Naoki Yoshida is considered the great savior of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. However, the rescue was briefly in jeopardy, as he shared at Pax East 2024. 300,000 players had quit the MMORPG back then because a boss was designed and balanced far too hard. The designer had not taken into account that players suffer from poor ping and lag.
This is the story from the early days of Final Fantasy XIV:
- The original version of Final Fantasy XIV was released in September 2010. The game was deemed terrible and practically unplayable. The ratings on Metacritic were 49/100 – PC Gamer even gave it just 30 percent. In reality, the game was even worse, according to eyewitnesses.
- Square Enix had expected a hit but had to revise their projected earnings for the year down by 90 percent. Ultimately, they even took Final Fantasy XIV off the market in 2012 and overhauled it to avoid long-term reputational damage to the game franchise.
- In August 2013, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn was released, which we know today, and is considered one of the best MMORPGs in the world.
This is what Yoshida says: As the head behind the new MMORPG, Naoki Yoshida has now shared insights at Pax East.
Because the “new version” also had some difficulties, such as serious server issues and overflow traffic. Moreover, the revamped MMORPG was characterized by extremely challenging content, as Yoshida reflected.
He cited the “Landslide” attack by Titan as an example: “I remember that 300,000 accounts disappeared just because of that.”
What was the problem? The Extreme Mode of “Titan” in the The-Navel-Trial is notorious for being too difficult. Titan’s attack gradually shrank the battlefield, and the “Landslide” attack could lift players into the air, shove them off the edge, and knock them out.
As explained at a fan fest in 2016, the idea behind the fight was to give players the feeling that there was no escape because the battlefield kept getting smaller.
Boss designer had forgotten that players also experience lag
In retrospect, encounter designer Kenji Sudo said that in all the excitement, he simply forget to take into account that players suffer from lag. He hadn’t considered that at all. The fight was also so hard because the attack animations weren’t functioning correctly and players were hit by attacks even though they thought they were safe.
Because he overlooked that, Sudo felt “really bad” about it afterward.
The combination of deadly abilities, lag, and the feeling of being helplessly shoved off edges was evidently too much for a large part of the player base back then. One can only hope that many of the 300,000 players who were pushed out of the MMORPG by Titan have returned later.
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