The RPG Fanatic Review Show - Analyzing Final Fantasy XIV: ARR - 1.0 Vs 2.0

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• published: 09 Sep 2014
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This review for FFXIV: A Realm Reborn goes into a lot of detail about what made 1.0 bad and 2.0 good. FFXIV Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V5D366G/?tag=martbrotstud-20 Final Fantasy 14 originally launched in 2010 in a version which is commonly referred to as 1.0 and almost bankrupted Square-Enix when it tanked in the market. I’m not making that up; they had investors selling their shares in the company because the game did so poorly that SE started to have a financial crisis, which it barely survived. But that is a tale for another day. Sources: http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1n7dfv/then_now_analysis_of_the_most_upvoted_complaint/ http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/20/5527948/final-fantasy-14-killed-square-enix-stubbornness-realm-reborn-new-approach http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/85639-18-Hour-Final-Fantasy-XI-Boss-Induces-Puking Then CEO of Square-Enix, Yochi Wada publically apologized to the world for the failures, acknowledging that Final Fantasy 14 had damaged the Final Fantasy brand, and game producer Hiromichi Tanaka actually resigned from the company because of how much of a screwup this game’s launch was and what problems it caused for Square-Enix. I want you to just take that in, for a moment. One of the most senior employees at Square-Enix, who had been with the company since its very first title Death Trap in 1984, who had been a designer on the early Final Fantasy games, who was the producer of fan favorites like Secret of Mana, Xenogears and Chrono Cross – this man who had been part of Square even before they were a company – this game was so bad that it resulted in him resigning. That is how freakin bad it was. And why was Final Fantasy 14 version 1.0 so bad? What are the exact reasons? How about needing to run off into the middle of nowhere for 20 minutes just to reach the place you need to start farming monsters for a quest. And don’t you dare die, because you’ll have to make that 20 minute trek back to the zone to start all over again. During version1.0 the leve-quests (which are bound by a daily limit) were the main source of leveling your classes, rather than the Main Scenario storyline quests we have in version 2.0. And you could only do 4 Battle-leve quests per day, meaning that if you wanted to play the game solo you had to be willing to do 1998 Everquest-era style spawn point camping of mobs on the overworld map if you wanted to reach lv 50 before the end of the year. If you relied on quests you would never get there. On top of that, how about the game incorporating a Fatigue System where the longer you played, the less XP you earned until eventually you could earn no XP? Because Final Fantasy 14 1.0 had this system in place to prevent players from quote on quote “excessively leveling”, otherwise known as having fun with the game. Fatigue points only reset at the end of the week, meaning that if you wanted to play the game every day you were shit out of luck. Unbelievably, the developers actually thought it was a good idea to design a system where the more effort the player put into playing the game, the less progress they would make. This was literally Square-Enix punishing their customers for using their product more often. In a well reported case a raid of players spent 18 hours fighting the Absolute Virtue non-stop until some of them players started experiencing extreme nausea from all the energy drinks they were consuming trying to stay awake and alert during the raid, and some were reported as actually passing out at their keyboards. Absolute Virtue is not only the destroyer of a raid’s in game characters, but also a slayer of the players’ actual bodies. And Hiromichi Tanaka’s team of developers sincerely believed encounter design like this was a good thing for their game; after all, Final Fantasy 11 is the most profitable game Square-Enix has made due the monthly subscription fee. And the game does have a small but loyal population of older players who still love the hardcore challenge of playing Final Fantasy 11, which has kept it afloat for many years. Yoshi-P’s experience as a hardcore MMO gamer proved instrumental to redesigning Final Fantasy 14 with such modern MMO design concepts as having branching story-line quests be the primary leveling mechanic, not adding Fatigue systems to reduce players’ experience points until they could no longer play, and not designing world maps to be so massive it took 15 minutes of running to do basic things like walk from one end of the city to the next. Basically under Yoshi-P’s direction the development team removed all of things that punished players for playing the game, which was the fundamental problem with 1.0