From the instant it was launched back in 2010, it was clear Final Fantasy XIV had many serious problems. Whether it was the unstable servers, dire user interface or awful quest design that served as the final nail in the coffin is unclear, but what’s a matter of record is the reaction: scathing reviews, an exodus of players and, ultimately, closure. Fans of the series were incredibly disillusioned with what had been put out under the banner of the once-great series. No one questioned Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada when he said in 2011, "The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged."

Fast forward five years and the difference couldn’t be starker. Not only is Final Fantasy XIV now thriving with a robust player-base of over 4 million paying subscribers, but it’s on the cusp of releasing its first expansion pack – something few MMOs manage these days, let alone those with such a troubled history. Final Fantasy XIV is no longer an unsightly blemish on the books of Square Enix but rather one of the most profitable parts of its portfolio, and that’s largely thanks to one man: Naoki Yoshida, the architect of the ground-up redesign that saw the title blossom under the A Realm Reborn moniker. According to him, it was a long, hard road that focused on creating a game and delivering content that would regain people’s trust.

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“We tried to regain the trust of our fans and our players through the launch of A Realm Reborn,” he explains. “It did take us five years but we’ve finally gotten to the point where we’re releasing our first expansion pack and we’re truly happy that we’re able to achieve this point. Throughout it all, our core belief has been that sure, we can do the PR and the marketing and appeal to the fans using our words, but it all boils down to having a great game that we can deliver to the players.”

“ I feel it’s very important for Final Fantasy XIV to continue making a game where the content justifies the players’ time and money.

As for what went wrong with the original game in the design phase, a number of theories have been batted about over the years. Blame is variously placed on original director Nobuaki Komoto, who lacked design knowledge of MMOs, to an overt eagerness to lazily copy World of Warcraft and slap a Final Fantasy skin on it. According to Yoshida though, the core issue was always the technology used, which rendered the very foundations of the game broken. It’s for this reason the team couldn’t try to salvage the game but had to burn it down and start again.

“I believe the server structure, the architecture and just how the servers were set up were already problematic,” he says. “They were broken. If your server has a problem and you’re trying to make an online RPG, it’s like your planet is deficient. Everything you build on it, it’ll always have issues. So I felt we had to rebuild the world from scratch, which is why when we started it was literally building from the ground-up.”

Yet it wasn’t a design decision related to this brave new world that raised the most eyebrows before A Realm Reborn launched back in 2013; rather, it was a business one. At a time when the subscription model for MMOs already seemed to be wobbling slightly, Square Enix’s announcement Final Fantasy XIV would resurface with a sub fee was viewed as the height of insanity given the complete mess that was the original game.

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Square didn’t see it that way, however. Yoshida and the team view the sub fee as a crucial part of how trust was rebuilt between player and developer. It’s a contract – the players promise they will continue to support the game as long as it’s worth supporting, with regular content drops that justify the cash. As an added benefit for Square, it enables the studio to forecast how much money it has coming in and use this to keep strong designers on to make sure future content will remain as strong. It’s all about planning for the future.

“ If World of Warcraft ever does switch to free-to-play we’ll start wondering what’s going on!

Looking now, it’s clear the decision has more than paid off. Final Fantasy XIV added more than a million players to its subscriber base in less than six months, in a time when even Blizzard’s behemoth World of Warcraft is haemorrhaging players, having just seen the biggest subscriber drop in its history, while other titles like WildStar opt to ditch the sub fee entirely. Considering Final Fantasy and WoW are now the two lone big dogs occupying a once-cluttered landscape of subscription MMOs, does Yoshida feel any sense of fear?

“To see the playerbase grow so substantially six months prior to the launch of an expansion, during a lull really when there’s no major content drop or announcement happening, it goes to show the results of what we’ve been putting into the game,” he says. “Players believe they are finally able to trust us and expect good updates regularly, and they don’t have to worry about the servers being shut down at a moment’s notice. They’re safe. They’re good.