As Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest departs London, we look at the secret to the MMO’s second chance success
One of the main road bumps in FFXIV’s development was the engine it was built on - Square Enix’s internally developed Crystal Tools. Crystal Tools was designed around requests thatthe studio’s own development teams had, such as “extensive use of character close-ups” and “stylized expressions.” But by trying to make an engine that would satisfy all of Square Enix’s developers, they ended up with something thatdidn’t really satisfy anyone. So much time was spent on the requests that it was impossible to lock down the final specs of the engine, and so the final specs of FFXIV couldn’t be confirmed either. In one bizarre example, a single flower pot in the game used around1000 polygons and 150 lines of shader code- roughly the same amount as one of the player characters. XIV 1.0seemed to reuse areasto cut down on memory usage.
After assessing the state of the game, Yoshi P put forward a plan to regain the trust of the Final Fantasy audience: secretly begin production of a completely new game to replace XIV, while at the same time continuing to patch XIV 1.0 for the game’s dedicated audience. These patches included huge features like an entirejob system, anoverhaul of the combat, anda new story. There was a fast-approaching time limit for all of this though, because with every day that passed, people’s interest in FFXIV was fading. One of the internal goals was to release the PS3 version that was promised years ago, as asign of Square Enix’s commitmentto their fans — they spentaround 21 monthsperfecting the UI for both controllers & mouse and keyboard. It was definitely a huge risk, but it was one that could be taken because development was“all funded 100 percent by Square Enix.”
While a lot was changing internally, the same had to be done on the outside. One of Yoshi P’s first changes was to improvehow Square Enix communicatedwith XIV’s players. Everybody was paying close attention to all of the negative feedback on 1.0, but rarely were any public statements issued saying as much. Yoshi P altered this; he gave several forthcoming interviews about the underwhelming state of the game and how committed the team were to fixing it, both tojournalistic publicationsand tofansites.
Fansites in particular were crucial because FFXIV did not have forums to begin with. Due to a fear of statementspossibly being mistranslated, the 1.0 development team used fansites and unofficial forums to gauge the temperature of the game. Community managers would have to create daily reports on how XIV was being perceived, across all regions, because there was no centralised location for this information. As you can imagine, Yoshi P added official forums.
The key to XIV’s longevity has been in its great communication and prioritisation of what its players want—a lesson that nobody at Square Enix is probably going to forget for a while. You do have to wonder though, withanother transformative expansionon the horizon, will Final Fantasy ever need another MMORPG?
