The MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV lost 300,000 players because a boss designer overlooked something

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Naoki Yoshida is considered the great savior of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. But the rescue was also in danger in the short term, as he now told at Pax East 2024. 300,000 players left the MMORPG back then because a boss was designed and balanced far too difficult. The designer didn’t take into account that players suffer from poor ping and lag.

This is the story of the early days of Final Fantasy XIV:

  • The original version of Final Fantasy XIV came onto the market in September 2010. The game is considered terrible and practically unplayable. The ratings on Metacritic were 49/100 – PC Gamer only gave it 30 percent. In reality, the game was even worse, as contemporary witnesses say.
  • Square Enix had expected a hit, but then had to reduce its expected revenue for the year by 90 percent. Ultimately, Final Fantasy
  • In August 2013, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn was released, which we still know today and is considered one of the best MMORPGs in the world.

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    This is what Yoshida says: The brains behind the new MMORPG is Naoki Yoshida. He’s now told the story at Pax East.

    Because the “new version” also had some difficulties, the game had severe server problems and overflowing traffic. In addition, the newly released MMORPG was characterized by extremely challenging content, as Yoshida says in retrospect.

    He cited Titan’s “landslide” attack as an example: “I remember 300,000 accounts disappearing just because of that.”

    What was the problem? Titan’s Extreme Mode in The Navel Trial is notorious for being too hard. Titan’s attack gradually reduced the size of the battlefield; the “Landslide” attack could lift players into the air, push them over the edge and thus eliminate them.

    As explained at a fan fest in 2016, the idea of ​​combat was to make players feel like they had no way out because the battlefield was getting smaller and smaller.

    Boss designer forgot that players also have lag

    Looking back, encounter designer Kenji Sudo said that with all the enthusiasm, he simply forgot that it is also important to note that players suffer from lag. He hadn’t even considered that. The fight was also so difficult because the attack animations didn’t work properly and players were hit by attacks even though they thought they were safe.

    Because he had overlooked this, Sudo felt “really bad” afterwards.

    The combination of lethal ability, lag, and the feeling of being knocked helpless off ledges was apparently far too much for a large portion of the player base at the time. One can only hope that many of the 300,000 players that Titan knocked out of the MMORPG back then came back later.

    More on the topic: The savior of Final Fantasy 14 is about to make perhaps the biggest mistake of his career

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