The fact that Final Fantasy XIV's original release in September 2010 was a complete disaster isn't breaking news. Even the most diehard of fans can look back objectively now and admit that the game was lacking in almost every aspect.
The burning question that has been on everyone's mind is, "How did this happen?"
Now, with version 1.0 of the game having concluded and A Realm Reborn on full steam ahead, it seems producer/director Naoki Yoshida is finally more free to talk about the original game's shortcomings. Hiromichi Tanaka, the game's first producer/director (who moved from Final Fantasy XI to lead the project but was replaced by Yoshida less than three months after release), also makes a few comments about his experience after leaving Square Enix.
In this Famitsu Magazine interview entitled, "The Death And Rebirth Of Final Fantasy XIV", Naoki Yoshida candidly tells us his feelings and gives us a glimpse behind the curtain at Square Enix's studio:
"To be honest, I'm relieved," said FF14 producer/director Naoki Yoshida in this week's Famitsu magazine. "I took on the old FF14 midway and just tried to do the best we could what what we had at hand. There were always conflicts between ideals and reality, but I feel that we've still managed to reach the conclusion that we were aiming for. It feels like we've finally piloted a large ship back to the dock."
FF14, of course, launched in September 2010, only to be universally slammed as buggy, incomplete, and overall unplayable. Two months later, producer Hiromichi Tanaka resigned, Yoshida took his place, and Square Enix posted an official apologize for the sorry state of affairs on its website.
If gamers were angry, things were decidedly worse behind studio walls. "Right after the service launched, in early October of 2010," Yoshida recalled, "I give this word of advice: 'This is never going to work unless we put our entire company's resources into this and revamp it. We're treating MMORPGs too lightly, and it's crazy to think we can just leave things as is for gamers.' We went into full launch mode after giving only the vaguest of responses to player feedback during the beta test. Part of me thinks that we should've been a month quicker. If we had pulled the trigger a month earlier, we could have shut the entire system down and go from there, since players wouldn't have had a chance to raise their character levels much anyway. If we had been a month earlier than that, we would have had the option of continuing with beta testing, too."
So how did Tanaka and Square Enix let things get so bad in the first place? "To put it bluntly, I think it can be summed up by saying we were conceited," Yoshida said. "We had server troubles, technical troubles, a lack of international marketing and research, a lack of communication with gamers. There were many problems, but they were all caused by the general idea that 'we're okay, it's the FF brand, we made FF11 work.' That was the feeling not just with the FF14 team, but with Square Enix in general. That's why I said that, before anything else, we had to apologize to gamers, so that's where the official announcement in December came from."
Yoshida called the idea of shutting things down by the time he was appointed director "unthinkable as a choice for me," but the alternatives he and his team faced weren't much more palatable. His ultimate decision: Keep upgrading the current FF14, but put their full efforts into FF14: A Realm Reborn, essentially a full reboot of the game.
"First," Yoshida explained, "there was the value of FF in my mind, especially an officially-numbered FF title. Second, there were the latest trends in MMORPGs. I thought that we needed a title in our line that put these two concepts together. In order to do that, we needed to discuss features to add to the old FF14, then take the time to decide whether it was feasible to implement them. We'd do research for eight or nine hours a day, then have a report meeting at night. After exploring all the possibilities, we came to the conclusion that it'd be faster to just start over. It's something backed up by solid research; it's not at all a spur-of-the-moment decision."
This couldn't have been easy. It also couldn't have been cheap. "We lost all that customer trust with the seeds we had sown ourselves," responded Yoshida, "and my take was that this was the cost of making up for that. You can't get trust back overnight, and it's not something you can buy back, either. You can only become friends again by showing that you've changed and sustaining that change. To get people to see that we're sincere, in a way, no price is too steep. So for that, the company basically said 'Go all the way you can with that' and to some extent the decision-making went pretty smoothly."
So FF14: A Realm Reborn is in alpha testing right now, and assuming Yoshida is telling the truth, it could be that his two years of nearly thankless effort may have been worth it. "We're seeing it work out better than I imagined," he said. "What's making me the happiest is that a lot of the tester feedback we're getting is along the lines of 'I really didn't expect this from an alpha test' and 'Why don't you just make this a beta?' and so on. This is a title that's got a negative image right at the starting line, so we tried to show off exactly how much of it is complete; we placed the quality bar really high for an alpha."
