Final Fantasy 14 Could Soon Come to Xbox One
By Jason Gallagher 26 June 2016
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn‘s director says Square Enix is talking to Microsoft about bringing the game and its Heavensward expansion to Xbox One.
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn launched on PlayStation 3 in 2013 and followed that up with a PlayStation 4 release in April 2014, but the game has yet to see release on a Microsoft console, which is a bit odd, considering that Final Fantasy 14‘s predecessor Final Fantasy 11 was available on the Xbox 360 prior to being shut down this past March. Square Enix has long blamed Microsoft’s console infrastructure, which previously has not allowed cross-platform play, as the main reason why A Realm Reborn has never been playable on Xbox. However, thanks to some news coming out of E3 2016, this situation may be about to change.
One of the biggest takeaways from Microsoft’s press briefing last Monday was that the company is working hard to bring down the divide between gamers on Xbox One and those playing on Windows 10. Microsoft’s Xbox Play Anywhere initiative means players can buy a game for either Xbox One or PC and get the game on both platforms. More importantly for Square Enix, Microsoft also announced a few months ago that they intend to let multiplayer servers work across multiple platforms, a promise the company reiterated during E3.
So is this the game changer that Final Fantasy fans were waiting for? After all, Microsoft and Square Enix have been talking about Final Fantasy 14 since at least the middle of 2015. According to A Realm Reborn‘s game director Naoki Yoshida, it just might be. Yoshida told Polygon that Square Enix is currently negotiating with Microsoft over bringing Final Fantasy 14 to the Xbox One.
“Microsoft actually approached the Final Fantasy 14 team about the cross-platform opportunity. When our team reviewed the regulations that are associated with that, we realized that Microsoft may not have the experience or understanding of running an MMORPG as an online game genre just yet. The Final Fantasy 14 team has fed back to Microsoft that there are certain elements of its regulations that we would have to consider waived. We’re waiting on Microsoft’s response for that, but we are having discussions.”
Yoshida also briefly discussed how much longer Square Enix plans to support the PlayStation 3 version of the game, saying, “At this point, we’ve already declared that we’ll continue to fully support the PS3 through the 3.x series of patches. That’s about all we can say at this point. If anything changes with that, we’ll be sure to update our players so that they are aware.”
Reading between the lines, it sounds like Square Enix will likely drop PS3 support for FF 14 at some point in the future. This makes sense, as having to make sure the game can run on the older console may be holding the developer back from making graphical improvements to the game. Final Fantasy 14‘s first expansion pack, Heavensward, released last year and its latest patch, titled “Revenge of the Horde” launched last week.
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn is available now on PC, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4.
Source: Polygon
