MOONWALKING

Naoki Yoshida on how FINAL FANTASY XIV found its feet after seven years-and what's next for the behemoth MMO.

- Mollie Taylor

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 FFXIV really is. But it's true-one hard reboot and ur expansions later, and the MMO has become a juggernaut in the genre. It's sitting pretty up there with the likes of World of Warcraft, and even managed to entice a good number of players away from Azeroth and into the catgirl-thronged world of Eorzea last year. The so-called 'WoW exodus' rocketed the game to its highest concurrent player count to date, helped by large WoW-heads like Asmongold and Preach giving it a try.

It's definitely hard to deny the effect they and other streamers had on the player boost. "Their impact on new players and the existing community has been tremendous, while current players have provided them a warm welcome," says Yoshi-P. Above all though, he's just glad more people are playing. "Whether they may be streamers or not, it just makes us happy to hear about more gamers coming into contact with FFXIV and playing the game!"

TO THE MOON