Few games have such an impressive development history as the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. From an initial total disaster, it has evolved over the years into one of the most successful MMOs. As part of our MMORPG theme week, we conducted an interview with producer Naoki Yoshida about this journey.
Who is Naoki Yoshida? Naoki Yoshida, often affectionately called “Yoshi-P” by the community, is a Japanese video game developer, producer, and director at Square Enix. He became internationally famous as the savior of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV.
After the original game failed with players and critics in 2010, Yoshida took the reins and made the bold decision to completely redesign it. Under his leadership, the game was reborn as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and became one of the world’s most successful and community-celebrated titles in its genre.
As part of our MMORPG theme week, Naoki Yoshida answered 7 questions about the journey of Final Fantasy XIV. You can read his answers here.
1.0 as part of A Realm Reborn instead of a clean slate
Question: Instead of working from scratch, 1.0 was integrated into the game world of A Realm
Reborn. Can you tell us how this decision came to be?
Naoki Yoshida:
Firstly, thank you for this interview opportunity!
The simple answer is that at the time I was given full authority over FFXIV, Version 1.0 had already been officially launched and several months had passed. During that time, you couldn’t have called Version 1.0 well-made, even just as an empty nicety. It was heavily critiqued and sharply criticised. Even so, players persevered and continued to play the game, and even after I took over the team, they provided me with enthusiastic support and encouragement, as well as spurred me onward.
At the time, I was thinking about “regaining trust”. This not only encompassed the rebuilding and rebirth of FFXIV, but I made a judgment that the most important thing was to make our customers trust us once again for the future, rather than for the business-related success of the company. If we terminated the service and simply rebuilt the game after a failed launch, the memories, data, and time of everyone who played the game up to that point would be lost.
Therefore, I made a decision to continue updating Version 1.0 as best we could, while working on the game’s rebirth behind the scenes, Version 2.0, to carry over the characters and data of everyone who had continued to play the game. That is the reason.
The base idea for the storyline, “drop a meteor, destroy the world, and make it reborn anew,” was an idea I came up with while watching TV while working at home on 2 January 2011. I guess you could say I was lucky. (laughs)
You can watch the last 11 minutes of 1.0 here:
Question: Were there ever any plans or ideas to make the story of 1.0 playable again? Like through
some kind of time travel or a specific content series?
Naoki Yoshida:
The answer is “No“. I never even once thought about the prospect, and I think you’d get
the same answer regardless of who you ask in the Development and Operations teams.
(wry smile)
The server system and design that supported the original Version 1.0 had some fundamental problems, partly because of the rush to release the game. The same applied to the client system side. In other words, for the updated content in Version 1.0, it was like the very ground was unstable, but we were still trying to keep building a house on top of it – walking an extremely fine line in terms of balance, making sure that the house wouldn’t fall down even if it wobbled. Essentially, there were a lot of things in Version 1.0 that were pretty much forced in – created by hook or by crook – on the assumption that the game could only be played in that moment: it could only be experienced in that moment. If we were to try and reproduce this in the present, we wouldn’t be able to achieve the same feeling unless we went as far as reproducing that instability. So, unfortunately, we do not have any plans and probably will not be able to reproduce it in the future. It may be possible to create an emulation server, but there is a lot of server code that is no longer saved, and that in itself would be a source of difficulty.
It is literally our legacy, and it was the best we could do at the time to deliver the best possible gaming experience for those of you who played Version 1.0 back then. Truth be told, it’s also my desire to keep it that way.
In this week, you can expect exciting articles every day around the topic of MMORPG. Included: a journey through the history of online role-playing games, as well as nostalgic flashbacks, streaming evenings, interviews, columns, and analyses.
Here’s the program for the large MMORPG theme week 2025 by MeinMMO
The rocky path to the relaunch with A Realm Reborn
Question: When did you realize that 1.0 couldn’t be fixed through normal updates and that you would have to make extensive changes that would require the game to go offline for an extended period of time? When was the point reached where the decision to relaunch was made?
Naoki Yoshida:
I announced to the public that I would be taking full control of FFXIV on 10 December 2010, but about half a month before that, an internal group of those willing to pitch in had already started an investigation into the current state of Version 1.0.
The change in the development structure was announced to all Development and Operations staff on 3 December 2010, and from there until 27 December, I and seven other people I appointed conducted a thorough investigation of the current status. On 28 December, we made a list of all of the information and confirmed the details, and I took the list and began the process of deciding on the overall policy by 7 January 2011. On 8 January, I notified the core members and solicited feedback to determine the basic policy. In parallel, on 13 January, I announced the immediate update plan for Version 1.0 to the entire team.