A Realm Reborn is due out next summer worldwide, and if it's a success, then Naoki Yoshida will have engineered one of the most astonishing turnarounds in video-game history. "This may make me a failure as a businessman," he admitted, "but to be honest, sales are secondary to me. My drive here is to regain the trust gamers had for us. I have confidence [we'll succeed], or else I wouldn't have taken on this project in the first place."
In another interview with Kotaku entitled, "New Final Fantasy XIV Director Talks About What Went Wrong With The Original", Yoshida laments the original team's lack of market research (Final Fantasy XI looked at the leader of the MMO market for inspiration, which was EverQuest, but Final Fantasy XIV failed to look at modern MMOs, such as World Of Warcraft).
Naoki Yoshida is about as far away from the stereotypical image of a Japanese businessman as you are likely to get. Clad in designer jeans with expertly styled hair and numerous finger rings, he looks more like a rock star than anything else. His business card even features a caricature of himself smoking while relaxing with a cup of coffee. But regardless of what he looks like, he is, at heart, a passionate MMO gamer who wants to turn Final Fantasy XIV from colossal failure into striking success.
While not a member of the team working on the original version of Final Fantasy XIV, Yoshida feared the game was doomed even before its release. After the bad reaction from players during the Beta test, even the staff thought the game wasn't ready for it to go on sale. "When I heard that it was going to go on sale as planned, I thought, that will probably be a big mistake."
To Yoshida, the biggest problems with the original Final Fantasy XIV came from how the game itself was envisioned and developed. Final Fantasy XI, Square Enix's other Final Fantasy MMO, was developed as a game where Final Fantasy would meet EverQuest—the top MMORPG of the day. In fact, according to Yoshida, the entire staff played EverQuest for at least a year while developing FFXI, trying to figure out just what exactly made it work so well. "I think it would've been good to do the same thing [for the original FFXIV]."
In Yoshida's opinion, the reason FFXI was a success is that it took the areas where Final Fantasy was strongest—cutscenes, dramatic scenarios, and story-driven content—and input them into an EverQuest inspired framework.
However, when the original FFXIV was in development, the goal of the project was simply to make a game that was different from Final Fantasy XI. Yoshida feels that the creators didn't recognize that the global standard of MMOs had been significantly raised in recent years. He would have suggested a different path for the game—one that mirrored FFXI's own creation. "I think it would've been good if they tried seeing what happened if they turned World of Warcraft into Final Fantasy. So, because they tried only to make something that was 'different from FFXI,' they ended up with not much of anything."
"They should have said, 'Hey you, go play WoW for a year [for inspiration].'"
Yoshida then talked at some length about the origins and development of MMORPGs. How they developed from tabletop RPGs into games like Ultima and Wizardy—before moving to the online world. What was important in his eyes is how early RPGs borrowed the best elements from and influenced each other. That's how the genre advanced and made new games. "Unless you are a genius, you cannot make something completely new from nothing."
When it comes to his FFXIV, A Realm Reborn, Yoshida believes they are on the right track. He has the best of the best from inside the company to work on this game and they are adamant the game not be released until it is ready. "We won't make a mistake like FFXIV again—if we did, it would be like at the level of destroying the company."
That said, Yoshida said his biggest worry while making A Realm Reborn has been the schedule. World class MMOs have so much in them that time is always an issue. There's got to be a lot for players to do. When coding started for A Realm Reborn, Yoshida and his team only had 16 months until the planned relaunch. At times, he had wondered if it was really possible to do all the work in two years. He lamented that he knows players wanted it fixed as quickly as possible, but if it is released before next year, he thinks they won't enjoy it.
When asked in closing how he would play A Realm Reborn, on PC or PlayStation 3, Yoshida responded, "I became an online gamer 16 or 17 years ago and I've always played on the PC. I played Diablo, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft—all always on the PC." He feels that, personally, if he did things like PvP without his trusty mouse and keyboard, he would definitely lose. But he mentioned that there was more than a little appeal to lying on his couch with the controller.
Coming out of the interview, I found myself more than a little impressed. Yoshida was upfront and frank about the problems of Final Fantasy XIV and the challenges that await Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. But more than that, our short talk left me with faith that if anyone can fix the game, it's him.
