Ever wondered how Final Fantasy 14 got turned around? They just decided to scrap everything.

Final Fantasy 14 is doing pretty well for itself now, but that wasn’t always the case. Back when it launched, it got a ton of negative feedback, but there was a staunch group of players defending the game and its developers.

In part two of NoClip’s three-part series looking at the original release of the game and how it was turned around, Micheal Christopher Koji Fox, the English localisation lead on the game, talks about how the developers handled ‘rewriting history’.

“You had something that not a lot of people liked, and everyone wanted to forget about it. So rather than…just re-imagining it, why not destroy that and start over?”

The reasoning behind scrapping everything was that leaving too much of the “original core” would have it “linger” like a “cancer” that would bring them “back to that failure.”

The team still recognised the core of players that had stuck with them, who were passionate about the game as it was.

“It would have been easy to just say, ‘okay, bye guys!’ but if you do that, then you’ve basically alienated the only group that stuck with you…for all of those years, when everyone else is slamming the game and talking about how bad it is.

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“Those guys were troopers,” he said. They defended the dev team “when a lot of times we didn’t deserve defending.”

It’s interesting to see how the team had to work the destruction of the old game into the story, and it’s always great to hear developers recognise players and their contributions.

If you’re a fan of Final Fantasy 14 and have the time to work your way through all three parts, I highly recommend it.