Final Fantasy XIV has quickly grown to become perhaps the biggest MMORPG title in the world following difficulties found by its biggest competitor, World of Warcraft, in recent years.
A big shift for content creators and players has certainly helped encourage more users to explore the world of Hydaelyn.
The Final Fantasy series as a whole is a well-established name with games ranging from handheld titles, full-fledged console classics, and themed titles emerging through games of chance online as those who choose to play on these options get some of the experience too – but it has had a bit of a rough opening for its latest expansion.
The early access period of its latest expansion, Endwalker, saw players who pre-ordered the game the ability to access a few days ahead of those who didn’t, but it didn’t go as smoothly as hoped – players would quickly run into the issue of huge log-in queues early in the day often taking many hours to get through, only to face the possibility of a random disconnection anywhere along the process and having to start all over again – even now after the game has been released outside of the early access launch, similar issues are being faced with changes being made in hopes to address this issue.
Final Fantasy XIV certainly isn’t the only game to suffer from this, the launch of Amazon’s own title, New World, earlier in the year would face the same with log-in servers being filled to the brim on limited quantity worlds and sparking a bit of an outcry to why this hadn’t been addressed earlier in – in fairness to the developers, it’s extremely difficult to determine the load on log-in and play servers during a testing period and scaling options up to handle the new traffic isn’t easy after a certain point, but does put a bit of a downer on the biggest expansion launch that the game has faced.
It isn’t as if it wasn’t expected, however, prior to the release the developers at Square Enix did warn players that it was a very real possibility, but it’s hard to discourage players from being upset after a summer of record-breaking months as concurrent players continued to exceed expectation and show just how popular the game has become – queue times are dropping, but it may be some time yet before access at convenience is available once again.
If anything, however, it does show the huge demand to have a popular MMORPG title once again akin to the days of World of Warcraft over a decade ago – and with studio and developer Riot Games looking to emerge in this space in the near future, it could be the next big game to really take off, particularly with the passionate fan base it has and recent successes with series like Arcane.
