14 DAY TRIAL // Square Enix announced that their massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, topped 2 million registered users just days before also being released on the PlayStation 4.
Seeing its current success, people may not realize what Square Enix managed to do with Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, a feat unheard of in the gaming world, a complete recovery from a catastrophic launch.
While most MMOs are hard-pressed to recover from a bad launch and manage to stay afloat, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn managed to do more than just that, even surpassing the publisher's expectations.
Of course, in order for the miraculous recovery to occur, the game had to be completely rebuilt. Naoki Yoshida became the producer and director of the MMORPG in 2011, beginning the journey for the game's healing.
He wasn't part of the original team, and he assumed the leading role in the revitalization effort based on his experience with the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre.
After the successful relaunch, the game also made it to Sony's next-gen platform, and Yoshida gave a very well-received talk at this year's edition of the Game Developers Conference, detailing how his team and the company had tackled the difficult project, also addressing some of the challenges of running a subscription-based MMO in a market that is saturated with free-to-play titles.
"A month after I took on the responsibilities, I had to evaluate whether this is something I can just go in and make revisions to make better, or if I need to start from scratch. I had to interview the development staff and other members of the company about the title, as well as check out the forums and see what the community was saying," Yoshida revealed.
A half-baked attempt to fix the game would have risked for the fans' trust to be completely lost, so the decision was made to rebuild the game into a totally new Final Fantasy game and integrate the change into the game's story somehow, with the priority being not the business, but regaining the fans.
"In order to regain that trust, regardless of business or commercial success, I think it was very important that Square Enix admitted the game did fail, but we want to regain the trust of our fans. It was very important to go back to Final Fantasy XIV and make sure that we fixed the mistakes, and go back and gain the trust that we had lost in the initial failure," Yoshida confessed.
He said that the game's current success is a direct result of the development team's commitment to create a fun and interesting game, and being open and letting players know about the progress that was made and about their shortcomings.