Trivia / Final Fantasy XIV

• Ascended Fanon:
  • During Fanfest 2014, one fan suggested to Yoshida that he should make the ADS (a giant metallic round ball that is a CPU) a ridable mount. Yoshida laughed and liked the idea, which then became a reality in patch 2.5 as a PVP reward.
  • A common joke among players was that retainers sent out on ventures were stealing the items they brought back, with one of the most common ones being about them showing up with furniture or even entire housing parts. In Heavensward, if you get a female Au Ra retainer with the "rough" personality trait, she starts to mention stealing them before catching herself.
  • The Moogles of the Churning Mists had worn down great a many a player's patience with their inane tasks born mostly out of laziness than anything else during the course of Heavensward. In 3.4, the Warrior of Light is caught retelling Aymeric about their adventures and framing them as "cruel taskmasters". In the same patch which added the Moogle Beast tribe, it starts when you learn that every artisan Ishgard had sent has quit and gone home because of their obnoxious nature, pointless labor, and annoying pranks. The option to refuse to help the Mogmender is one of the most aggressive responses in the game, with the Warrior of Light saying "Piss off, kupo!" if you choose to refuse the Mogmender.
  • At the beginning of the questline in which the player searches for the airship Enterprise, Father Iliud will mention a story regarding it that supposedly grew popular in the wake of the Calamity, much like another story called "The Great Goobbue Wall of Ul'dah" did. This was actually a player-created "event" in the final days of 1.0 where players situated in Ul'dah summoned their Goobbue mounts and formed a massive wall around the entrances to prevent the heavily spawning monsters from getting in. This was also given a callback in the 2018 Rising event where outside of Ul'dah, you can see several Goobbues in a wall formation.
  • After the Weeping City of Mhach raid came out, a lot of people loved the challenging boss fight that was Ozma and many asked for a savage version of the fight. Years later during the tail end of Stormblood, Proto Ozma is the final boss of the Baldesion Arsenal dungeon in Eureka.
  • Fans memetically really loved the emphasized "La-Hee!" at the start of the Rak-Tika Greatwood's daytime field theme, even more so once Koji Fox said it was effectively gibberish. Come 5.2 and Qitari beast tribe on The First, one of the quests is named "La-Hee" and explains that the word means "Wake up" in ancient Ronkan - and also doubles as a greeting.
  • The "square grapes" that were highlighted in Endwalker were endeared by the playerbase, its disappearance lamented on when the grapes got a slightly higher polycount in a patch. 6.55 implemented an outdoor lamp post modeled after said grapes, its flavor text describing it to be inspired by a researcher that tried to grow a blocky cluster for ease of transport, and was remembered fondly despite complaints about how unappetizing they looked.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Square Enix would rather not talk much about the 1.0 version of the game, and with good reason. It was a massive Creator Killer, thanks to how poorly it was received by both fans and critics. As seen at GDC 2014, Naoki Yoshida thinks pretty low of the 1.0 version of the game, aforesaid panel also dedicated in part to why he thought it failed. Yoshida cited three main problems: an unhealthy obsession with graphic quality over gameplay, a surprising lack of MMORPG knowledge amongst development team members, and the mindset that the solution to every problem could be fixed or patched in a future update. When developing A Realm Reborn, Yoshida and his team threw almost everything out, using what happened in 1.0 as the basis for a new story but otherwise starting from scratch. During E3 2019, a fan asked if there was any way Naoki Yoshida would create a "Legacy" server similarly to what Blizzard was doing with World of Warcraft Classic. Yoshida responded with "Nightmare!" in English, showing that Yoshida and Square Enix as a whole has no plans to bring it back.
  • Showing off Cloud's Fenrir bike from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children has led to some regret from Yoshida, who says the bike was only made in game for fun and wasn't intended to be an actual mount for the player. Fans keep pestering him about wanting the bike in game to which he always responds with a no. The demand only increased once the Stormblood update gave increased speeds for all mounts. Said mount has now been confirmed as a Fanfest 2018 bonus.
  • Yoshida also feels some regret over introducing the half-Hyur, half-Elezen character Hilda Ware in Heavensward, because it ended up opening the possibility of mixed race characters. When asked about whether or not mixed races will be seen again at Fanfest 2018, Yoshida grimaced as the question was being asked. While he said that he would consider it in the future, it would be limited to NPCs due to the sheer number of problems that would need to be addressed for player characters if it they tried to implement it.
  • Yoshida has openly stated his disdain for the questing required by players to get into Heavensward. This is because, while at the time it was a good way to get players invested (because players have to do them to get into the expansions), it means players are stuck doing several patches' worth of quests that were more evenly spread out at release, back to back — the 2.1 through 2.5 cycles added a hundred main-story quests in total, on top of the nearly two hundred from the beginning of the game to The Ultimate Weapon. It wasn't until roughly patch 5.3 in Shadowbringers that this could be done, as the team were able to trim around twenty percent of the 2.0 quests.
• Creator Killer: Version 1.0, with its bugs and generally unpolished nature, led to original developer Hiromichi Tanaka's removal as producer and his eventual departure from Square Enix — and he was one of the original founders of Square back in the '80s. Health problems cropping up around the same time also contributed to his departure.
• Crossdressing Voices: The male Papalymo is voiced by a female actor named Eri Kitamura in the Japanese version. Everywhere else, Papalymo is voiced by male actors.
• Content Leak:
  • Data miners analyze each patch that goes live. The reveal of new combat jobs, rewards for future events, and even end game boss characters were spoiled by people posting information found by the data miners. There was also an accidental leak by in the European version of the game within the French game client where a bug in the game's dialogue script caused an NPC to list every playable race, which also included the Hrothgar race before they were officially revealed at the 2019 Tokyo Fanfest.
  • In April of 2017, someone known only by their handle as "BluFever" started posting on the GameFAQs board for FFXIV giving out leaks for the game, starting with nailing down Tsukuyomi as the boss fight of 4.3 and the context behind the character's existence as an initial proof. Once that was proven true, they then went on to accurately describe all of the bosses of the final Omega raid (albeit with incorrect names) and a vague description of early concepts for Shadowbringers, as well as saying that Blue Mage was being introduced as a DPS job in 4.5 (technically true, though as a limited job), and that Shadowbringers would bring a Soldier-type job as a tank (which turned out to be Gunbreaker), and Dancer as a healer (the only wrong one, though this itself, and the presence of Dancer's healing ability, in turn has led to a lot of speculation concerning the development history of the Dancer job). Their final post had them tell people to look at their profile picture of a rabbit and a lion, teasing people with Viera and Hrothgar. Shortly after giving that final hint, BluFever quietly disappeared after feeling like a major FFXIV community name called Mister Happy had put BluFever on blast for leaking content and "starting a witch hunt". Plus, whoever BluFever was, they were close to being caught and fired (or perhaps even crimially charged) since they were almost certainly a Square Enix employee or someone with direct communication with one after being correct so many times in a row.
  • Another happened in the leadup to Dragonsong's Reprise (Ultimate), where someone from the Square Enix offices posted a picture of a developer's computer with a model showing the final opponent of the raid. Yoshida was allegedly furious about this leak, because it could only have come from an employee leaking this information. Whoever it was, they never updated the community at large if they were caught and/or fired for it.
  • The other Ultimate from Endwalker, The Omega Protocol, was also not immune to content leaks. During the World First progression, a video came out showing a single player clearing one of the later phases with God Mode on, which could only have been done on an internal development server that was meant for playtesting. A post was made promising a harsh punishment to whoever was the perpetrator. In the same post, Yoshida also mentioned that somebody managed to send a false completion flag to the Unending Journey (a book that allows you to see various cutscenes) in order to show the final cutscene from the raid. That player was discovered, and a penalty was issued against their account.
  • A minor one, but datamining in patch 6.1 revealed that Zenos' voidsent avatar was labelled as "Zero" in the game files, though if that was its name or a placeholder nobody could say for sure. Come 6.2, and the voidsent was revealed to actually be named Zero.
  • Averted at the end of the MSQ of Endwalker, thanks to some Developer's Foresight. The Stinger of 6.5's MSQ shows a character just from the waist down as Erenville speaks to them. When datamined, the character model for this NPC was just their bottom half, to prevent the character's identity from being leaked early. The character would only be introduced in patch 6.55 as Wuk Lamat of Tural, though she garnered the nickname "Legs" from the community because that was all anybody knew about her until the proper reveal. They also doubled up on this by making Wuk Lamat's body and customization options be pasted over a pre-existing armor set, so it would be impossible for dataminers and modders to mod themselves into her or get a hold of Hrothgar customizations early.
