Final Fantasy XIV (1.0)

~ the last words ~

My time in persistent worlds was spent on Ultima Online private servers, which asked for no card and no monthly anything, and that accounts for most of the reason a subscription MMO was never going to be mine. Final Fantasy XIV arrived in September 2010 asking for exactly that arrangement, then spent the next two years not charging for it because of how the launch had gone.

It shipped on 30 September 2010 for Windows, with a PlayStation 3 version promised and pushed back until it stopped being mentioned. Metacritic settled at 49, which for a numbered Final Fantasy was less a bad score than an incident. Reviewers liked the way it looked and the way it sounded. Everything you touched with your hands got taken apart in public.

It still sold 603,000 copies in the first two months, which tells you the name was doing work the game could not. Square Enix suspended the monthly fee almost immediately and did not reinstate it for well over a year. A free MMO is usually a strategy. This one was an apology with a billing system bolted to it.

In December 2010, ten weeks after launch, the producer and the director were both removed and Naoki Yoshida was put in charge. Yoichi Wada, running Square Enix at the time, said out loud that the launch had greatly damaged the Final Fantasy brand. Companies do not usually say that about their own release.

~ the record ~

~ what went wrong ~

The menus were the first thing everybody noticed. Basic interface actions went to the server and came back, so opening your inventory had latency, and a game where the inventory has latency is a game you fight to operate. The world underneath was built from a small number of terrain pieces repeated across enormous maps, which meant hours of walking through places you had already seen assembled in a different order.

None of that was a mystery to the people playing it, and that is the part that stings. This was not a game that failed in some subtle way only economists could detect. It failed at the level of pressing a button and waiting.

~ the end of an era ~

After 1 November 2012 the servers stopped saving progress. Whatever you did in those last ten days was not going to be kept, and everybody logged in anyway, because Square Enix had done something no other MMO had bothered with. Rather than post a notice and switch off the racks, they wrote the shutdown into the story.

Dalamud, the red moon that had been hanging in the sky getting closer for a year of patches, came down. Bahamut came out of it. An old archon named Louisoix threw the surviving players forward through a rift in time so that the people who lived through the end of the world would be the same people who showed up in the new one. Then the servers were cut in the middle of that scene on 11 November 2012, and the footage became the trailer for the next version.

~ what it became ~

A Realm Reborn opened on 27 August 2013 with the same world rebuilt from nothing on a new engine, and by April 2021 it had passed twenty two million registered players. The rescue is now the standard reference anybody reaches for when a game launches badly, usually by people who never touched the version that needed rescuing.

That version is properly gone. The 1.0 client connects to nothing, no offline build was ever made, and there is no private server keeping it warm the way there is for most dead MMOs. All that survives is video, plus the odd detail in the current game that only makes sense if you know a moon fell. It is the only Final Fantasy with an ending you cannot reach.

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