Kupo Chronicle #60 - A Realm’s Destiny
Sustaining The Flame
Welcome to the Kupo Chronicle, the premium edition of the Wark Digest newsletter, where we explore the Final Fantasy universe in long-form and drill down into unique moments of the series’ history. I’m Chris, aka Hoogathy, and in this installment, we examine the fate of two long-running Final Fantasy games in light of the cancellation of another force of nature in the games industry.
This week’s newsletter is 2753 words, a 12-minute read.
In last week’s gaming industry news, we saw two stories about games from very different eras and genres, which contrasted each other in a unique one. One game is old and mostly-retired, yet still maintaining relevance; the other game is a third as old, still in active development, and as we learned last week, about to be abruptly retired. The former game also has a younger relative, of an age between the two, who climbed out of the ashes of a disastrous launch to become the top of its genre, and now faces the need to reinvent itself.
I’m referring, of course, to Final Fantasy XI, Destiny 2, and Final Fantasy XIV. Despite being intended to become a sort of living museum of itself, FFXI has remained relevant enough that its dev team is considering adding new content to a early-PS2-era game. At the same time, Destiny 2 (a mid-PS4-era game1) is about to be put into the same kind of living stasis (or Maintenance Mode, if you will) next week—unceremoniously cancelling two planned expansions, almost certainly leading to a devastating swath of layoffs at developer Bungie, and leaving no current plans to continue the IP. And while these two games dance around the metaphorical drain, FFXIV still stands (mostly) tall, 16 years after its initial launch and 13 since the unprecedented 180°-turn that saved it from disaster; though it’s still one of the biggest MMORPGs out there, it stands upon a precipice of its own right now.
So how does a long-running game stave off death, reinvent itself, or earn a brutal coup-de-grace from its own developer? Let’s examine these outlying examplars of the online genre to see what lucky aces Final Fantasy has up its sleeves.
Diverging Paths Through History
To fully discuss the history of any one of these games could be a whole issue in itself, but we must set the table with a brief summary of their epic development sagas.
Final Fantasy XI was first announced at the Square Millennium Event in January 2000 and released on PS2 in May 2002; expansions followed in 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2013, peppered with extra scenarios in between. The Rhapsodies of Vana’diel storyline effectively served as the last main content in 2015. Since April 2016, it’s lived in a retirement state, with minor updates to address bugs and stability…