• Defictionalization: On April Fool's Day 2019, there was a blog entry about a shoujo manga serialization that takes place in a modern-day Ishgard-based academy, down to having mockups of the page spreads. The uniform designs were so well-received, they eventually became real items purchasable from the Online Store for players to live their high school manga fantasies. In a 2021 Live Letter, a High School AU spinoff was greenlit.
• Demand Overload:
  • After the game was rebuilt into A Realm Reborn, there was massive amounts of hype for the game. Sure enough, tons of players rushed to log into the game once it went live. For weeks, many players could not log in due to the mass amount of traffic the relaunch generated. It got so bad that Square Enix temporarily removed the digital copies of the game from its online store and they also enforced an automatic AFK-logout system that forced players offline if they idled for too long. After things settled down and the servers were optimized, Square apologized and gave everyone one free week of play time. A similar phenomena happened again with a patch that introduced the Gold Saucer, where it became impossible to get into the area due to everyone trying to get in all at once and filling out the capacity. Even the chocobo races were open to having a race becoming impossible due to everyone trying to sign up for a race. Thankfully, the high traffic died down in a few days, and the Gold Saucer has remained relatively easy to access ever since. It still spikes every June around the "Make it Rain Campaign" that increases the amount of MGP won at Gold Saucer events, but it's never been anywhere near as bad as the Saucer's grand opening.
  • Square learned their lesson and prepared the servers for the launch of Heavensward by introducing several copies of the same instanced overworld maps so that players would still have space to get in whenever they move to another area. Square also took measures to make logging in with a minimal amount of trouble as possible. Both measures made the launch of the expansion pack a very smooth one, averting the trope.
  • Square took extraordinary steps to make sure that Stormblood would have as few queue and overpopulation issues as possible by locking out the most populous servers (even disabling character transfers, which for the longest time was a reliable way to subvert locked realms) a full month before the expansion launched with plans to open up more (particularly EU, which is lacking in them). Like with Heavensward, several areas from the new zones had multiple instances so that no one is blocked from entering if one instance is full. Unfortunately, even all that preparation wasn't enough. A huge amount of players trying to start the first story quest battle for Stormblood overloaded the instanced servers, causing people that started the fight to suddenly find themselves kicked back to the overworld. Players from many servers tried to ease the pain by having everyone form a line to the NPC that starts the battle so that the instanced servers wouldn't be taxed, though it didn't do much good. Square posted a response a week later (among the usual announcements of fixes planned or being in effect) that most of the problems came from an unknown party DDoSing the servers around the same time.
  • Beginning in mid-2020, the game began to see an increase in players joining the game. This all exploded in July 2021, when many prominent content creators and streamers tried out the game fueled by the heavy anticipation of Endwalker. Elsewhere, the release of the controversial Patch 9.1 in World of Warcraft that saw a large portion of its playerbase leaving, XIV saw a massive influx of new players that overwhelmed both the North American and European servers for the game, resulting in many players having trouble logging in due to heavy queues brought by the servers being full — reportedly, the servers hit their maximum login capacity for at least six hours straight during one weekend in July 2021. The congestion was bad enough that Square was forced to activate the automatic AFK-logout system normally saved for traffic during expansion releases and put out a statement apologizing for not anticipating the overload, documenting the details of the server traffic, and encouraging players to log out whenever not actively playing the game.
  • While the developers anticipated a surge of players rushing to play Endwalker and took steps to make things less chaotic, it wasn't enough. Login queues reached beyond five thousand players waiting in line before they could get in. On top of that, it was very frequent to see the dreaded 2002 error on the login screen, which meant the login server is completely overwhelmed (over 17,000 players trying to login at the same time!) and the game forces a shutdown on itself. As a way of apologizing, Square gave everyone a week of free game time added to their accounts and also suspended housing auto-demolition so that people who couldn't get in the game wouldn't have to worry about losing their homes. Square Enix later compensated with two more weeks of free game time after they had to suspend all sales of the game in order to keep the server load under control. This led to numerous jokes, memes, and articles on video game news sites about how XIV had a Demand Overload so intense that its developers had to stop people from buying it.
• Development Gag:
  • When the first Stormblood trailer was released, players began speculating who the woman in the red dress was^Spoilerrevealed later on to be Lyse, the woman players had long known as Yda, and the real Yda's sister and what job she represented. Immediately fan theories suggested she was a Dancer, given her very dance like martial arts kata, elegant dress, and use of a weight at the end of her left arm's sleeve/bracer. It would turn out that the character in question was not a dancer, or even being added as a class, but instead a certain familiar monk. For 2017's "The Rising" seasonal event to celebrate the 4th anniversary since A Realm Reborn's launch, the minion of said character lampshades this.
    Wind-up Lyse: Tataru's choice of raiment for this lifelike recreation of Ala Mhigo's newest heroine was, by no means, made with the sole intention of confusing the public into believing Lyse was a dancer by profession. Honest.
  • The main town for Shadowbringers is purposefully very similar to the town shown off in Square Enix's 2005 E3 tech demo, which served as the initial technological concept for the "Rapture" project which would become XIV.
• Development Hell:
  • Eureka was was supposed to be released shortly after the launch of the Stormblood expansion. It got delayed twice and wasn't released until 9 months later due to the developers not being satisfied with how it was coming along in the start and had to rework it. Some also speculate that Eureka was going to be similar to the Diadem and got scrapped after players didn't like how Diadem (both the original and revamped versions) turned out.
  • The developers wanted to try to make a new Ultimate for every odd numbered .X patch, but difficulties resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic meant that the team was scrambled enough trying to keep regular content running through the rest of Shadowbringers and into the start of Endwalker, so after The Epic of Alexander in 5.1, Ultimate raids had to be put on hold until 6.1 brought in Dragonsong's Reprise, a nearly three year gap between Ultimate raids.
• Dueling Games:
  • Final Fantasy XIV has a long and complicated history with MMO juggernaut World of Warcraft.
    • Back in 2010, the original 1.0 version of the game was, it is widely theorized, rushed out to beat WoW's Cataclysm expansion to market. This, combined with this game's extremely critical reviews, resulted in this approach not turning out well for Square Enix and resulted in producer Hiromichi Tanaka being removed as the game's producer.
    • The relaunch was coincidentally timed to go along with the release of the final patch for Mists of Pandaria, but thanks to the game as a whole being in a better state, it worked out far better.
    • Rather strangely, the lead-up to Heavensward, the first expansion for ARR, happened to coincide with a content dry-spell for WoW as Blizzard shifted focus towards developing Overwatch - after the release of Warlords of Draenor in November 2014, all that had been added for seven months were minor bugfixes and things like Twitter integration, tokens for extending play-time, minor updates to the blood elf models, and a Hyperspace Arsenal for heirlooms - only for ARR patch 3.0 (adding Heavensward's new zones, jobs, quests and the like) and WoW patch 6.2 (adding a new zone, a new raid, a new companion and a major extension to Garrison Campaigns) to both drop on the same day.
    • Once more with Stormblood, whose release date turned out to be a single day after WoW's 7.0.3 patch added the long-awaited Tomb of Sargeras raid, and during a time when a lot of the latter's playerbase was disgruntled over unnecessary filler and unavoidable time gating.
    • By the time Shadowbringers was ready to come to market, the "duel" had turned into one of the most ferocious game rivalries of The New '10s, and probably in the wider history of the medium; player response to WoW's Battle for Azeroth expansion had been abnormally negative (stemming mostly from a series of design decisions that sat poorly with long-time fans), and a significant number of players were trying out XIV as an alternative, encouraged by the seemingly positive changes coming in Shadowbringers. In response, Blizzard scheduled the 8.2 patch for WoW, "Rise of Azshara" (adding things such as a system of essences for the Heart of Azeroth, new zones, a new raid and megadungeon, etc.), for June 25th - three days prior to the Early Access debut of Shadowbringers on June 28th and a week ahead of the full launch on July 2nd.
    • The release of Patch 9.1 in WoW's Shadowlands expansion was received extremely negatively by players. They saw more poorly-received design decisions and significantly controversial story beats in a game whose story was already divisive to begin with. The release of the patch proved to be The Last Straw, causing many to flock over to XIV. Further fueling the player migrations were prominent WoW streamers and content creators who decided to try the game. All of this resulted in a massive influx of new players to XIV, creating another Demand Overload.
