FFXIV probably should have been shut down. It most likely should have become free to play with your typical cash shop set up, waiting for those “whales” to drop hundreds of dollars into it. It was by far mostly regarded as a train wreck of an MMO. At the very least it seemed like a really expensive misguided project. Yet it’s still alive. Not only alive but coming back with a subscription model. FFXIV is not likely to be everyone’s cup of tea but as people of our hobby I think it’s fairly interesting seeing this game going through such a unique metamorphoses.

Sometimes my character would just stand there toe to toe with a monster after I had depleted it’s HP to zero. Only for it to collapse after awkwardly looking at me as if it forgot what it’s role was in a scene of a stage play. Beta hiccups! I told myself that many times with a myriad of other issues that came up. After a few months of playing I had given up. Nothing had really improved, this is just a bad game. A lot of FFXIV was poorly optimized. At the very least it felt like it wasn't ready to be sold. Strangely enough you can see production value in various spots of the game but then sorely lacking in others. Setting aside it’s networking issues, fairly obvious things like map design were atrocious. The best maps were the one’s with the least details because a barren landscape didn't have much way of copy and pasted landmarks. The game was so bad that SE decided to make it free to play and retooled it’s staff.

I only kept track of FFXIV’s progress off hand. All I knew is that some guy called Yoshi P was in charge now. I think it’s important to note the crazy people that stuck with the game. Dedicated players that saw something in this hot mess that others didn't. If it wasn't for them the current FFXIV may not exist the way it does now. My general understanding is that the current development team created and improved content while working on the big change, the so called FFXIV 2.0. Going as far as justifying it through lore, they tore apart the old FFXIV to recreate it. What’s cool about this is that all along the development process Yoshida and staff communicate a lot with the community. Even having one to two hour live streams taking suggestions and answering questions. It’s a little more common in the western world of video games, but what about Japanese? As far as I know not too common being this transparent or directly communicating with community. The only thing that really comes to mind are the developer commentary videos for Bayonetta. FFXIV ARR connects it’s relaunch with it’s player base. Old players, or “Legacy” players have become warriors of light. Very much in a Final Fantasy fashion players were saved by being sent into the future their bodies bearing a mark of survival. Besides keeping original characters their introduction and some NPC dialogue differs from normal players. It’s not that big of story deviation as one would like but cool nonetheless.

Yoshida wants FFXIV to be a successful pay to play MMO in a free to play world. It’s uncertain on how this will shake out, but he does have some decent points for the pay model. Thinking back on all the MMO and free to play games I’ve played I always gave up for the same reasons. Setting aside games that were just low production value and/or bad, good games were led to ruin because of how the cycle of pay items went. There aren't many DOTA 2’s around that seem to have this stuff down in a way that seems fair. After participating in the beta I can say that I want to play more of FFXIV ARR, probably every night for a while. I’m going to subscribe to this game without a problem. That said, any MMO’s true merit is shown months down the line when content starts to run dry. Will we have more things to do? If Yoshi P has his way there should be. Quite a few people want to believe so at least.

It’s nuts that FFXIV ARR exists in it's current form, or at all. A Square Enix pay to play MMO based off a failed pay to play MMO with a Japanese development team tasked to fix an expensive mistake being communicative and transparent with it’s fan base while actually showing positive results as of it’s beta. It’s kind of neat.

nice post, it's really great to see the game turning around like this. if XI's recently released expansion is any indication (11 years after launch), and if they truly have the full support of square-enix now like yoshi-p is saying, it's easy to see how they could keep the content coming for a long long time after launch.

i've been enjoying the beta as well, i never played 1.0 to have that frame of reference for exactly how improved it is, but it's still basically like my PSO2 (modernized, beautiful version of a game i have a lot of love and nostalgia for), since FFXI was my first mmo, and this just oozes that same unique style and world, with a game that's actually fun and playable (to be fair to FFXI's recent strides in playability, i quit in 2004 when all my friends did).

now my only problem is deciding who to play with. i'm leaning towards the crew here on GB because they're starting on a fresh server, but there's some advantages that could come of playing on a legacy server as well so i'm conflicted. i don't actually KNOW anyone on either end, i also don't know what the advantages of having a potentially large free company are vs. just doing my own thing like this was some kind of mmo and trying to make friends by playing with them rather than what forum they post on.

