Final Fantasy XIV has seen a surge of players recently, hitting a level of success that the game has not seen before. With people excited for the next expansion, entitled Shadowbringers, on the horizon It looks like FFXIV has no plans for slowing down either. This has lead many people to feel that the game that was once so bad they had to rebuild it from scratch, is now the apex of what an MMO should be.
This has, in recent months, invited comparisons to World of Warcraft which has widely been considered the best MMO since it was introduced in 2004. While it has maintained high popularity since then, it has suffered setbacks in recent months. This has culminated in many people jumping over to Final Fantasy XIV, including streamer Asmongold. This ultimately resulted in the game breaking its highest concurrent user record on steam. Soon after, the suggestion that World of Warcraft had been beaten began to make the rounds.
However, Final Fantasy XIV Director Naoki Yoshida, or as he is referred to by fans Yoshi-P does not seem fond of this conversation. During the 14 hour live stream held for the game Yoshi-P gave a speech on the perceived rivalry the two games have. It was translated thanks to blluist on YouTube.
Yoshi-P stated:
Blizzard is definitely aware of this, but without World of Warcraft, A Realm Reborn wouldn’t exist. WoW was the game we constantly looked up to. Our goal was to recreate a Final Fantasy version of WoW, so saying we won or lost to WoW is off-base to start with, because they were the game we aspired to be.
Yoshida makes a valid point here. Final Fantasy had largely entered the space with XI after seeing the success of WoW. From there it was not an easy road to success and during much of that time, WoW was the dominating MMO. But the talented teams at Square Enix kept not just moving forward but learning from their failures to make in the success it has become. The moral of the story is just enjoying gaming, no matter where we choose to do so.
