Post Script
Pondering Final Fantasy XIV’s possible future paths
By now the story of Final Fantasy XIV’s development is widely known, not only among the game’s community but throughout the industry. In short, after a catastrophic launch in 2010 that risked serious long-term damage to the Final Fantasy brand, the game was salvaged under the stewardship of Naoki Yoshida, before the MMORPG was rebuilt from the ground up in 2013’s A Realm Reborn. Today Final Fantasy XIV is an overwhelming success, with over 25 million registered players, and stands as the most profitable game in the series. With End walker
another feather in its cap, we’d like to think Yoshida and his team can finally take a welldeserved rest.
Yet we doubt this is likely, given that Creative Business Unit III is busy with the forthcoming Final Fantasy XVI, which Yoshida is overseeing as producer. And, in keeping with the myth that sharks must keep swimming to stay alive, an MMORPG is never truly finished – at the time of writing, a new eightplayer raid series has been updated for End walker’s postgame. But more than stat tweaks or fixes, it’s where to go next that may be the greatest challenge for the game. After all, when plotlines have repeatedly raised the stakes, how do you top it without contrivances such as a memory wipe or a time skip?
Fortunately, the devs have already written themselves out of that corner in previous expansion Shadow bringers, which opened the way to traversing parallel worlds, referred to as Reflections. If the Warrior Of Light could travel to the First, that raises the possibility of travelling to another. Yet it shouldn’t require anything as drastic as transcending space and time to find adventure. As another character points out, there are untold destinations we have yet to chart in the realm of Eorzea, let alone the realms that lie beyond it, essentially giving XIV’s writers free rein. However, the risk that any subsequent adventure will feel comparatively trivial remains – after all, you have already felled empires and gods.
It’s not merely a matter of looking forward, either. A Realm Reborn may have been the much-needed new direction following v1.0’s woes, but compared to subsequent expansions it feels archaic, as everyone who continues to grind The Praetorium will attest. A streamlining of quests and increased XP have helped alleviate some issues, but it will be a missed opportunity if the AI companion Trust system introduced in the latest expansions is not implemented for older dungeons.
Expanding FFXIV includes widening its community, too. One obvious way to do this would surely be to follow through on the original announcement in 2019 to bring the game to Xbox, and now, just as the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc has wrapped, certainly seems an opportune time. But while “positive” conversations with Microsoft are ongoing, it seems an issue of resources has prevented such a port, especially when having to meet the demands of completing all updates for the existing platforms in a condensed cycle. And there’s that already sizeable player base to consider. Square Enix has had trouble handling FFXIV’s surge in popularity in the past year, with the launch of End walker resulting in the game being temporarily suspended from sale to cope with server congestion.
Nonetheless, these are not bad problems to have – especially compared to those early days when FFXIV was fighting for its very survival, and the situations of rivals such as Amazon’s New World, which shed 90 per cent of its player base within two months of launch. However the game develops in future, it feels impossible to imagine its success without Yoshida at the helm – and he has committed to making this his life’s work. With that knowledge, players can have every confidence that whatever future problems it may face, Creative Business Unit III will continue to forge ahead with what is surely the finest MMORPG on the market today.