    • The grand irony is that, by all indications, the two development teams respect each other greatly and have both benefited from analyzing what the other does or has done — ARR naturally drew a lot of quality-of-life and gameflow elements from Warcraft's general design (taking particular inspiration from a lot of Wrath of the Lich King-era design choices) and there are multiple instances of Warcraft developers analyzing what XIV does with a great amount of praise, as this example shows, and the social media teams for the two tend to act pretty friendly. Yoshida is even on record as saying he'd love to do a collaboration with WoW.
  • Aside from World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV contends heavily with Phantasy Star Online 2, Dragon Quest X (ironically, Yoshida's previous project and part of the reason it was believed that XIV could be saved with his direction) and especially its own predecessor, Final Fantasy XI. It's even more ironic considering Phantasy Star Online 2 and Dragon Quest X had collaborations with Final Fantasy XIV, the former receiving Odin as a boss fight and several of the game's artifact gear as costumes, and the latter giving Eorzea a limited-time questline themed around the rival game's brickmen. The irony extended even further when Dawntrail pre-release Live Letters revealed the expansion's Alliance Raid is going to be themed after Final Fantasy XI, titled "Echoes of Vana'diel".
  • Averted with Elden Ring. An expansion for that game called Shadow of the Erdtree was scheduled to be released on June 21, 2024. Yoshida was originally planning to release Dawntrail on the same day. But, not wanting to compete with Elden Ring, he pushed the release date for Dawntrail back one week to June 28. During PAX East where the Dawntrail release date was announced, Yoshida insisted that this had nothing to do with he himself wanting to play the DLC for a week.
• Dummied Out:
  • A Ramuh-Egi was discovered in the files for A Realm Reborn, having been removed just before release, before later making an appearance as a mechanic in Ramuh's Primal fight. There were plans to properly implement it, as well as a Leviathan-Egi, but they were ultimately scrapped and an explanation for their absence was incorporated into the lore in the Heavensward questline.
  • Titan was originally going to be the first primal you did battle with in 1.0, but after the Japan earthquake he was shelved and replaced with Good King Moggle Mog.
  • Leviathan was intended to make an appearance in Legacy (and his model could even be found in the data files), but in the wake of the earthquake-tsunami disaster he was shelved completely and not even "replaced" like Titan was. He does, however, appear in Realm Reborn as of Patch 2.2.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Common consensus is that somewhere along the line, there's been some meddling from the higher-ups at Square Enix. The arguments are over just where, ranging from the theory that FFXIV 1.0 was rushed out to beat a certain popular MMO's next expansion, to claims the developer replacements were an unnecessary move to give executives a scapegoat (or a publicity stunt). The noticeable improvements made to the game after the staff replacement suggest more of the former, however.
  • The game was meant to have a version for the Xbox 360 as well, but the plan was cut short due to Microsoft refusing to allow cross play with the PlayStation 3 or the ability to play without an Xbox Live Gold account. This trend persisted into the succeeding console generations, and remained the reason the game was not available on the Xbox One, despite other recent Final Fantasy products being available for them. It was only during the Las Vegas Fan Fest in July 2023 when it was announced that the game would be coming to the Xbox Series X|S in 2024, just ahead of the Dawntrail expansion.
  • More on the side of "executive inactivity", lore director Banri Oda wants the inclusion of Roegadyn children, but his superiors don't consider it a priority.
• God Never Said That: When Yoshida announced that 6.0 would be the end of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark story, many fans believed that it meant the game was going to end and eventually be shut down. Likewise, when it was announced that Yoshida was going to be the producer for Final Fantasy XVI, people speculated that he was going to step down from his role as producer for Final Fantasy XIV. During the 2021 announcement showcase, Yoshida went on the record saying that 6.0 is not the end of the game and that there would be new adventures to follow in 6.1 and later. He also stated that he would continue to work on the game for many years to come and would make an announcement about his departure if he does decide to leave.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Want to rewatch a cutscene from a seasonal event? You'd better hope someone recorded a video of it somewhere, because they are not archived into the Unending Journey.
• Lying Creator:
  • Hiromichi Tanaka, reigning champion from his time as producer of Final Fantasy XI, returned to (among other things) cause a large part of the controversy surrounding the Anti Poop-Socking system by lying about it being in the game after it was already discovered and hours before it was announced. There was also the case of Guildleves being the main system of gaining Experience Points back in 1.0, but as that comment was made much earlier in development it may have just been an honest change in development priorities. The constant public relations disasters he caused as a result of this sort of behavior (which was much easier to document in 2010 than in 2002, what with a more proactive Internet fanbase and games media), combined with health problems, significantly contributed to Tanaka's removal from XIV and eventual departure from the company.
  • To a lesser extent, when information for Heavensward was buzzing about, Michael "Fernehalwes" Koji-Fox said that the expansion wouldn't have a new DPS class, but a healer one. Later in that same fan fest, he heavily alluded to a gun using class. Come the December fan fest, he showed that there was indeed a new DPS class: Machinists, and the healers he was talking about are Astrologians, an entirely new, completely unforeshadowed class. In a later Live Letter Koji admitted that when he made that statement, there really were plans for a gun-toting healer class based on the Chemist from Final Fantasy Tactics. However, there were enough problems regarding mechanics during the preliminary phase of development that they scrapped the idea and instead separated the gun use and the healer.
  • Stormblood gives us another sly, intentional version. During the first reveal of the Collector's Edition for Stormblood, it was said to include a cloth map "of Eorzea". That was true, so far as it went... but they lied by omission and didn't mention at the time that the map would also include the other two great continents, including Othard, where the other half of the expansion takes place.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: In the liner notes for the 5th anniversary album, Soken stated that he was surprised with how much the playerbase loved Equilibrium, Sophia's theme. He said he put the song together in only a few days because of how tight the schedule was so he considered it a bit of a throw away.
• Meme Acknowledgment:
  • The trailer for Stormblood showed a scene of Yotsuyu stomping her heel on Gosetsu's head, which created quite a bit of memes from the player base. During the 2018 PAX East event, the developers brought over stand up figures to give away to fans. The devs did not forget to include the stomping by Yotsuyu.◊
  • For April Fools Day 2019, Square Enix released a video about a Smart Home Assistant like Alexa. At one point, the mother of the featured family is cooking food and asks Omega to play some romantic music. It naturally starts playing its own theme, whose opening lyrics are commonly and jokingly misheard as something along the lines of "A chicken tender, ready to fry". And what is the mother cooking during this? Chicken tenders, naturally.
  • On October 4 2020, which was International Taco Day, the game's official Twitter acknowledged the Big fat tacos meme.
  • In ocean fishing, getting the Momora Mora is something people dread, due to being a low-value big fish. In patch 5.4, the developers added the minion "Much Coveted Mora", with a description that lampshades how much people hated getting the Momora Mora.
  • The developer band The Primals released a music video for the song A Long Fall that contained choreography that was partially various emote dances from the game (including the infamous Manderville dance), but it also contained choreography that was similar to the famous Double Dream Hands music video due to a particular video that overlaid the dancer over footage of The Twinning's dungeon and music.
  • For the majority of characters used in the custom deliveries, players could change their outfits upon reaching maximum rank. Naturally, many players would dress down the NPCs into something very skimpy like a bikini. Upon getting maximum rank with Ameliance in Endwalker, she tells you to dress her in a way that can make her husband blush, which is a nod to everyone that made custom delivery NPCs sexier with their glamour choices.
  • The low polygon grapes that were a meme in Endwalker were made into merch at the 2023 Fanfest in the form of a stress squeezer. During the keynote presentation, Yoshida announced that the game would be getting its first major graphics update. However, Yoshida joked that as much as they may want to, they simply can't add any more detail to the grapes.
  • Hrothgar players are known to dress down in skimpier outfits to show off their physique. Memes were abound over the "slut wear" of the Hrothgar. Volume 3 of the Encyclopaedia Eorzea would acknowledge this by making Hrothgar showing off their bodies as a form of power as canon.
  • During the trial against Shiva, it's very common for players to use various emotes to pose in place when they frozen solid. This gets acknowledged by the dev team with a video showing people how to do the poses and emotes from the game in real life and it shows a Dragoon doing a pose right before he gets frozen by Shiva.