There were two plans I had at that time. One plan was to frantically update Version 1.0, add content for about 3.5 years, and then terminate the service. You could say that this was the realistic plan. As mentioned above, the server system itself and the client system itself had major flaws, and I decided that it would be impossible to make any updates beyond that point. The reason being that without a complete rebuild, it would never be possible to improve the fundamental playing experience.
The other proposal was the “rebirth” proposal, whereby we would release a newly designed/completely redeveloped Version 2.0 in parallel with Version 1.0 and fundamentally replace it with that new version. The initial development time estimate for the rebirth version was 2 years and 3 months.
It was around late January 2011 that I proposed these two ideas to the company’s upper management. Fortunately, they adopted the “rebirth proposal”, and this was the first step toward the game’s rebirth. Of course, I strongly advocated for the rebirth proposal myself – so my presentation was basically saying, ”Don’t choose the service termination plan!” :p
From there, we continued to update Version 1.0, while in the background starting on the design and development of Version 2.0 in parallel. As a result, the development of Version 2.0 took 2 years and 8 months. This 5-month shift from the plan was the main reason for the gap between the termination of Version 1.0’s service and the release of Version 2.0. I had originally hoped to keep this period to 2-3 months, including preparation, but I apologise for that!
A relaunch to regain trust and as a complete new beginning
Question: What were the main goals for A Realm Reborn, what improvements were prioritized, what goals were set for the relaunch?
Naoki Yoshida:
First of all, the goal, as mentioned above, was all about “restoring customer trust”. I did not set any business goals. For us, that meant every single person: players, fans, distribution partners, and the media. My thoughts were that money and business would come after this restoration of trust.
There was no end to the improvements and goals related to the game, but the first thing I considered was that it is a FINAL FANTASY. FFXIV is an MMORPG, so each player should be the main character, and the adventure should be about saving the world. We should incorporate many FINAL FANTASY elements, such as jobs and chocobos.
On top of that, as a modern MMORPG, we set various goals such as ease of party formation, ease of taking on the challenge of content, and so on, and designed the systems and specifications corresponding to those goals. There are many more, but I could easily talk about them for
4-5 hours, so please forgive for limiting my response to these examples…
Question: Are there any parts or aspects of 1.0 that you would have liked to have in the new version
but decided to remove?
Naoki Yoshida:
Let’s see… for a lot of what came in the Version 1.0 updates and content, we kept getting responses from the engineers saying they wanted to do something but just couldn’t get it to work – we had to somehow figure out what we could put in the game and work on implementing that. So, while there were some things we intentionally didn’t carry over to 2.0, I don’t think there was anything that we wanted to include that we weren’t able to.
Perhaps the one thing I can think of is how some events were kind of carried out live, after it had been decided that Dalamud would fall. GMs and the community team would take control of monsters to swarm towns, and players would have to combine forces and fight together to stop them. It was a game experience that felt real, but it was premised on the servers shutting down – so we wouldn’t be able to recreate it now, even if we wanted to (laugh).
The impact of the relaunch on the current version of the game and a look into the future
Question: What influence does the relaunch of FFXIV have on the content in the new expansions to
this day? Do you think that the relaunch still has an impact on the further development of
FFXIV today?
Naoki Yoshida:
I think the biggest advantage to having created A Realm Reborn is how simple it is to implement expansions and new content. If we’d kept things as they were in Version 1.0, then I don’t even think we’d have been able to make the first expansion.
And the experience and confidence we gained from the relaunch still supports us to this day. We know that no matter how distant a goal or objective may seem, if you keep working hard each and every day with a solid plan, that slow and steady pace will bring you to your destination and allow you to realise your ideals. It’s all because our players supported us through it – truly, the biggest influence on the future development of FFXIV is our players.
Question: Are there any plans for the future that could significantly change FINAL FANTASY XIV once again?
Naoki Yoshida:
Everyone has their own idea of exactly how big a change needs to be before it becomes “significant”, which makes this question a bit tricky to answer…
Having said that, FFXIV will always press forward. There are always lots of significant plans running in parallel, even in this very moment. For now, I hope you’ll all look forward to the next Fan Festival we hold. I have full confidence that we’ll be able to present even more to surprise and delight!
Without the tireless efforts of Naoki Yoshida and his team, Final Fantasy XIV would most likely not exist today. You can read the detailed story of how this historical resurrection happened here: One of the best MMORPGs of all time was a disaster at launch and had to accomplish historic feats to change that
