Why ffxiv failed

Elden Ring network test keys are being sold on eBay A new low for scalpers. The Witcher 3 builds: The best alchemy, Death March, Sign builds and other combat builds to use How to make Geralt combat ready for any situation. Premium only Off-topic: Getting off the familiar fantasy merry-go-round, and loving it A Deadly Education.

Supporters only Letter from the Editor: Feast and famine The only thing worse than not enough games is too many of them. Or is it? Comments 22 Comments for this article are now closed. Thanks for taking part! Hide low-scoring comments Yes No. Order Newest Oldest Best Worst. Threading Expand all Collapse all. Buy things with globes on them And other lovely Eurogamer merch in our official store! Subscribe to The Eurogamer. Another important part of Yoshida's process was reaching out to the community.

He said that for as much as we might not believe him, he and his team actually read the Final Fantasy 14 forums obsessively and actively discuss and implement fan feedback. In addition to internal updates, Yoshida began a regular livestream during the development of A Realm Reborn , which helped connect fans to the game and also fostered motivation for the team.

Square Enix management thought it was risky to be so open about development to fans, but the players loved it so much that Yoshida and his crew are still doing livestreams now.

By comparison, Yoshida said it's common for a massively multiplayer game to be in development for as long as five years. Speaking to the future of the MMO genre and providing advice for other developers, Yoshida warned that no matter what, you're going to be compared to World of Warcraft.

But he's not scared by the comparison anymore. He urged that proper planning is of key importance for an MMO, especially in consideration of long-term updates to the game. However, he said, as long as players are complaining, they still care. The trick is to learn to listen and adapt based off of those complaints. He also said it was important for creators to play their own games.

Returning to the country analogy: "If the leaders don't live there, why would their subjects? Wrapping up, Yoshida said that Square Enix itself has learned many lessons from the struggle with Final Fantasy While the initial game was a massive failure, it was an important opportunity for the publisher to reassess its methods and grow. And this is just the start. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Gaming PlayStation Xbox Nintendo. Movies TV Comics. Star Wars Marvel. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. What went wrong Beginning with a history of Final Fantasy 14 , Yoshida noted that the game originally launched in to an extremely negative reaction from both fans and press.

How did the company fail to see that its Next Big Thing suffered from mortal wounds? And once it had no choice but to look, how did it then proceed with releasing that game into the wild? The answer, according to Yoshida, was hubris. See, Square Enix had experienced eight long years of success with its first MMO, 's Final Fantasy so much so that it wanted to replicate that accomplishment by making a new MMO for a new generation of gaming hardware.

But great success, Yoshida said, can breed great failure. When designing FF14, Square Enix succumbed to the pressures of having to succeed a second time. Yoshida points to three primary reasons for FF14's failure. First: an unhealthy obsession with graphical quality. During his GDC presentation, he pulled up an image of a flower pot that appeared in the game.

It's something a player might walk past without ever paying attention to; yet that flower pot had 1, polygons--the same number of resources that went into each player character. Because the in-game assets were of such high quality, the original FF14 had to be broken up into small instanced settings to prevent hardware from suffering a nuclear meltdown. Only a handful of players could ever be present in the same playing field at once, which, Yoshida said, went completely against the inherent social qualities of MMOs in the first place.

The only way for these types of games to succeed in that region is if they're available on a console, as FF11 was on the PS2. As such, many of the developers' only MMO experience was with FF11, and they were unaware of the significant changes introduced to the genre since Finally, Square Enix had adopted a mindset that any problem could be fixed in the future with a patch.

Not only did this make for a significantly unstable launch FF14 suffered hundreds of daily crashes in addition to its underlying design problems , but this thought process was used as a crutch for the game's structural flaws. With all these issues built into FF14's foundation, it was doomed from the start. Unfortunately, Square Enix didn't see it coming.

The hope was that, by doing so, Square Enix could repair the damage and mistrust that FF14 had caused.