According to the director of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, the MMORPG could be getting a further five years’ worth of expansions.
Final Fantasy 14 first released in September 2010, but it was a commercial and critical flop. In response to its failure, then-Square Enix president, Yoichi Wada, announced that the game would be scrapped and a new team led by Naoki Yoshida would essentially rebuild the game from the ground up.
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn then arrived in its new, full form for PC and PS3 in 2013, and then in 2014 for PS4. A Realm Reborn had a brand new engine, revamped gameplay, interface, restructured story, and an improved online server.
A Realm Reborn may have had a slow start in its “2.0” form, but gradually the player base increased, and the game improved in quality. As of July 2020, it reached a whopping 20,000,000 registered players.
Its ever-growing success spawned four major expansions: Heavensward (2015), Stormblood (2017), Shadowbringers (2019), and the final expansion, Endwalker is to arrive later this year. At least, we thought it was the last expansion.
Endwalker was supposed to close the story of A Realm Reborn, but due to the game’s popularity, director Naoki Yoshida has claimed that more expansions could be on the way for a further five years.
Yoshida made the claims while speaking to the Washington Post [via PC Gamer] and assuming that it maintains its player base, Endwalker might not be the end.
“Even now, our CEO is encouraging us to strive for more players and for 30 million adventurers, and he still has future plans for us,” said Yoshida. “Luckily, we don’t see any stopping in our momentum. At one point we thought maybe we might plateau, but fortunately, our player base just continues to expand and grow.“
He added that Square Enix sees “at least another five years” for the online game.
When you consider that Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn is set to release for PlayStation 5 later this year, I wouldn’t bet against it still maintaining a solid player base, which might spawn the extra expansions.
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Featured Image Credit: Square Enix