I concur with PC Gamer’s Mollie Taylor, my fellow Final Fantasy 14 enjoyer on our illustrious staff, that FF14’s Occult Crescent patch has made the game feel like an MMO again. I actually got downright emotional, hopping into my first critical encounter and seeing swarms of strangers crowding around a chance to give a boss a beatdown: ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘I’m playing an MMO again’.
But with that joy came a recognition of almost a full year of malaise, seeing desolate friend lists and linkshells lie empty. A malaise that, at least unofficially, has been backed up by numbers (thanks, Automaton).
LuckyBancho has run an unofficial census for years—given these aren’t official numbers from Square Enix, they should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt, but they aren’t a bad temperature check for how the playerbase is doing.
LuckyBancho compiles this census via the Lodestone, a character repository hosted by Square Enix. To determine whether a character is ‘active’ or not, they measure certain parameters against their prior survey results. These include things like changes in HP or XP, obtaining new minions or mounts, and the like.
Their estimate of active accounts is roughly 950,000—and while this number can’t be taken at exact face value, it is significantly lower than their prior number of 990,000, obtained using the same methodology.
LuckyBancho also has a different batch of data that tracks achievements, placing them into a graph. This information is obtained in quarterly segments, so it’s not quite finished yet (the latest quarter will end in June) but there’s a clear downward trend, and “there has been no movement to reverse” it since the last quarter.
All of this info was obtained towards patch 7.25, which myself and Mollie are enjoying very much—and it’ll be interesting to see if it injects some life back into Square Enix’s money-making baby. And, to be clear, a game with almost 1 million players in it is by no means dead. But I can take a few good guesses as to why things’ve gotten this way.
FF14 has a content release schedule problem—not just in the gaps between patches, but in the prioritisation of content itself. Dawntrail released with no repeatable midcore content—’Midcore’ being defined as content where your brain is engaged, but you don’t need tight communication or high mechanical skills. In World of Warcraft, these would be world quests, reputation grinds, delves, and (debatably) the early keystones of Mythic+.
Instead Creative Studio 3 made, once again, the backwards decision to schedule all of this stuff nearly a year after the expansion’s release, prioritising Savage Raids, Extreme Trials, and Ultimates over, you know, stuff that the majority of its playerbase is going to do. Anything that isn’t that tier of difficulty was either mind-numbingly straightforward (FATEs, treasure dungeons, society quests, and new story dungeons) or on a weekly lockout (Alliance Raids and Normal Raids).
There’s also the elephant in the room that Square Enix basically doesn’t know how to do world content. Dawntrail’s zones are downright gorgeous and to be commended, and I have spent basically no time in them—I grinded out all my FATEs like a month after release, and then never left the main city again unless it’s for treasure maps, gathering nodes, or society quests. You are either doing a specific dungeon or raid or trial, or you’re doing nothing at all.
Then there’s the game’s story—FF14 has historically been kept aloft by huge player investments in its narrative and, while the latest patches have made huge improvements, the expansion as a whole has missed the mark. You can read my full thoughts in those links, but that good will is truly fractured. Only time will tell if Square Enix can turn the good ship FF14 around, and navigate back to the glory days of Shadowbringers.
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