'The situation has affected us heavily these past months. The latest patch for Final Fantasy 14 was delayed by a few months, due to disruption no thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, as announced via a live stream from Yoshida in May. 'We have to continue driving this forward, so there's really no time to relax, or lower our guard.'
Final Fantasy 14 has just hit 20 million registered players, but according to Yoshida it's still not enough for Square-Enix's President and CEO, Yosuke Matsuda. 'There isn't any time to relax, or chill out at the moment,' producer and director Naoki Yoshida tells me over Zoom. Fast forward seven years, with a few critically-acclaimed expansions under their belts, the Final Fantasy 14 team looks back at older content, and introducing the game to new players with patch 5.3.
It's been almost seven years since the release of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, a game whose story has been recounted countless times, after putting Naoki Yoshida in the director's chair, who since pulled the game from the brink of disaster with the release of A Realm Reborn.