• Milestone Celebration: The Rising events serve as this. The event always starts on August 27, the date that A Realm Reborn was launched in 2013. Each also features a message from Naoki Yoshida thanking the player for playing the game and for continuing to support them, as well as saying that The Player Is the Most Important Resource. The tenth anniversary of the game's launch, done for the Rising event in 2023, also featured letters from various people in-universe that thank adventurers for their hard work. These letters were Leaning on the Fourth Wall, as even a cursory glance at them made it clear that they were from the development team members who were also thanking the players for appreciating all their hard work.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: The dragons who only use Dragonspeak have the same voice actor no matter which language you're playing with — Steven Hartley is always Hraesvelgr, Simon Greenall is always Nidhogg, and so on. The reason for this is that Dragonspeak is a Conlang, so there's no need to record lines for it more than once.
• Newbie Boom:
  • The release of Shadowbringers began a period of steady growth and the 2020 pandemic caused a big jump in server populations, as the overwhelmingly positive reviews to the expansion and very positive community reception lead to a lot of buzz that appealed to people stuck inside and looking for a way to keep occupied and social. The 80th Live Letter provided statistical proof of this, revealing 34% of the surveyed playerbase started playing around this time, compared to the 24% of players that started in A Realm Reborn.
  • A massive one happened during the summer of 2021 thanks to fan hype for the next expansion Endwalker lead to a lot of community buzz. Also, by sheer coincidence, main competitor World of Warcraft was in a nine-month-long content drought; when new content finally did drop, poor gameplay design and universally disliked story choices angered a large portion of the playerbase. Several prominent WoW streamers tried the game out in response to said bad patch, liked what they saw, and stuck around. Asmongold, one of the largest (if not the largest) WoW streamers, is largely regarded as the big tipping point for causing the flood of new players to XIV, after he tried it and came away with a very good impression. The game got so popular that servers were overwhelmed and the official Square Enix store briefly suspended all sales and registrations for the game just to try and keep the server loads under control. They even had to close one of the data centers to new character creation for a time to allow things to balance out.
• Not Screened for Critics: Reviewers were asked not to review 1.0 for about a month after release so that Square Enix could fix some issues most believe they should have fixed in beta. The reviewers promptly ignored them and blasted the game for being so terrible.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Occasionally, there will be item design contests for gear, hairstyles, or housing furniture for players to partake in for unique prizes. The winners' content get added in by small chunks at a time. Some examples include the Bonewicca series in The Swallow's Compass, the crafted Neo-Ishgardian series, and the Gyr Abanian Plait hairstyle.
• The Other Darrin:
  • While casts in other languages remained consistent, the English version is an exception. For A Realm Reborn, the English cast was based in Los Angeles. However, in Heavensward onwards, every voiced character had their voice actor change from an LA-based one to a London-based one, which still persists to this day. The only ones who didn't get changed out were Aymeric and Haurchefant, who already had London-based voice actors. (Somewhat ironically, Urianger's original voice actor, Gideon Emery, is British, but didn't make the cut because of where he's based, presumably for logistical reasons.)
  • Yugiri's second English voice actress, Sian Blake, was murdered in her home a month after patch 3.1 hit. While she was eventually replaced again (making Yugiri the first character in XIV to suffer the trope twice, and twice in the space of one expansion), the character was conspicuously absent for much of 3.x, likely out of respect to Blake and her family.
  • Matoya is voiced by Sheila Steafel in Heavensward. But when Steafel passed away of cancer before Matoya's next appearance in Shadowbringers, the role was given to Sheila Reid, who provided a similar, but more gravelly take on the character.
  • An odd case regarding the voice of Hydaelyn herself: like the other voiced characters from ARR, her voice was replaced for Heavensward, from Mary Elizabeth McGlynn to Joanna Roth - but then, late into the 5.2 story, Hydaelyn's voice is heard by several people on the First after an illusion of a meteor shower, which reuses a clip of McGlynn's voice.
    • Even the Japanese version isn't exempt, replacing Masako Ikeda with Kikuko Inoue for Endwalker.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • While Naoki Yoshida being a fan of Final Fantasy isn't a surprise, the entire reason he joined Square Enix was because he wanted the chance to work alongside Yasumi Matsuno as one of his favorite games is Tactics Ogre. Unfortunately, Matsuno left shortly after Yoshida joined due to creative differences regarding Final Fantasy XII. However, when Yoshida became the lead director for Final Fantasy XIV and turned the game into a success, he then brought Matsuno on to create the Ivalice raid scenarios, finally fulfilling his dream.
  • In a similar way, during a Live Letter with Yoko Taro, Naoki Yoshida revealed that he specifically asked the Nier team for a collaboration since he loved the game and that while Taro was surprised at the interest, Yoshida was elated that he got to work with him.
  • In an interview in the press tour for Endwalker, Robert Vernon (Estinien's English voice actor) said that he'd played every Final Fantasy game as they released in the UK.
  • In Patch 6.3, the Mount Ordeals trial theme song, "Forged in Crimson" (an arrangement of FFIV's Four Fiends theme) was arranged by Kenichi Maeyamada. Long-time Final Fantasy fans might better recognize Maeyamada as Hyadain, who released a fan arrangement of the same theme back in 2009.
  • James Day, the voice of Thaliak, is a Warrior of Light himself since 2.0 and a longtime Final Fantasy fan, finding his role a dream come true.
• Reality Subtext:
  • A Realm Reborn. The title officially refers to the lands recovering from an event at the end of the old version's storyline, but is also a nod to the fact that Square-Enix had to take down the game and rebuild it from the ground up.
  • A "Reference Page" NPC in the Sharlayan library has a line about the desk experiencing an unusually high number of requests, asking the player to wait patiently for the issue to be resolved. Given that huge Demand Overload of Endwalker's release was extremely predictable (just for starters, one of the biggest causes of the problem was that planned server upgrades to account for the player influx had to be delayed due to a global semiconductor shortage), one might wonder if the parallel is deliberate.
  • During the delayed 2021 Halloween themed All Saints Wake event^note Originally set to November, which was already late, got pushed back to January instead due to Endwalker's delay, the Investigator explains to you that the Continental Circus has been conspicuously missing. This is in reference to the fact that the All Saints Wake event of 2020 was straight up cancelled because of Covid-19.
• Refitted for Sequel: In 1.0, ferries and airships traveled in real time, forcing the player to wait minutes before they could be transported and had to wait inside the vehicle until the ride is over. You could pass the time by going fishing; this was scrapped for 2.0 because it was deemed unnecessary and cumbersome, with airship and ferry travel being just a cutscene that could be skipped, meaning the only wait time was that necessitated by loading. 5.2 introduces a fishing vessel that is set to a schedule, which was inspired by this system.
  • Under What Could Have Been, Shadowbringers originally had a plot point that the player would be intangible in the First. This was scrapped as it complicated the plot too much. It was brought back in Endwalker, and even there the issue was quickly resolved.
  • Back in ARR, it was planned to have content taking place after the Crystal Tower raid that takes place underneath Syrcus called Eureka based of the Final Fantasy III dungeon that inspired it. The idea never launched and was instead transferred over to the Stormblood relic quests Eureka. The former idea has been revisted again as Eureka Orthos which is a Deep Dungeon located under Syrcus.
• Release Date Change:
  • Endwalker was originally scheduled to be released on November 23, 2021. However, on November 5, Yoshi-P announced a two week delay in the 67th Letter from the Producer, shifting the release proper to December 7 instead. Yoshi-P explained in the Live Letter that he wanted everything to be as good as possible, but spent too much time fine-tuning the expansion's content, which delayed QA testing enough that a delay was needed to find and fix bugs. Out of regret for needing to delay Endwalker, when the next expansion was announced for Dawntrail, Yoshi-P deliberately held back announcing the release date until he was absolutely sure that whatever date was chosen would not be delayed.
  • Averted with Dawntrail. It originally was going to released on June 21, 2024, but Yoshida decided to delay the release by one week to June 28 instead since DLC for Elden Ring would also be releasing on the 21st. Yoshida knew fans would want to play it, and didn't want to create a Dueling Games situation with Elden Ring. However, since the release date of June 28 for Dawntrail was announced in March 2024, there was no actual delay. Yoshida also insisted that this one-week change had nothing to do with Yoshida himself wanting to play the DLC as well.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Eureka, content that the relics for Stormblood would be in, was delayed several times. Originally, it was going to be in patch 4.15, but design issues kept cropping up, forcing the devs to delay it towards patch 4.2. It was delayed again for the same reason and was finally released with patch 4.25.