What became of Hiromichi Tanaka, the troubled game's original producer/director? After taking full responsibility for the game's shortcomings and stepping down from the project in early December 2010, he went back to work on Final Fantasy XI. He announced last June at VanaFest 2012 that he was leaving Square Enix, mainly due to health issues. Three months later, it was then learned in an interview with Famitsu Magazine that he was joining GungHo Online Entertainment as a freelance advisor. He alluded to the fact that 'getting removed from the Final Fantasy XIV project' was what began to sow the seeds of discontent. This seems to confirm suspicions that his stepping down wasn't nearly as voluntary as the media made it sound.
In an interview published in Famitsu magazine this week, Hiromichi Tanaka, former producer on online titles Final Fantasy XI and XIV, announced that he was joining Japanese game publisher GungHo Online Entertainment in a freelance advisor position.
The last time the Western world heard from Tanaka was a couple years ago, when he stepped down from FFXIV (along with most of the main team leadership) after the multiplayer online RPG launched in a buggy and generally incomplete state in September 2010. Afterwards he went back to working on FFXI full-time before announcing his departure from Square Enix this July.
"The trigger for me thinking about leaving was getting removed from the Final Fantasy XIV project," Tanaka told Famitsu. "I helped mold Final Fantasy XI into one of the best MMO formats on the market, and I wanted to respect the wishes of the team as much as possible when they wanted to make something different with FFXIV, so I tried my best not to meddle too much with development. In the end they weren't able to realize what they were aiming for, which is a shame, but I wish them the best of luck with the reboot."
(Tanaka has also been dealing with some sort of long-term illness, although he didn't specify what in the interview. "I'm going along fine now," he said. "It's not the sort of thing that can be completely cured and I'm going to have to deal with it for a while to come, but I'm visiting the hospital every week and it's not a particularly big problem.")
GungHo Online, a relatively unknown company outside of Asia, is a Japanese publisher involved with a wide variety of MMOs, console games and smartphone apps. They're probably best known as the Japanese provider for Korean MMO Ragnarok Online (above), still one of the biggest-grossing PC titles in Japan. Tanaka got involved with them via several ex-Square staffers who currently work for the company, including Ken Narita, longtime programmer on the Final Fantasy series and GungHo's current head of development.
"I was still heavily involved with FFXI, so I couldn't leave immediately," Tanaka said. "First there had to be a good roadmap laid out for FFXI in terms of development structure, expansions and the user interface. Once I was sure that the team would continue doing their best on the title, then I could think about myself and take the next step forward."
So what is that next step forward? Besides getting to know GungHo and providing development advice, Tanaka has at least one idea for a game he'd like to work on. "There's a project that I've been letting simmer up to this point," he said. "Right now I'm in the midst of putting it all together. Assuming it goes well, I'm hoping that I can make it into a GungHo project. It's an online game, but it won't be an MMORPG this time. Unlike ten years ago, smartphones and tablets are perfectly usable game platforms, and in addition to that, gamers are spending less time playing each individual games. Instead of just trying to get money out of users [via microtransations], I want to provide convincing gameplay which provides an experience that's actually worth paying for."
Tanaka seems to place the blame on the development team, believing that it wasn't his job to 'meddle', despite the fact that he was heading the project, all the while taking a good chunk of credit for Final Fantasy XI's success. Perhaps something is lost in translation, but for those who remember Tanaka's E3 2010 interview where he finds the idea of modern MMO staples such as jumping to be laughable and his Twitter snafu which sounded like an insult to foreign (non-Japanese) players, such arrogance is not surprising.
There are definitely two distinct styles between Tanaka and Yoshida. Though no one can dispute that Tanaka was an integral part of crafting early games in the Final Fantasy series and other Square titles into the masterpieces we have grown to love today, he is definitely rooted in a mindset that is now arguably outdated. In fact, many have felt that Square Enix titles, including newer standalone games in the Final Fantasy series, have begun to decline in quality. Yoshida's early insight into the problems that would indeed plague Final Fantasy XIV has served him well in his role as the game's second producer/director. Problems that, Twelve willing, have now provided a valuable learning experience. Perhaps the aptly subtitled reboot of the game, A Realm Reborn, will be fitting for Final Fantasy XIV and Square Enix both.
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