Another disappointment like Final Fantasy XIV can hurt Square Enix badly, says game director

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   November 28th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Final Fantasy XIV is a game that neither the gamers feel like remembering, nor the publisher Square Enix is proud to own.

The second massively multiplayer online role-playing game in the Final Fantasy franchise turned out to be a huge disappointment and ended up receiving wide-spread negative reception, something that hardly came as a surprise keeping the quality and various other issues with the game in mind.

The game director of Final Fantasy XIV Naoki Yoshida is not ignorant to the amount of damage that can be dealt to Square Enix if the development team ends up making a similar mistake in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which is a remake of the original game, though with significant changes.

“We won’t make a mistake like FFXIV again. If we did, it would be like at the level of destroying the company, “he stated

Yoshida went on to claim that he was not completely satisfied with the original Final Fantasy XIV prior to its shipment in 2010 and had a strong gut feeling that it was not a great idea to launch the game, as there were a number of improvements that still needed to be made in order to give the game any real chance of holding its own in the market.

“When I heard that it was going to go on sale as planned, I thought, that will probably be a big mistake,” he said. “I think it would’ve been good if they tried seeing what happened if they turned World of WarCraft into Final Fantasy. So, because they tried only to make something that was ‘different from FFXI,’ they ended up with not much of anything.”

The blunder has already been made and the Final Fantasy brand has suffered some serious damage already.

The publisher had apologised to the customers over the poor quality of the game and decided to reshuffle the entire development team, which was to work on the remake of the original game.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn was announced in October last year, with the publisher confirming that while the settings, lore and story of the original game will be retained, a new client, graphics engine, improved interface, new service and data structures, redesigned maps, additional story and more gameplay variations will be featured in the remake.

Despite all the changes that are being made and additional features that are being incorporated in the original Final Fantasy XIV, it is still hard to say if the gamers would be willing to give the game another chance after being so thoroughly disappointed with it the last time they gave it a shot.

Square Enix plans on releasing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn for PC and PlayStation 3 simultaneously in mid 2013.