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Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker signifies the end of an era. A story, begun nine years ago, has come to a stunning and heartwarming conclusion, as the promise of a new adventure looms on the horizon. Corn Endwalker doesn’t just mark the end of the Hydaelyn/Zodiark saga. For some die-hard gamers, Endwalker also provides a final coda for the game Final Fantasy XIV was before it was restarted in A kingdom is reborn.
the original Final Fantasy XIV Online – colloquially known as “1.0” – had a rough release. Reviewers at the time said the game “lacks character, cohesion, and joy” and lamented every one of its features, from the user interface to the storytelling. The only thing Tatjana Vejnovic remembers from 1.0 was “[h]oh that was not fucking playable.
“Everything loaded super slow, and it was slow as hell,” she said. The edge.
Lag was one of the biggest complaints from 1.0 gamers. While the game was visually impressive for its time, the developers sacrificed performance for aesthetics. At the 2014 Game Developers Conference, Naoki Yoshida, Game Director of FFXIV, talked about some of the things that were wrong with 1.0, specifically citing Square Enix’s overreliance on delivering a pretty game at the expense of performance and content.
Jake Dehlinger remembers being very disappointed with 1.0.
“I spent my college years playing FFXI with my friend (thanks to Raphiell!), and we planned to play FFXIV together,” he said. The edge. “The experience was very disappointing and I didn’t last very long playing it.”
Dylan Fitzgerald remembered his time more fondly by recalling some of the interesting bits of the game’s story.
“Did you know you didn’t affix materia to a piece of equipment used to blow up the whole thing? Or that conjurer at one point had fire, blizzard, and thunder spells in more of the earth, wind, and water they have now? While it was obviously a mess, I still had a lot of fun with 1.0, largely for the community that stuck around after the most people have jumped ship.
Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 released in September 2010 and lasted two years before Square Enix killed the game in a fiery conflagration, paving the way for it to rise from the ashes like a phoenix. Yoshida said in his GDC speech that Square Enix kept the name Final Fantasy XIV in order to regain the trust of fans, and while some elements of 1.0 have been postponed, A kingdom is reborn is essentially a totally different game.
The combat system has been revised, and more classic Final Fantasy jobs have been added. The main story quest has been significantly improved and graphical updates have been more balanced. The game was and still is pretty, but your system won’t get carried away when loading a flowerpot.
“ARR was a hit in my mind,” Dehlinger said. “It made me feel like I had a game where the story really mattered.”
Although 1.0 ended with Square Enix literally blowing up the world, EndwalkerThe story of has taken time to recognize how far 1.0 players have come from those difficult beginnings until today. Noted and respected veteran players EndwalkerThe 1.0 homages, including one that’s a direct, almost shot-for-shot remake of a 1.0 introductory quest.
“I think they pulled off the ending as elegantly as possible for something with such a rocky start that had gone on for so long,” Fitzgerald said. “I absolutely felt a sense of closure the moment it was all said and done, and Endwalker inspired me to finally get my character’s legacy mark tattooed on my own body.
(Legacy Marks was a special in-game cosmetic given to players who subscribed during 1.0 and subscribed again to ARR.)
At Yoshida’s GDC conference, he said that one of the main takeaways from version 1.0 was to “never forget your roots”. FFXIV 1.0 closed in 2012, and there have been several expansions between the ARR reboot and now, but you can still see the roots of 1.0 embedded in Endwalker. “Answers”, the song that sums it up so well Endwalker‘s plot, was written by Nobuo Uematsu for 1.0.
“FFXIVThe team never forgets characters and storylines,” Dehlinger said. “Watching Endwalker bringing back and tying together so many stories in such a beautiful way left me extremely satisfied.
It is rare for a video game to recover from a terminal velocity drop. Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 was so bad that Yoshida said in his GDC presentation that it hindered the development of Japanese MMOs. It might have been easier or even expected for 1.0 to die the death she made without remark. Corn Final Fantasy XIV is a game with a long memory in a space where it feels like sequels and spinoffs, video game or otherwise, don’t like to recognize where they came from. Although ARR and subsequent expansions are games that radically changed the trajectory of Final Fantasy XIVThe legacy of , 1.0 laid the foundation on which everything fans love FFXIV seat now.
