Square Enix is a company that I desperately want to love, because they did what no other developer would do and came through on their promise to improve a failed MMO from the ground up. Apart from Darkfall and maybe one or two other titles, this doesn’t happen. You have companies like NCSoft who would rather fire everyone and chalk it off as a loss than take even the tiniest of risks in improving the product, Mythic Entertainment who will dump on their previous product to promote the next low-seller, and then you have Battleground Europe who respond to low subscribers by simply deleting any criticism. So the simple fact that FFXIV: A Realm Reborn exists is enough to earn Square Enix a lot of respect in my books.
First of all, let’s talk story. A Realm Reborn takes place after the events of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, where the Garlean Empire invades Eorzea with the goal of military conquest, and Bahamut (the giant dragon from the end of game trailer) descends upon the world and destroys many of the major cities. When the attempt to contain Bahamut fails, the adventurers (players) are teleported a short distance into the future and in order to maintain continuity, no one remembers who they are or what they look like. Five years later, the adventurers begin appearing in Eorzea, ready to aid the land once again in the fight against monsters, the Garlean Empire, and a rising tide of evil.
There’s a special five letter word I like to break out when referring to Square Enix: Inane. The company appears to be peppered with inanity from the very tip top all the way down to the bottom. Inane people who think that selling 3.5 million copies of Tomb Raider is a disappointment. Who greedily approved and released the shameful non-game that was Final Fantasy: All The Bravest. And finally, the people who designed the systems around Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I could use this time to question why my pre order of FFXIV directly from Square required me to use the forums to receive a link to find my order (it was never sent to my email) so that I could go to a third party website, bring up a pre order code that came back as invalid. Oh wait, I have to put that code in another website which then generates my pre order code, which is different from the beta code and product code and even though I purchased the game directly from Square, not automatically applied to the account. Nevermind the fact that these websites were broken much of the time, returning an invalid code notice to people with valid codes without telling them that they were actually supposed to wait until predetermined dates before they could be entered, assuming they hadn’t been sent a code for the wrong region or just not at all.
And now let’s talk about server traffic, AFK, and the perception of customer value. Even post-launch, players have found themselves unable to log in with the most grueling of all errors: Error 1017, or “this world is full.” Why is the world full? Because everyone refuses to log off. Square Enix decided once again that they would not implement an auto-kick function. Couple high traffic with the fact that people will not log out in fear of losing their spot and you end up with a game where the servers are consistently full and the normal cycle of slots freeing up when someone logs off is mostly broken.
On the other hand, the game is a lot of fun when it does work, and you can hear more on that in Part 2 of our impressions piece coming later this week.
MMO Fallout 