It's really awesome how FFXIV has improved in 2.0 :) I'm coming from the perspective of a FFXI player, and XIV feels new and exciting to me! It doesn't play much like XI, but somehow even without considering the FF trappings it reminds me of XI in a good way.

That said, it does feel like a very modern MMO that incorporates aspects of several recent good ones!

For any GB'ers who want to play on legacy servers, some friends of mine, my FFXI linkshell (Legion of Altana, which is the oldest existing linkshell on Sylph), and myself will be playing on Hyperion come open beta :)

@belegorm:
So many XI users on beta forums have been kind of jerks about how FFXI is better. As a fellow XI player I'm glad to see it's not the case for most of us.

@onimonkii:
There are some GBers that are on legacy servers like Belegorm here. So you can always try and roll with them. My friends and I will probably play on Cactuar I think. Not 100% certain yet 'cos it'd be nice to join a larger GB group.

Yeah, it's totally turned around. I'm one of those Legacy members currently on the Gungnir server and I avoid the forums like the plague. In fact, I avoid most MMO forums.

yeah I saw in the post mentioning some legacy GB people on Excalibur, and that's where i think a friend of mine is going to roll with a larger legacy company. Might be able to check them out and still see some GB dudes. that's the sad truth of mmos, you can't realistically play with everyone, even among friend groups :(

like the last time all my friends were on the same server was FFXI, because there were 5 of us and we all started together. even in WoW it was like i knew 5 people playing and all of them were on a different server/server type/faction for one reason or another, and none of them were into the idea of moving to play together. it just gets worse when you get into internet friends and acquaintances and so on.

I think the problem in the beta forums is that all these "new" people want to have an action oriented Combat system like Tera with actual Dodging etc but that is not what FFXIV and people really getting annoyed by people trying to push this idea.

@darji: Yeah I can see that. While streaming I was talking about FFXIV with everyone and one person said that they prefer action games like Tera. I've always disliked it when MMOs call them selves action games when it's still very much not. Vindictus is an online action game to me. Terra has it's cool stuff in combat but I wouldn't call it an action MMO. I think they just like to call it action since it's free moving combat and not locked on combat.

@insane_shadowblade85: Yeah you're right to avoid 'em. I guess I just wanted to talk about the game and my first stop was the beta forum. Yuck.

I really want to try FFXIV, hopefully they will open up the beta soon.

The thing the FFXI always reminds me is that MMO's aren't supposed to be 100% about the combat. What happened to being in a living, breathing world with thousands of other players online that you can can have friendships with, rivalries with, and help each other out? I would not really care if combat was really simple because that's not the only thing I'm there for in FFXIV.

Also I forgot to try out the new crafting system, but if they took the good parts from 1.0 and improved on them they may have the most enjoyable crafting system of any MMO I've played.

Also FFXI is a very unique MMO even now, so I think people who played that still want to be somewhat unique, and not be like every other MMO that copied WoW in the past 10 years. FFXIV certainly has some WoW-inspired stuff, but it also takes ideas from other more recent MMOs, like GW2, and polishes them up a bit in a FF world.

Kinda sums up how i think about xiv, theres so many moving parts that help bring it all together, with the style, music dialog, the way your character moves like an actual game character and not a tank, and how the game totally encourages party play through quest-lines to try and make sure your not just going to jump in be play it as a single player mmo, ive played at least most modern mmos that came out in the last few years and other than eve(although allot of the time ive been too intimidated to interact with other people) none of them made me ever want to interact with a person as i kept to myself doing my own thing.

Fuck I thought it was gonna be F2P.