  • The game, much like everything else at the time, was greatly impacted by the notorious outbreak of the deadly and highly-contagious coronavirus that began in 2020, and as such, some content were pushed back as a result:
    • Patch 5.3, the final part of the main Shadowbringers storyline and the long-awaited 2.x revamp, was initially set to be released on June 16, 2020. However, after the pandemic became a problem, it was pushed back two months to August 11. Yoshida stated the reason was because they had to adopt a system to work from home, meaning they needed more time to get staff in a good position to continue working. This also meant that patch 5.4 and 5.5 had to be delayed as a side effect, though unlike 5.3, it was only a small delay because they were able to adjust to working from home.
    • Meanwhile, the second Ultimate Trial for Shadowbringers, Dragonsong's Reprise (Ultimate), ended up getting pushed back to 6.1, when it was originally going to be released for 5.55, and Endwalker's original release date of November 2021 was noted to be later than expected because of problems relating to the pandemic (although it's still within the Fall 2021 release window promised in February).
  • Two weeks before the set early access launch date for Endwalker, at the start of the 67th Live Letter, Producer Naoki Yoshida regretfully announced a two week delay, shifting everything into December. He explained that this delay was a selfish one - since he wanted everything to be as good as possible, he spent too much time fine tuning the expansion's content and he ate into time that QA needed for making sure the expansion was as bug-free as it could be. He could have kept the original date, but there would've been a much higher chance of issues cropping up during early access and launch. He noted that such a decision was not made lightly, and he hated making it, as it was the first time in his career he delayed a release for such a reason.
• Shrug of God: The use of parsers on the PC version is a bit of a sore subject. Thanks to the Broken Base, no one can decide if parsers are either a helpful tool to help a DPS player get better at their rotations, or if the tool is abused to exclude people for not performing optimally. The developers are a bit vague on the use of parsers, abiding by the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In other words, Square Enix will ban you for illegally using third-party add-ons like parsers if it's brought to their attention. But as long as you are not using parsers to harass people, it's fair game.
• Throw It In!:
  • During the May 2017 Live Letter demoing some of the new features of 4.0 Stormblood, Yoshida described the tale of how Paladin's Passage of Arms ability design came to be. The head of the Battle Design team walked by one of the team members desks, and saw they were playing as a Paladin and had added magical wings of light to the character for no apparent reason other than to look cool. When the rest of the team caught wind of it, it turned out that they liked the idea of the wings enough to turn it into an ability.
  • During the development of Shadowbringers, the lead character concept artist wanted to see how much he could get away with for Eden Titan's design. He joked that the monster should have giant jackhammers and drills on its shoulders, to which the design team actually went along with it.
  • During the production of the Shadowbringers trailer, the person in charge of making sounds for the gremlin couldn't figure out what it would sound like. Out of frustration, he went to his closet and did his best impersonation of one while also doing it quietly so he wouldn't wake up his family. When the recording was brought to the rest of the team, they loved it and used it with some modifications to make it sound like how it does in the trailer.
  • When 1.0 was initially launched, chocobos were referred to in the Japanese release with kanji that translated into "horse bird", rather than their katakana names, as a holdover from the game's Chinese localization. While this was subsequently corrected, the term stuck around as the name given to chocobos by people from the Far East, where chocobos are not native.
• Trans Character, Cis Actor: Inverted in the English dub. The English voice actress for Wuk Lamat is a transgender woman named Sena Bryer, but the character is cisgender.
• Trolling Creator:
  • During the Live Letter in April 2017, when asked about the benchmark for Stormblood, Yoshida showed pictures of an actual bench before showing off the long requested in-game benchmark.
  • Yoko Taro, the main writer of the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse raids in Shadowbringers, natch. The player is initially expected to believe 2P to be the heroine of the raid, with 9S as the main boss of the first raid dungeon, the Copied Factory. In the 5.3 questline, however, 2P is revealed to be a Machine Lifeform copy of 2B, who pulls off a Big Damn Heroes moment. The quest to unlock the Puppets' Bunker even lampshades this with the name "Everything You Know Is Wrong".
• What Could Have Been: The dev team is extremely open about the development processes, this means that the community very frequently (Via Word of God) gets told of plans that had changed and things that were cut or altered in development.
  • General stuff, as well as 1.x and A Realm Reborn:
    • In general, the storyline pre-Yoshida. While we never really got to see much of it due to how badly the game was rushed out the door and how SE chose to react to that, what ARR and Heavensward became wasn't quite the same thing as the original plan for 1.0. The big one is Bahamut - it does appear that he was always meant to be in Dalamud, but that reveal was originally planned for much later in the game's lifecycle (very likely in whatever would've been the rough equivalent of Endwalker in the Yoshida era). Dalamud getting dropped and Bahamut getting exposed ended up coloring a fair bit of the narrative of both ARR and Heavensward.
    • The Rogue and Ninja classes were supposed to have been in ARR from the start, but due to the tight deadline for A Realm Reborn, that class/job combo was put on the back-burner, and only implemented a year later with patch 2.4.
    • The Crystal Tower was originally supposed to have been very difficult for players to tackle, possibly being as hard as the Binding Coil of Bahamut. During development of the tower, the dev team decided to scale the difficulty down after realizing that 24 random players grouped together would likely not be able to fully coordinate with each other in such extreme difficulty. The concept of Savage-difficulty alliance raids was revisited in the form of the Baldesion Arsenal, Castrum Lacus Litore, the Delubrum Reginae, and Dalriada.
    • G'raha Tia, a character introduced in the Crystal Tower raid series of A Realm Reborn, was originally meant to have a bright green color palette, as shown at the 2024 Tokyo FanFest. The rather jarring colors caused Yoshida to instantly reject this design and order it replaced, leading to G'raha Tia being made predominantly red instead of green.
    • Supposedly, the Echo was supposed to be a sweeping name for a multitude of powers, of which certain main characters had different manifestations of (resistance to tempering was baseline; the PC was able to see in the past, Minfillia could see the future, some would grow stronger the more they fought, etc.) but the failure of 1.0 and rush to the End of an Era content prevented them from fully fleshing it out. Upon ARR's launch, the pretense of each Echo-powered individual having their own unique ability was dropped, with the PC seeming to have every planned manifestation of the Echo at once save for seeing the future, which remained a unique ability to Minfilia. However, they started to reintroduce the idea with the revelation that the Ascians' body swapping may be the Echo, and Iceheart's ability to both manifest and control Shiva was definitely the Echo. Eventually, they officially reintroduced this in Patch 3.1's story. Krile mentions that the Echo manifests in everyone differently, while explaining her own powers granted by the Echo.
    • Originally, Titan was supposed to be the first primal you fight in the story and Leviathan would have been in the release story; the rushed release means they didn't make it in regardless, but scenes from this could be seen in the early trailers and the dev team was evidently scrambling to get them into the game as part of the endgame. The 2011 Earthquake-Tsunami incident made them decide that having genocidal primals wanting to wipe out humanity with, well, earthquakes and tsunamis was in poor taste, so both of them sat out Legacy entirely, Titan's prominence was lessened on ARR's release (with Ifrit serving as the first Primal you fight instead), and Leviathan didn't even show up until 2.2, a full eight months after ARR came out.
    • In the early days of 2.0, the devs toyed with the idea of allowing free companies to capture a wandering primal and use it to summon it to battle whenever they wanted. The idea was shelved due to several technical factors that would make summoning primals an issue, plus it would also cause major conflicts with the story since the player character is tasked with defeating primals before they suck up the world's aether. This concept may have been given a subtle nod at in the main story, with Unukhalai telling of how the Warriors of Light of his world using Auricite to tame Primals eventually lead to its destruction and transformation into the Void. The idea was officially revisited in the deep dungeon Heaven on High where players can obtain magicite to summon a primal that kills all enemies and/or deals major damage to bosses. The game handwaves the summoning by saying that the player is using the magicite's aether to summon a primal based on their memories of said primal. It's also used again with a twist in the Eden series of raids, where the Scions reintroduce aether to the Empty, the vast majority of the First that was swallowed up in the Flood of Light, by summoning versions of primals based on the Warrior of Light's memories and then having them kill it to scatter that aether and restart its flow in the Empty.
    • In an interview with Dualshockers, Yoshida stated that he was considering making the game in native 4K resolution for the PS4 Pro but decided to upscale the existing assets instead. He explained that having textures appear crisp and sharp no matter how far away they are would appear fake or too perfect and that players could get motion sick, since the game's framerate wasn't quite stable at native 4K. Therefore, Yoshida prefers to keep the game as is to make the game look good in motion. It was the PS5 version that would ultimately bring the game to native 4k.
