MOONWALKING
It’s bizarre to look at Final Fantasy XIV’s last 12 months and witness a game that has been suffering from success. It’s a stark change for a game that, for a large part of its early life, was simply suffering.
“Final Fantasy XIV is a project that got off to a very problematic start,” director and producer Naoki Yoshida admits. It’s a well-known tale in games: a messy, unfun MMO crippled by conflicting ambitions across its team. “There were issues not only within the project itself, but also in terms of the company structure. All these issues erupted with Final Fantasy XIV. The consequences were that we lost the trust of our fans, our gamers, and the media.”
When Yoshida (lovingly nicknamed Yoshi-P by the community) puts it like that, it’s a wonder that I can now sit here in 2022 and say what a fantastic game really is. But it’s true – one hard reboot and four expansions later, and the MMO has become a juggernaut in the genre. It’s sitting pretty up there with the likes of and even managed to entice a good number of players away from Azeroth and into the exodus’ rocketed the game to its highest concurrent player count to date, helped by large -heads like Asmongold and Preach giving it a try.
