Final Fantasy XIV (2010 video game)

• 1. A Game That Broke Square Enix

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  Final Fantasy XIV launched on the 30th of September 2010, and within months Square Enix had suspended subscription fees, postponed its PlayStation 3 version indefinitely, fired its entire development leadership, and issued a public apology at the Tokyo Game Show. By November 2010, the game had sold 603,000 copies worldwide. Its Metacritic score sat at 49 out of 100. The company later cited XIV among the reasons it reduced its projected annual income by 90 percent.

  The game was set in Eorzea, a fantasy realm threatened by the Garlean Empire from the north and by the primals, ancient gods summoned by the land's beastmen tribes. Players built customizable adventurers, switched jobs by swapping weapons, and pursued two quest types: story quests and side missions called Levequests. The premise was rich. The execution was not. What went wrong, and how a replacement was built from ruins, is a story that reshaped the entire company.

• 2. Five Years in the Making

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  Planning for Final Fantasy XIV began in 2005, four years before its public announcement, under the codename "Rapture". The team assembled veterans from across the series. Producer Hiromichi Tanaka had been the original producer of Final Fantasy XI and had worked on multiple earlier entries. Director Nobuaki Komoto had directed XI and worked on Final Fantasy IX. Writer Yaeko Sato had written the main scenario for XI. Art director Akihiko Yoshida had previously held the same role on Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII. The game's logo was designed by series artist Yoshitaka Amano.

  Despite this pedigree, the development was troubled from the start. The team used Crystal Tools, the same middleware engine built for Final Fantasy XIII, but found it unsuitable for an MMORPG's needs. Its internal structure was later described as "broken". The studio had no plan for addressing major problems before launch and relied on the assumption that issues could be patched afterward. A postmortem described an unhealthy obsession with graphical quality: one flowerpot in the game used as many polygons and shader lines as an entire player character. That priority forced the game to cap the number of players visible on screen at twenty, undermining the communal scale that defines the genre.

• 3. The Xbox 360 That Never Was

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  At E3 2009, Square Enix officially announced XIV for PlayStation 3 and Windows. A port to Xbox 360 was actively pursued, but negotiations collapsed over a single sticking point: Microsoft required players on Xbox Live to use a separate server from PS3 and Windows players. Square Enix wanted a shared server across all platforms. Microsoft would not grant the access needed to make that possible. Development on the Xbox 360 version was stopped.

  The PS3 version also ran into trouble. Though originally scheduled for simultaneous release with the Windows version in 2010, it was delayed indefinitely because the game could not fit within the console's memory constraints. Square Enix stated it would not release the PS3 version until the game met the quality standards appropriate for the Final Fantasy name. That bar was never cleared for the original version. A Collector's Edition had been released on the 22nd of September 2010, decorated with artwork by Amano and Akihiko Yoshida, and included a behind-the-scenes DVD, a security token, and a decorated tumbler. In its debut week in Japan, it reached number 2 in the PC games charts, behind Civilization 5.

• 4. Nobuo Uematsu's MMORPG

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  Nobuo Uematsu, the composer behind much of the Final Fantasy series' music, had originally been contracted to write only the ending theme for Final Fantasy XIII. When the XIV team asked him to score their game instead, he agreed, and Final Fantasy XIII's theme was handed to Masashi Hamauzu. Uematsu had contributed only a few pieces to Final Fantasy XI; XIV was his first full MMORPG score.

  He worked on the project simultaneously with The Last Story, a game from original Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. For XIV's battle sequences, he combined orchestral and rock arrangements. The game's theme song, "Answers", was composed by Uematsu and sung by Susan Calloway, chosen personally by Uematsu after he heard her sing previous Final Fantasy themes. Two mini-albums, Final Fantasy XIV: Battle Tracks and Final Fantasy XIV: Field Tracks, were released on the 29th of September 2010. A full album, Final Fantasy XIV - Eorzean Frontiers, followed on the 1st of September 2012. After launch, composers Masayoshi Soken, Naoshi Mizuta, Tsuyoshi Sekito, and Ryo Yamazaki contributed additional music. Soken served as sound director and would become the primary composer for the game's eventual relaunch.

• 5. The Backlash and the Rebuild

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  In December 2010, Tanaka and Komoto were removed from their posts, with Tanaka publicly accepting responsibility for the game's failure. Naoki Yoshida, who had previously worked on the Dragon Quest series at Square Enix, took over as both producer and director. Komoto was reassigned as lead game designer. Yoshida's first priority was making the game playable. Among the improvements introduced through subsequent patches were a job system, personal chocobos, a revamped battle system, expanded gear customization, and new dungeons and bosses.

  In 2011, XIV and Final Fantasy XI were taken offline for a week following the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan. During the outage, Square Enix received messages from Japanese players who had been using the game to contact friends and relatives while landline and cell service remained unavailable. A planned boss battle featuring the primal Titan was cut because the team felt players might associate the earth-linked beast tribe deity with the disaster. A fight against Good King Moggle Mog was created in its place using repurposed moogle models and a moogle theme Uematsu had already composed.

  Yoshida ultimately concluded that no amount of patching could fix the game. The engine and server structure were critically flawed. The decision to relaunch as a new version rather than a new title was driven by a need to rebuild player trust, which Square Enix believed a clean abandonment of the XIV name would not accomplish. The final revision of the original game went live on the 1st of November 2012. On November 11, after a final in-game battle open to all players, the servers closed permanently.

• 6. A Realm Rebuilt

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  At the 2011 Tokyo Game Show, Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada issued a formal apology for XIV, saying the Final Fantasy brand had been "greatly damaged". Development on a rebooted version, initially titled Final Fantasy XIV 2.0, began in April of that same year. Yoshida conceived the in-game "Seventh Umbral Era" storyline as a narrative explanation for the game's radical transformation: a world-ending event that would justify the altered landscape and mechanics waiting in the new version. He arrived at the idea after watching a television program about the 2012 doomsday prophecy attributed to the Mayan calendar.

  The reboot was released in 2013 with the subtitle A Realm Reborn. Critics and players responded positively. By April 2021, the game's registered player base had surpassed 22 million. In a 2019 interview with Easy Allies, Yoshida joked that running a legacy server for the original version of XIV, similar to World of Warcraft Classic, would be a "nightmare". Yoshida himself noted that A Realm Reborn was only the beginning of rebuilding trust after the 2010 release, and that the process would take a long time.