"...I'm not done telling you all the things that I wanted to say; there's still so much. It's been so long since anyone listened to me talk. Won't you stay?"

Me eating breakfast: I want to write

Me getting ready for work: I want to write

Me at work: I want to write

Me eating lunch: I want to write

Me driving home: I want to write

Me at home, sitting in front of my laptop:

yeah so, in summary, when FF14 was first released it was helmed by an entirely different team of producers who were very much not interested in learning from developments in the MMO genre up to that point and kinda created a mess of a game. it wasn’t really due to one thing in particular that the game failed though, the entire production was highly mismanaged. people knew in beta that it was going to be a mess but they pushed it out anyway and it was a major flop critically and a big hit to square’s reputation. the producers were then removed from the project and another producer named Naoki Yoshida who had a lot of experience working on the Dragon Quest MMO was brought on to replace them and hopefully improve the state of the game.

when realizing just how fucked FF14 1.0 was at the time, yoshida gave square a bit of a hail mary option and was like “we can improve this game, but it will never be great in this form. let me continue making updates to the game… while also in the background secretly rebuild the entire game almost from scratch”. fucking miraculously square was like “yeah sure” and actually gave that idea the greenlight, with a 2-year window to release.

so that became the plan. improve the game in incremental amounts for players currently sticking with it, and then wipe the whole slate clean and release a FF14 2.0 that was a fundamentally remade experience, actually taking more design inspiration from other successful MMOs and other final fantasy games. they didn’t just decide to wipe the original game on a meta level though, they actually worked the destruction of FF14 1.0 into the plot of both games. and so, famously, the day that the servers for 1.0 were shut down was a day where IN GAME players fought a horde of deadly monsters spawning around the world until inevitably a giant moon crashed into the world and took the servers offline for good. and then when you play 2.0, they frequently reference this calamity in the early MSQ and players who stuck with 1.0 until the end actually got their entire character transferred over with a special tattoo, opening cutscenes, and special dialogue throughout the MSQ that connects them to the game that was deleted.

there’s a 3-part noclip documentary that goes into more detail, it is FASCINATING stuff.

re:vale week

- Me writing a story written and outlined by me.

Dracula and Jonathan’s Tango - from The Polish National Opera production of ‘Dracula’.