    • The Rogue class originally was going to be Thief, but the developers didn't go with it due to not wanting the Warrior of Light to be associated with thievery and other bad implications that thieving would bring.
    • Originally in 1.0, there were supposed to be six starting cities. Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, and Ul'dah were the only three cities that ended up making the cut. Ishgard, Ala Mhigo, and Sharlayan would have also been cities for players to start in, but between the the dev team trying to keep 1.0 afloat and then working on A Realm Reborn, there was no time to implement the additional three cities. However, each of the three cities not initially used would eventually get implemented down the road — Ishgard was opened up in Heavensward, Ala Mhigo was used as a dungeon in Stormblood, and Sharlayan was used as the central city in Endwalker.
  • Heavensward:
    • According to Yoshi-P's social media accounts, the gun using class started its life as Chemist, a healer, but at some point during development they scrapped the idea, turning them into DPS Machinists and creating a new healing class in the Astrologian.
    • And as an aside to gun-using classes, the unused Musketeer's Guild signage and location in Limsa Lominsa (housed alongside the Marauder's Guild). Merlwyb herself even sports a pair of dueling pistols, and you frequently encounter enemy musketeers during quests in the thassalocracy's domain. Rumor has it Musketeers were intended to be a base class, advancing into a higher-tier gun-based job at 30 like the other starting options (given the focus on gunplay until the higher levels, it would have been smooth and natural for it to go Musketeer->Machinist).
    • The Au Ra race were originally envisioned as humans with dragon features during their development and the concept art showed the race having a lot of scales and facial features that were also dragon-like. Later on, the dev team decided to change the Au Ra to be more like demons in their appearance. The change was most likely to avoid story conflict since Ishgard is at war with dragons and it would have caused issues to have player characters interacting with the story as a dragon person. That being said, the Au Ra looking like dragons is referenced in the game several times, with several Au Ra NPCs in Heavensward mentioning persecution and outright assault from Ishgard due to being mistaken for dragons.
    • The first new race in the initial planning stages were initially going to be Viera from Final Fantasy XII possibly using the name Au Ra. Concept art also showed a Little Bit Beastly version alongside the ones in XII, being sized somewhere between Lalafell and Miqo'te and having more anthropomorphic traits than just the ears and claws (and also males). The scaled demon-like Au Ra ultimately won out for being Heavensward's new race, and (female-only) Viera, now appearing identical to the ones from XII, wouldn't be added until Shadowbringers four years later. Another variation showed a bizarre fusion of a viera and a bangaa (although this was made as a joke).
    • Idyllshire was originally going to be a part of the Dravanian Hinterlands, the same way Revenant's Toll is part of Mor Dhona, but the developers realized that the congestion from players doing quests and visiting NPCs to get end-game gear would be a problem, so they made Idyllshire its own map. This would in fact become a recurring design element because of how well it worked, with each expansion getting a "big town" you unlock access to early on and a more endgame-focused "small town", as directly discussed by Yoshida in the Endwalker reveal.
    • The lyrics heard during the fight against Ravana were going to be quite different compared to the final version. Originally, the lyrics were going to be in the Gnath language, but then Square requested the lyrical style to be changed since the singer they found could only speak in Japanese. The songwriter changed the language to Dravanian, only to be told by the higher ups that the original singer canceled at the last minute and the next singer in line could only speak English. The lyrics were changed to English and became the final version heard in the game.
    • The progression towards obtaining an Anima weapon was possibly going to be simpler and/or easier compared to how it is now. Yoshida explained that they had to make obtaining the Anima relic a lengthier process than it was originally because the dev team wasn't happy with the low clear rates for Alexander (Savage) and admitted that they overtuned the fights too much with extremely tight DPS checks. Ergo, in order to make raid weapons not be completely outclassed, Anima relic weapons had to be put behind a bigger time gate in order to not totally invalidate Alexander weapons.
    • The Alexander raids were originally going to have three tiers of difficulty so that everyone could tackle the raid at whatever difficulty they were comfortable with. Due to the massive amount of work the devs had to put in for Heavensward and the crunch towards the deadline, they opted to scrap the third difficulty and keep the raid at normal and savage difficulties (normal for catch up gear and letting lesser skilled players see the story and savage for the more hardcore player).
    • Yugiri was supposed to be omnipresent throughout Heavensward's plot after being reintroduced, however Real Life Writes the Plot and after the murder of her English VA, the character was Put on a Bus for the vast majority of the content cycle. The Other Darrin was eventually applied to her (for the second time) in 3.5, once the real-life criminal case had been fully settled.
    • The twelve Knights of the Heavens' Ward were originally planned to be given quests that fleshed out their personalities, showed how they regarded and were treated by the people of Ishgard, and how the big revelations of the Dragonsong War affected them. Sadly due to time constraints almost all of these were cut out, leaving Ser Grinnaux and Ser Charibert the only ones to really receive any characterization and the other 10 feeling rather flat. The second Encylopedia Eorzea went a bit more in-depth with this cut idea, discussing their relations with the citizenry and each other, and the idea is also briefly touched on with the first Dark Knight class quest in Stormblood involving a cousin of Ser Ignasse.
    • The second phase of the Ozma raid battle where players get sucked inside had a very different concept compared to the finalized version. During the development of the fight, the devs were originally going to have everyone be split into parties of four containing one tank, one healer, and two DPS. The split parties would have to defeat a few enemies in order to progress and reach the Ozmashade and reunite with the rest of the alliance. The dev team scrapped the idea when they realized that parties whose healer was KO'd would be at a huge disadvantage.
  • Stormblood
    • During the development of Stormblood, the dev team planned to remove the Protect spell since they felt like it wasn't adding anything vital at that point. Yoshida overrode the team's decision and requested that Protect remain in the game, since it's an iconic Final Fantasy spell, while citing that it would feel too weird to have the spell gone; the dev team wouldn't have their way until a full overhaul of the combat system with the release of Shadowbringers two years later, and even then it ended up returning as a Lost Action in the Bozjan Southern Front.
    • Teleportation costs in Stormblood were going to be very expensive if the player teleported between the continents of Aldenard and Othard. The dev team decided to cap the teleport fees at 999 gil to keep things reasonable. Due to the inflation of gil, Endwalker removed the cap on teleport fees in order to remove more gil in circulation.
    • During the development of Lakshmi's character, her original design was going to be a bit on the thick side based on how Westerners see Oriental designs. Yoshida hated the design and said Lakshmi needed to be more cute, which is the design that is seen in game today. Lakshmi's battle theme was going to be redone since the original version (the one heard in game now) was made with the old character design in mind. The dev team made a second song for the new Lakshmi model to go with her more youthful appearance, but they eventually decided that the first song was a better fit for the primal and her tempered followers.
    • The Monster Hunter crossover event originally was going to allow players to chop various body parts of the boss like they can do in the boss's home game. However, the idea had to be scrapped since it would require the game to be re-rated, assuming the engine could even handle it, and getting delayed as a result. Yoshida admits that he didn't like having to do it and wishes it could have stayed in. It took until Endwalker for the tail to finally be visibly severed.
    • In the 2018 North American Fan Fest, it was revealed that Balthier was going to make an appearance, but the plot had changed around so much, he was removed, and his gear instead would be a reward. Listen here. They did tease, however, that "a certain character" from FFXII would appear, and with all the teasing for Viera, most believed it would be Fran, which was confirmed.
    • The Qiqirn were originally going to be an interactable beast tribe for Stormblood, but the dev in charge of the beast tribes found themselves so enamored with the Namazu that they used them instead. The Qiqirn would later be used in Shadowbringers, but as a beast tribe on the First and under the name Qitari. The fact that there is a friendly version of the Gyr Abanian qiqirn model, which was only seen twice in the entire expansion, suggests it was an artifact of this idea.
  • Shadowbringers
    • After their reveal at the 2019 Tokyo Fanfest, Yoshida stated in an interview that while Hrothgar were always the first choice, development decisions were split between male-only Hrothgar and female-only Viera, or male and female Hrothgar at the passing up of Viera entirely. Ultimately, the former won out to give players a bit of variance in what body-types they want to play, and to appease the playerbase's long-standing desire for playable Viera while also including a full on bestial player race.
