Wada: Final Fantasy XIV a Serious WoW Rival
Square Enix wants to take on Blizzard with its upcoming MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV.
Square Enix president Yoichi Wada told Develop that the company is looking to take on Blizzard's monster MMORPG, World of Warcraft, with its own offering, the upcoming MMOG Final Fantasy XIV. That's a bold statement considering that Final Fantasy XI for the PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox 360, its previous MMORPG that connected all three platforms together, failed to become a house-hold name.
But Wada and Square Enix seems determined to overpower the Blizzard giant. In fact, he questioned Blizzard's ability to successfully create a sequel to World of Warcraft, citing failures of other companies who had a great 1st MMOG but an unsuccessful sequel. But he did admit that Blizzard is a tough competitor, however talking about who can make a bigger sequel doesn't change the fact that World of Warcraft has over ten million subscribers. That's quite a mountain to conquer.
With that said, could Final Fantasy seriously be a threat to World of Warcraft's throne? Wada offered a earnest yes, but also said that both games will offer consumers a choice. "We believe there is a number of people that will stay attached to each title, but we are optimistic in that sense for Final Fantasy," he said.
Wada goes on to talk about the MMORPG itself, and how it will retain the monthly subscription fee structure. Square Enix also decided to change the gameplay to some extent, making it less party-specific and easier for solo gamers to embark on quests alone. Final Fantasy XIV is expected to launch sometime in 2010 for the PlayStation 3 and Games for Windows.
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Every MMORPG developer says theirs will be a rival for WoW, so this doesn't really come as a shock. The problem is to rival WoW you would need to release a game with a massive amount of content already in it, rather then release a full game by its own right and expand it bit like bit, like WoW has been doing for years now.
Interesting to see how it will play out. Final Fantasy will have a console based platform format as wellng as PC, and seeing as it's a next-gen game, it will have the advantage of better hardware to take advantage of. This ofcourse can be good and bad for the PC as not everyone will have high specs. I'm sure eventually people will realise current MMO's are just a time wasting grindfest. I'd be interested in how they are going to make the game so that it's actually fun, Since really, they are basically just converting players from other MMO's and those players will have been thru the grinding once already. However, having said that, FF14 doesn't have a traditional level up system.
They've got FF11 data for research, so they should be able to come up with something fantastic. Even WOW is moving to smaller party and grouping with each expansion. FF14 might just pull it off.
WoW did (and does) do well by doing something back then (circa 2004) unheard of - giving customers what they want.
They didn't want to be stuck in a hub city (like Jeuno) waiting for a group just for the privilege of levelling. So WoW gave them the ability to solo all the way to the maximum level.
They didn't want to level by killing monster after monster incessantly. WoW incorporated questing and levelling into one neat package.
They didn't want a crafting system where they lost their hard won materials if the crafting failed. WoW gave them that.
They definitely didn't want to have 5 hard (and not soloable, or at least not practically) quests in the way of getting to the maximum level. WoW had no cap.
And they didn't want to be priced out of being good players by a lack of in-game money and expensive but necessary items. So WoW made most things questable/grindable/craftable and made gold fairly plentiful.
And now it has 10 million subscribers to FFXI's 0.5 million. Don't get me wrong, I like Final Fantasy and hope the next one does well, but it's going to bomb unless they listen to what people want. Genuinely listen, instead of pretending to.