Final Fantasy – it’s been one of the biggest brands in RPG gaming for decades, but all is not right. Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada has acknowledged in the past that the troubled 2010 MMO Final Fantasy XIV “greatly damaged” the Final Fantasy brand. Now Square Enix is aiming to regain the trust of its customers.
With that in mind, the company hasn’t even started charging for FFXIV, which was supposed to have been a premium MMO. Come December, though, patch 1.20 will launch and bring about any features that were missing. Square Enix could begin charging then.
“What we consider more critical is the feeling that we betrayed the trust of our players,” says Naoki Yoshida, producer of the game. “Final Fantasy XIV, at the time of its launch, greatly disappointed our customers who had high hopes, and failed to live up to the standards of the Final Fantasy series. As a result, we lost our customers’ trust in a big way.”
“The first thing I did when I became the producer and director of Final Fantasy XIV last December was to ask myself, ‘What kind of service system, game content, and community content would be necessary if we were to continue to offer this service 10 years into the future ‘” says Yoshida, who took clues from popular Western MMOs such as World of Warcraft and Rift. “I came to the quick conclusion that we would have to redesign the user interface, graphics engine, map system and the resource itself, and the servers.”
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