helping return the company to profitability in 2014 after a dismal year. Expansions followed roughly every two years: Heavensward (2015), Stormblood (2017), Shadowbringers (2019), Endwalker (2021) and Dawntrail (2024), with new zones, races and jobs. Shadowbringers and Endwalker in particular drew acclaim beyond the MMO audience; Endwalker won Role-Playing Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards and the BAFTA for Evolving Game. The game won Best Ongoing Game and Best Community Support at The Game Awards in 2021 and 2022.

Registered players reached 14 million by August 2018, 24 million by late 2021, when Square Enix called it the most profitable Final Fantasy game to date, and 30 million by January 2024. A free trial, expanded over the years, now lets newcomers play through several expansions without paying.

Legacy

Final Fantasy XIV became the industry's best-known case study in how to rescue a failing game: admit the failure, communicate constantly, and rebuild. Yoshida's own account, given at the 2014 Game Developers Conference, blamed an obsession with graphics, a lack of MMORPG expertise and the belief that everything could be fixed later. The game also kept the subscription MMORPG alive in an era of free-to-play, and brought the traditions of the Japanese console RPG into the online world as fully as any game has. Its composer Masayoshi Soken's enormous score earned a Guinness record for the most original music in a video game.