Final Fantasy 11 expected a ‘sharp player decline’ once the hype from the FF14 crossover and welcome back campaigns ended, but that never came

Final Fantasy 11 is a seasoned MMO with grey in its beard, at this point—not entirely unheard of in the industry (World of Warcraft itself is over two decades old), but absolutely in its veteran years. I mean, this is a game that originally came out on the Playstation 2 as well as PCs.

Still, it’s trucking along quite nicely. That’s per a Famitsu interview (translated here by Automaton) with Yoji Fujito, the director and producer of FF11.

There’ve been some events that the developer says were expected to give a player bump—such as the crossover raid series with Final Fantasy 14, Echoes of Vana’diel, as well as a Welcome Back campaign and giveaways. Fujito expected things to even out, but the new playerbase has, to his surprise, kept steady:

“Overall, the player count remained stable at a high level, and we never saw the kind of sharp decline we had anticipated, so honestly, the outcome exceeded our expectations and came as a surprise.”

That doesn’t mean the team isn’t facing problems, though. For one, FF11 is encountering a similar problem to Old School RuneScape, wherein the developer is running out of IDs for in-game areas, requiring large systems architecture changes to accommodate new expansions (the following quote’s been machine translated):

“However, we know that we can free up a few more ID slots if we are creative, so we are investigating how we can make that work. If we can make it work, adding a new area will not be impossible … Depending on the results, I have a feeling that some kind of project may start moving forward.”

The idea of fleshing out FF11 with full-blooded expansions is exciting to me—not because I’ve played the MMO, but because I’m excited about MMO conservation in general. I think these games are important, and I always feel a sad kind of melancholy when I see an old titan diminish and go into the west. Especially since nobody’s really making them anymore.