    • The original plan for The First in Shadowbringers was that it was going to be more of a mirror world of The Source, but without looking like the various Calamities had taken place. This was maintained a bit in game by having each zone have visual elements of zones from The Source, but instead zones were made unique to avoid being too similar to the original locations. Also, the player character would have been invisible while on The First due to not being from it, but this was removed to avoid any possible issues narrative and gameplay wise.
    • The Great Serpent of Ronka in Shadowbringers originally wasn't going to be in the game due to the dev team rejecting one of the writer's idea pitch for it. Said writer persisted and after the team took a closer look into the idea, they decided to greenlight it.
    • The 2020 Valentione's event had everyone vote for one of three characters and a special cutscene depending on the winner would play after the voting had finished. However, due to being pushed as the blatantly correct answer, Astrid ended up winning in all of the servers, making the two other cutscenes inaccessible. A post on the developers' blog details the other cutscenes, at least.
    • The Nu Mou were originally going to be a beast tribe reputation and are still advertised as such on the Shadowbringers website, as well as there being a group of evil Nu Mou in the game who are never elaborated on and probably would have been explained in their questline. While Nu Mou are still in the final game, their reputation grind ended up getting replaced by the Qitari. The Nu Mou were integrated with the Pixie beast tribe quests.
    • The Dwarves' beast tribe quests were originally going to be in Kholusia since that's where their home is. Due to the map pushing the limits of the game engine (not only does it have the second biggest elevation change in the game next to The Tempest, but Mt. Gulg rising, the Talos coming up to grab it, and the Puppet's Bunker destroying a nearby mountain all change its layout), the story and its quests were moved to Lakeland.
    • Trusts were originally planned towards having a different reward than letting you change your trusts to their Stormblood outfits at 80 and giving you a title for maxing all of them. One of the most talked about ones that ultimately never came to be would have been a "friendship" cutscene where the trust confesses their Undying Loyalty and companionship to you, with the potential of even getting into a relationship with Thancred, Urianger, and/or Y'shtola. Ultimately, the devs said that this was scrapped because a character arc like that would be far too important to put into optional content, not to mention it would likely have to change text for every future conversation with said characters to be consistent, which would be far too much work for the writers. A similar idea was brought up of creating "mirages" of characters to fill similar roles as that, but it was decided against for similar reasons, and to avoid issues where the community would start fighting among themselves over the idea.
    • Similarly to the Valentione's event, the NieR crossover would have had two endings depending on which of the twins got more support. Every server on every data center overwhelmingly sided with Anogg instead of Konogg the entire way through, so ultimately what would have happened to the story if Konogg was supported to the end was left unknown.
    • The "Save the Queen" storyline was supposed to continue after the Bozjan Southern Front was completed, as evidenced by the final cutscene after finishing the main story for it setting up Gabranth as having found something to help him continue his plans. For reasons unknown^note According to Matsuno, the reception to said story was very mixed, which suggests that this caused them to abandon the plot, the lead writer, Yasumi Matsuno, announced it was over on twitter, with the resolution supposedly ending with Bozja's liberation, but that the story would not continue forward and that he was no longer working on the game. Instead, the resolution was found in collecting all the Field Notes. On a related note, Matsuno had a lot of different ideas on how to direct "Save the Queen", such as making the Odin trial mandatory because the auracite used to summon Queen Gunhildr worked the same way as Zantetsuken.
  • Endwalker
    • The team was always planning on adding a new healer class after hearing criticism of two expansions straight without a new one, but there was initially no clear idea for what. Yoshida stated they almost went with Alchemist, with it focusing on throwing out potions to heal people or having a medical kit of some kind. Sage was decided in the end because they felt it fit better over Alchemist, and felt that Alchemist's potions would be gimmicky and too difficult to work with. According to Yoshida, Reaper took only around three months to create and finalize, while Sage took around half a year to be finalized, showing the difficulty the team had when designing it initially.
    • Endwalker's story very early on was originally meant to be told across two expansions, with 6.0 dealing with Garlemald and Anima as the Final Boss; 7.0 dealing with the Final Days proper. Head writer Ishikawa later condensed the story into the single expansion Endwalker as we know it today, to avoid Arc Fatigue.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • Win trading — giving people guaranteed wins in quests in exchange for gil or items — was very common in the PVP section of the game, which resulted in many people getting high ranks and gear with high stats (including Morale, which is a PVP only stat) without earning them fairly. Frontlines was a second PVP mode added later on to the game and it doesn't use the Morale stat. The act of making Morale useless in Frontlines was very likely done to make sure that people who bribed their way to the top can't have the big advantage over everyone when Frontlines was released. Unfortunately, the motion also punished legit players that earned their gear and ranks for PVP.
  • Win carries — carrying another player to victory while said player Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing — were also plaguing non-PVP content and allowed players to earn gear and other rewards by simply paying another player to do all the work for them in raids and dungeons. While it wasn't the main deciding factor, Square decided to kill two birds with one stone by adding an item level requirement to some dungeons. This way, players are properly prepared, and it prevents people from being carried through most runs with bad gear.
  • For the longest time, the duty finder (especially for the Labyrinth of the Ancients and Sycrus Tower raids) was plagued with withdraw spam. When everyone is queued up, a player can choose to withdraw from the duty for whatever reason, but it causes everyone else to be re-queued as they have to wait for a replacement. Since there was no penalty for withdrawing after the ready window popped up, people would either troll everyone by joining and withdrawing, or fish for duties that were already in progress and withdraw if they didn't get one. Patch 2.4 added a penalty system; anyone who withdraws three times when the ready window pops up gets a thirty-minute ban on queueing up for any more duties. This thirty-minute penalty will come back for each withdraw after that until the next day.
  • The official forums worked like any other forum, and Square Enix needed people to test it in its beta stages. Naturally, people started to clog the forums with spam, flame wars, and other annoying things, prompting Square Enix to slap down a heavy posting restriction where every user has a limited amount of posts they can make in a day based on their character's level and a 1000-character limit was also thrown in to prevent people from filling posts with text walls (which was eventually increased to 3000 characters). Then again, Square Enix wanted to test how the forums would work, and it could be argued that they got exactly what they wanted.
  • The abuse of parsers — third party add-ons that measures a player's DPS output — is the reason why the developers are very reluctant to make an official one. Because of people that use parsers to verbally harass people with low DPS (even in content where DPS checks aren't used), just mentioning that you use parsers puts you at risk of someone reporting you and getting yourself banned. In patch 3.2, the developers created a training ground where players can whack a dummy whose HP is based off of various raid bosses (with some adjustments due to the content being for solo play) so that people can test their skill rotations for optimal DPS performance, but it doesn't give much information other than you know you are doing good if you can break the dummy before the time limit expires. In a February 2020 stream, Yoshi-P said that the reason the dev team is reluctant to make any kind of "official" combat tracker is because they know some bad apples would ruin the bunch by harassing people for DPS that was too low (which has happened before with the third-party tools), and the dev team members don't want the game to be based around maximum combat effeciency.
  • The Feast (then later succeeded by Crystalline Conflict) PVP mode isn't quite newbie friendly due to a lot of Serious Business players flying off the handle whenever someone in the party screws up. The developers decided that in patch 3.5, all forms of chat would be disabled in all competitive PVP modes. The only way to communicate after patch 3.5 is through pre-made macros that take up space on hotbars. While the developers never stated why they made such a drastic change, it's likely due to the overabundance of players being openly hostile towards others, which can drive people away from PVP completely.
  • Previously any class could wear crafter/gatherer gear (aside from artifact sets), which gave more options for glamour. However, this was abused by players who entered raids/dungeons equipped with the aformention gear for the purpose of spiritbonding or to inflate item levels in order to enter a dungeon/raid they normally wouldn't, which severely hindered groups from those just wanting to complete the dungeon/raid or are farming for a particular item. By Stormblood's release, only Disciples of Hand/Land can be equipped with any new sets for their respective classes.
  • The launch of Stormblood brought in a ton of players, to the point where simply trying to get into certain servers would take hours at a time if the congestion was high. The developers implemented an auto-kick measure where anyone that was AFK for too long would be logged out. Players trying to get around this countermeasure would spoof their AFK status such as leaving a menu open or going into crafting mode without actually crafting. This in turn made the queues even longer and many housing/apartments/private rooms were inaccessible due to the instance servers hosting them being perpetually clogged with AFK players. Presenting itself as a nuclear solution, the developers made a new countermeasure where every server on every data center would automatically log everyone out of the game once a day, no matter what they were doing (this includes quests or other instances) and they would not be able to log back in for 10 minutes. This also affected players on lower populated worlds and it especially includes the people that transferred off a congested server to avoid the queue problems in the first place. The restrictions were eventually lifted once everything became more stable.
