Final Fantasy XIV launched in 2010 with a particular problem: the flower pots looked way too fancy. This was explained by Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida in a retrospective. The flower pots, in total, required a lot of performance.
Final Fantasy XIV was first released in 2010. However, the MMORPG was torn apart by the press and players: It was considered unfinished, buggy, and faced numerous other issues.
Later, the MMORPG was eventually taken offline to be completely revamped. The new head was Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida. Yoshida explained at that time in a retrospective (via Polygon.com) that there were several major problems. One of them was the flower pots in the game, as they simply looked too fancy.
In this week, you can expect exciting articles every day on the topic of MMORPG. Included: a time travel through the history of online role-playing games, as well as nostalgic retrospectives, streaming evenings, interviews, columns, and analyses.
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You can watch the official trailer for the original version 1.0 here:
Pots looked as fancy as player characters, which caused problems
What was the problem with the pots? Yoshida explained that they had been obsessed with achieving perfect graphical quality from the beginning. The game was supposed to look great, but this very decision cost a lot of processing power.
As a concrete example, Yoshida showed a screenshot of a flower pot in front of an inn from the first version of Final Fantasy 14. He referred to it as “the most beautiful flower pot in an MMO,” but then revealed that it cost a lot of performance: a single flower pot contained over 1,000 polygons and 150 lines of shader code, meaning it consumed as many resources as a single player character.
To ensure that the game functioned reasonably, the team made a compromise: they limited the number of player characters visible on the screen at the same time to 20. This allowed them to control the processing power, resulting in the game running fairly smoothly at launch. In the end, there were more pretty graphics and less real MMO feeling.
What other problems were there? Yoshida mentioned two other reasons:
- The then developer team lacked MMO knowledge and experience.
- Major design flaws in the game itself. However, the developers hoped that they could fix the issues later with patches.
Final Fantasy XIV was significantly revamped and is now one of the most important, actively running MMORPGs that you can play. Whether it’s worth starting and what you need to pay attention to is discussed in the following article directly on MeinMMO: Is it still worth getting into Final Fantasy 14?
