Final Fantasy XIV Has Issues, Says New Producer
No MMO launch in recent history has gone quite as badly as that of Final Fantasy XIV. Hyped for years and seen as a new era in MMO gaming, the title was released to universal scorn and ridicule. It got such bad reviews that several pundits predicted it would be shut down within a year.
Well aware of the disaster it has overseen, Square Enix brought in Naoki Yoshida late last year to try and salvage the situation. In a recent interview with Gamasutra, the game’s new producer talked about some of the issues final Fantasy XIV faces, and how he plans to address them.
"XIV had many issues," he frankly told the site. "There was technology trouble, in-game trouble. The game at the time of release did not live up to expectations that players had of current generation MMOs.”
He went on to say that Square Enix and the game’s developers had not been working closely enough with the many fans of the franchise.
"Square Enix wasn't working close enough with their user base,” he added. “They weren't working with them. It was pretty much by themselves. And so this whole change came about in order to address these issues.”
A bad launch is something most MMOs never recover from, and Yoshida is well aware of this. However, he has made it clear that Square Enix remains absolutely committed to FFIV.
“With FFXIV, operations and development are all funded 100 per cent by Square Enix, so as long as we decide to continue backing the project and we don't give up, we can continue to provide things to the players, see what they want, then go back and retry things, redo things. Basically, it comes up to us."
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