  • The final two A Realm Reborn dungeons, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, are the only two dungeons which feature mid-dungeon cutscenes. Veteran players grinding for tomestones or experience points would rush from boss to boss, skipping every cutscene as they did. This left newbies with a Morton's Fork choice: watch the cutscenes and potentially get kicked for slowing everyone down, or skip the cutscenes and rob themselves of the emotional climax of ARR. Either way, they'd be missing out on something. It wasn't until patch 4.2 where the cutscenes in these two dungeons were made unskippable for every player, regardless of if they had run the dungeon or not. As compensation, the rewards for the two dungeons were also increased since they now had a much longer time investment, and they were given their own "Main Scenario" rotation in case veterans didn't want to get hit with an unexpected time sink. While there was some grumbling about this among the playerbase, it was generally accepted as the only plausible solution to the problem. Patch 6.1 further smoothed out the Main Scenario roulette by reworking the two dungeons in several ways — several areas which were essentially padding for the runtime were removed, the fight against the Ultima Weapon was made as a separate trial in two parts, the fight against Lahabrea was made into a solo duty after fighting the Ultima Weapon, and the content was reduced from 8-man to 4-man in both dungeons so that there wasn't as many human players to worry about.
  • A small part of the fandom wanted to play as a Kid Hero, but this request was eventually given a hard "no" from Yoshi-P. He gave two reasons as to why. One: the Warrior of Light goes through a lot over the course of the story. While the Warrior of Light has a Vague Age, it's clear from the storyline that they're an adult of whatever race the player chooses for them, and it can be contentious to put a child through the stresses and horrors that the Warrior of Light is expected to put up with. Two: Final Fantasy XIV is home to a rather large community of role-players. And not all of them are wholesome role-players. While Yoshi-P and the game's moderators don't object to erotic roleplay as long as it's kept away from people who don't want to see it, it would be impossible to defend allowing players to roleplay a child in that kind of thing.
  • The Ishgard Restoration content allowed players to visit other servers and assist said servers with their progress. Due to Demand Overload (as well as people trolling others by making the problem worse), almost no one could get into the Firmament to contribute to the progression and this also included people getting locked out from their own home server. Within a day, the dev team changed the system where players can't visit the Firmament unless it's on their home server.
  • Data mining — digging into files and/or searching large sets of data for patterns in order to learn more about the game — is a hot button issue between fans that want to see what's hidden in each patch and fans that don't want to be spoiled. Square Enix themselves generally weren't bothered by data mining as long as people kept the methods of data mining to themselves, although they did openly state not to spoil anything. In 2019, several people were upset towards a raid team that had got the World First clear for The Epic of Alexander (Ultimate) and accused them of cheating by using data mining to prove that the raid team cheated. The developers came down hard on data mining by suspending people that were openly data mining or were linked to data mining in some way. Because data mining was used to harass people, data mining in general is now a lot more private.
  • In the past, jobs that were getting adjustments would be reflected in the prelimary patch notes or sometimes during a live letter. Due to misconceptions, backlash, and general complaining about certain jobs no longer being good, job changes are only discussed sparingly. Only really big changes (such as major changes to the Paladin in patch 6.3) will be discussed in Live Letters. Also, the full details of job changes aren't posted until the complete patch notes for any patch come up, which only happens when the servers are down for maintenance until the patch goes live.
  • After a World First team for The Epic of Alexander (Ultimate) streamed themselves openly using the Cactbot fight planner to change waymarks on the fly to help their performance in fights, in defiance of Square's don't-show-don't-ask-don't-tell policy on mods, Square Enix quietly changed it so that waymarks could no longer be laid down or altered in combat, but added way more letters and numbers to help plan it. Given that the other alternative was to crack down on the bot by making an example of a "World First" team via banning them during a World First race, this was probably the less controversial option for the developers.
  • The February 2020 live letter began with Yoshida decrying the modding scene, specifically those that go the extra mile in erotic roleplay by changing clothing and character models to do things that Final Fantasy XIV was not meant to do. While the whole segment carried an air of "I am being paid to say this", Yoshida has ample reason to be concerned and stated as much. Final Fantasy XIV is a worldwide MMO that these modders are turning into a porn simulator, and different nations have different laws regarding porn, which could give the game the wrong kind of attention from the authorities.
  • The gifting of codes, items, and other things from the Online Store was altered in October 2022. After the change, you can't buy anything that gives a gameplay advantage (like mounts, level-skips or story-skips) for anyone but yourself, you must be friends with the recipient you're gifting the item to, and you have to have been friends for at least 72 hours before you can gift them anything. The official announcement noted that it was to combat Real Money Trade, including buying things for the sole purpose of selling them as gifts or buying things with the use of stolen credit card information.
  • The Japanese team UNNAMED came from behind to win the World First race on The Omega Protocol (Ultimate). However, it was soon leaked that members of the team used plug-ins to aid in the fight, which was considered cheating. Yoshida made a public statement regarding the World First race not long after. In the statement, Yoshida said that although World First races were unofficial, he was naturally aware of them as the game's director and producer. The crux of the letter was Yoshida expressing disappointment and anger at seeing people cheating at something designed to be very hard, and that he didn't consider UNNAMED the true winners of the World First race as a result of using third-party plug-ins, which Yoshida reiterated were against the game's Terms of Service and always had been. Shortly thereafter, UNNAMED was stripped of their clear on websites that tracked the race, the team was disqualified from trying again, their in-game achievements for clearing the fight were removed, and they were forced to discard any and all loot they received from the raid under threat of being outright banned from the game if they refused. This marked the first time that such a public crackdown came on the use of third-party tools in high-end content. Yoshida also more-or-less said in his letter that the development team wasn't going to make any more ultra-hard content if people were just going to cheat every time such content came out. This led to a lot of calls for self-policing in the XIV community in regards to third-party tools — the letter from Yoshida was largely taken as a thinly-veiled threat that future Ultimate content may outright stop if the use of third-party tools in World First races wasn't curbed.
  • Duty Roulette: Alliance Raid suffered Loophole Abuse for a long time, as some players stripped down their gear to reduce their Item Level, using this to game the system to only get the Crystal Tower raids from A Realm Reborn. This was a Boring, but Practical way to get daily roulette rewards quickly, but interest in the entire Roulette steadily declined from people burned out at only getting the same three raids. Not to mention, this made it harder for players who wanted to play non-Crystal Tower raids to find groups. Patch 6.5 would kill this behavior off by adding an item level requirement based on your current job level that you had to meet before you could queue into the Alliance Raid roulette. During the Live Letter in which this was announced, Yoshida admitted he was aware that there would be people who didn't like this change, and there was some discussion among the playerbase about how this might end up hurting new players who haven't reached the item level requirements for later duties. But it was generally agreed to be for the best, simply because the playerbase at large was sick of a few bad apples ruining the roulette for everyone.
• Word of God:
  • Like FFXI, the 1.0 launch game was very low on the details, such as what your Name Day and Guardian Deity were for. To get concrete info to the public, the community site had Q&A topics called "Ask The Devs". Once Yoshida took the helm, however, lines of communication became much more open, and in particular Yoshida pioneered the trend of developers at Square Enix, and in Japan more generally, running live-stream events to announce game changes, general news, and field questions. XIV's are called "Producer Live Letters" and are run at regular intervals. The localization team, which is fairly plugged-in to the worldbuilding, is also active on the English forums and comes in with clarifications on the lore from time to time.
  • A few other things Yoshida stepped in on were effectively to say they were never happening - one was that the Warrior of Light will never get outfits based on past villains like they do past heroes with the veteran rewards, and that there will never be a playable job that is downright evil (like Necromancer) or has villianous implications (the reason that we have Rogue instead of the more franchise-recognizable Thief), only dubious but ultimately heroic at best like Dark Knight or Reaper - both of these were reasoned as Yoshida wants to make sure the Warrior of Light is never seen as anything but a heroic figure, unlike many other MMOs which usually have at least one strictly "evil" class to play as, which inevitably causes a disconnect when this is completely overlooked to still focus on the heroics they do.
• Word of Saint Paul: Runar's Japanese voice actor revealed that Y'shtola and Runar are Like Brother and Sister during the 73rd Live Letter.

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