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
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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