It's been a rough year for the critically acclaimed MMO.
As I wrote earlier this year, Final Fantasy 14 is in a bit of a weird spot. The highs of the Endwalker’s narrative conclusion and the WoW exodus have officially tapered off, leaving players with a fairly middling introduction to its new story and frustrations around patch cadence.
There are smaller snags between the more glaring issues, too—DDoS attacks continue to plague servers, last year’s graphical overhaul and Xbox launch have caused a snafu or two, and there was even one particularly odd bug last year that caused one of the game’s easiest raids to go turbo hard mode.
Director and producer Naoki Yoshida is pretty aware of the disruption it’s all been causing, as he briefly discussed at the beginning of a livestream last week. “I’ve been feeling that our quality of service has declined recently, I am very for that,” Yoshida told viewers (thanks to the Final Fantasy 14 community Discord for the translations), adding that there have been “too many bugs that we need to have an emergency maintenance or a hotfix for.”
Yoshida claims he’s had chats across both the community and development team, before saying: “It feels like we got used to things a bit too much and got comfortable.”
Now he’s probably talking more about the multitude of tech-related hiccups here, but it’s a sentence that rings true across the entire game. It feels like there’s been a real ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality that’s been keeping the MMO ticking along in recent years. And I mean, it ain’t quite broke. But it’s certainly incredibly rusted.
I do think he’s at least somewhat cognizant of that, though, as he follows up by saying: “We grew bigger and processes didn’t fully work the way we had intended them to, we want to improve this again. Especially with new and big content we have recently released, this was difficult. We want to keep providing fun and engaging content and we will strive to do better.”
Stagnant game design and a lack of any meaningful, repeatable midcore content for an entire half of an expansion’s life is certainly harming Final Fantasy 14, and this all does make me wonder if Square Enix has at least sort of started to recognise that the formula isn’t working as well as it used to. Especially as the gap continues to widen between itself and WoW, with Blizzard practically running circles around Square at this point.
It does spark some kind of hope in me that we’ll start to see some larger overhauls, though they likely won’t manifest until the next expansion at the very earliest. We have already seen the developer dabbling with different fights like tougher 24-player boss fights, and returning to older concepts like Diadem and Bozja in the form of Cosmic Exploration and the Occult Crescent. Sentiment on all three has been rather mixed—which is to be expected, I guess—but I do hope Square Enix takes the feedback to evolve and catch back up to its competition, rather than going for its usual method of canning the content all together.
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