Oh,
Final Fantasy XIV. What a pretty, pretty mess you were.
There's an unwritten, but unfortunately very well known rule of MMORPGs which states that a newly released game cannot be deemed enjoyable until at least either six months or over a handful of patches have passed behind it on the road to hopefully not imploding on itself and being discontinued.
Final Fantasy XIV took this principle and ran it
right into the ground, being such a complete train-wreck on launch that practically everyone who touched the poor thing, including reviewers, said they thought it would be canceled within a month. If not less.
Before we hold hands and skip merrily down the road to answering if XIV is finally fixed or not, some backstory is needed behind the game's very dubious development history; and much like the series it spawned from, this history is very convoluted and long-winded. Okay? Okay. Let's go!
Development of the wacky Final Fantasy that is XIV reportedly started significant development when the
Chains of Promathia expansion pack to Square-Enix's previous MMO,
Final Fantasy XI, was just about wrapping up during the 2004-2005 period. The game was originally given the codename Project Rapture, and a quick
tech-demo was showcased at E3 in 2005. XIV, like XI, was directed by Hiromichi Tanaka (who also worked on titles like
Final Fantasy III, Chrono Cross, ect) which made a lot of fans very nervous, even back then. The biggest concern was what was going to happen to
Final Fantasy XI, as it was going really quite strong at the time. The second was that, well, Mr. Tanaka was quite infamous among the community for green-lighting very...
quality-ambiguous gameplay mechanics.
Specifically, Tanaka seemed to enjoy the prospect that players would have to
earn or wait significantly in order get to what many would call the 'fun' aspects of the game. If this was a good direction or not would be, and still is, constantly debated among the players of XI and XIV. The more important point here is that Tanaka would basically be controlling two games at once, which might partially explain what happens below.
At E3 in 2009, Square-Enix revealed that
Project Rapture would, of course, be
Final Fantasy XIV. Like with every game ever created in the series, this news split the gigantic fanbase apart and created roughly several hundred million threads on forums, with people going on about either how awesome this was going to be, or how it would devour babies and slap everyone's mother before defecating on the carpet. Shortly after its announcement, we started getting juicy gameplay details, like how "
growth is not based on EXP", it would be released on the PC and PS3 worldwide simultaneously, and all sorts of other neat stuff.
Stuff that never actually came true.
On April 2010,
Final Fantasy XIV entered its Alpha testing stage. The lack of information about the game up to and including this phase of development startled quite a few potential fans, but anyone who was familiar with FFXI and Tanaka's involvement there just shrugged it off as business as usual. We got some very pretty screenshots and a quick trailer here and there, which was keeping most people nice and happy. Overall, the game was still
highly anticipated by many, myself included. What started to make the internal alarms of the ol' noggin' blare, however, was that the Beta period was going to start in mid-June. Which wouldn't have been a problem if the game wasn't
just announced to be released in late September.
In short, XIV's beta was only going to be three months long; which is a far-cry off the original estimate, and MMO genre average, of
six months. Unless XIV was somehow mysteriously already polished to a shine (and therefor eliminating the need for a Beta in the first place) the proper testing phase of the game was going to be way, way,
way too short for any feedback from the testers to make it back into the product to any significant degree. With MMOs, and any game worth its salt, a well-made product needs to be constantly tested in every regard over a significant period of time. Solutions to problems need to be implemented, then those solutions need to be tested to make sure they don't cock anything else up. Then when that inevitably happens, you need to test everything again anyway. It's long, hard work, and
Final Fantasy XIV seemed like it was going to try and barrel right through this as quickly as it could.
To say this would come back to bite them in arse is a gross underestimate of the derriere-chomping that would follow.
The Beta phases came and went as quickly as expected. We were only given the city of Limsa Lominsa and a small chunk of the outlying fields to explore. The game definitely showed a lot of potential, and actually delivered pretty well on a fair few of its concepts. The biggest problem here was the game very obviously wasn't finished, what with it being a Beta and all, but a majority of the feedback players were giving seemed to fall of deaf ears. There most likely wasn't anywhere
near enough time for the developers to read through all the feedback, and Tanaka and his crew never gave any real indication that they were even reading them in the first place, outside of a few tiny, tiny things that could be fixed while the Beta flew by.
In a
wonderful case of 'open mouth, insert foot', I wrote a very long and mostly pretty-praising article about XIV, believing that the developers would fix all the known issues amongst the playerbase before launch, just a
day before the Open Beta really got underway and the big bomb was dropped on everyone. XIV's Open Beta, which was just the closed Beta in content but with more areas, was going to be the
entirety of the game at launch. The game barely had any proper content (including no definable way to consistantly level and just a few cutscenes for missions here and there), the launcher was glitchy (you couldn't even alt-tab out of the game without it crashing), it was
hideously optimized for the PC and... well, felt like a damned Beta. But here we were with Square-Enix and Tanaka basically kicking its arse out the door and screaming "
It's done~!"
The backlash from this is what you'd expect.
Final Fantasy XIV absolutely tanked upon release. Square-Enix tried to hide the game's shoddy state from the general public by placing an embargo on mainstream game reviewers until a couple of weeks had passed, but word was already spreading across the Internet from the players themselves. The game was nowhere near ready, and it was considered by many a downright
insult for Square to expect people to pay for this. When the reviews did come out, hoo-
boy. Let's just say they were about as forgiving as the players were.
Less than a month later, we received this lovely little gem from the developers.
Since the official launch of service on September 30, 2010, we have received a wealth of constructive feedback from the FINAL FANTASY XIV community, and the development and management teams would like to take this opportunity to express their sincerest gratitude. For those who purchased the collector’s edition and began to play one week before official service began, the month-long free play period is drawing to a close. Considering the nature of much of the feedback we received, however, and the current state of the game, we have decided to extend the free trial period for all users. Please continue reading for further details.
