Recently, the Japanese outlet Dengeki Online conducted an interview with the director of Final Fantasy XI, Yoji Fujito, where he talked about the recent celebration of the MMORPG’s 23rd anniversary, and his plans for the future of the game, and shared an interesting anecdote about a discussion they had back in 2022.
According to the director, the original plan after the release of The Voracious Resurgence was to place the game into a so-called “maintenance mode,” where no new content would be added, and instead, only the essentials of maintaining the server would be done, with even a few discussions revolving around potentially shutting down the title for good, as it was initially believed that interest in the game would be dwindling down by now. But after Yoji’s team received a lot of messages from the player base asking for the continued support of the game, they quickly took it as a sign that it is worth continuing support for the game a little while longer, and has made the procedures to continue operations.
Below is a translated excerpt of his response:
“There was something we had discussed before the 20th anniversary, where there was a non-zero chance that 2024 would see the end of Final Fantasy XI’s updates, and we would shift to “maintenance mode”, where only system maintenance would be carried out. When the 20th anniversary came around, we received requests from various places asking for the long-term continuation of operations, and we thought that suspending the service would have been disruptive to the daily lives of active adventurers.
For those who have supported the game up until now, our mission was to continue supporting the game. To do this, we proceeded with [replacing the old servers with new ones], so that we can continue stable operations in the future. In addition, the current development team is quite small, so we have also reassessed what we can do with the current staff.
We ultimately came to the conclusion that while it would be difficult to implement completely new content in every patch, and so we prioritized our workload and timeframe with some members saying things like “let’s implement this next”, while also making various updates to existing content and systems, and preparing for future patches. The main activities over the last year have been to ensure that players can continue to enjoy the game.”
It’s truly heartwarming that it looks like Final Fantasy XI will still be around for years to come, especially as more players take some interest in it, especially with the new Final Fantasy XIV Echoes of Vana’diel collaboration quests that will be coming in future patches in the future.
