There was a time whenFinal Fantasy 14was the darling of the MMO world, even going so far as to attract a large swathe of World of Warcraft players who had become disillusioned with the game. There’s no publicly available, accurate measure of MMO player populations out there, but Final Fantasy 14 certainly seemed to be the pinnacle of the genre for several years.
However, since Final Fantasy 14’s popular Endwalker expansion concluded, the game has struggled to maintain the same momentum. Final Fantasy 14’s ongoing expansion Dawntrail hasn’t attracted the same plaudits as Endwalker, and players are constantly voicing their concerns over various aspects of the expansion.
Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida recently opened up about the state of the MMO in a"director’s letter" style livestream, kindly translated by the game’s community Discord server (nice spot,PC Gamer).
Stagnation
“I’ve been feeling that our quality of service has declined recently,” Yoshi-P said. “[There have been] too many bugs that we need to have an emergency maintenance or hotfix for.”
Yoshida goes on to say that he’s been speaking to his fellow developers, and they agree that they’ve collectively “got used to things a bit too much and got comfortable.”
Yoshi-P is most likely referring to the slew of technical problems and bugs that Final Fantasy 14 has suffered in recent months, rather than any of the design decisions that underpin Dawntrail.
“We grew bigger and processes didn’t fully work out the way we had intended them to, we want to improve this again. Especially with the 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,” he concluded.
Final Fantasy 14 Mobile was recently released in China and was found to beladen with predatory microtransactions, which is concerning.
However, Final Fantasy 14 remains one of the most popular MMOs out there. With a couple of good content updates, players will come flocking back in droves. Especially considering some of the new arrivals in the genrearen’t particularly inspiring.
