"Players had a very high expectation" of FFXIV, says Tanaka

Hiromichi Tanaka, SVP of software development at Square Enix, has said the company is doing everything it can to bring Final Fantasy XIV "back to the level" it planned to have ready for players of the MMO right from the start.

The latest patch is just a start.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Tanaka said the firm understands the frustrations felt by the fans, and their complaints are being addressed.

"We believe players had a very high expectation of this title from the alpha and beta tests," said Tanaka. "We received a lot of feedback from the beta tests. The development team should have focused on shaping up the game during the beta process, but because we were really concentrating on de-bugging the game – fixing all the bugs – that's one of the reasons why we were not able to have all the requests implemented during the beta process.

"That's why we do understand the reaction from the players, now the game's out. Therefore, the development team is working really hard to bring it back to the level we planned to have ready for the players."

The battle system, lag issues and user interface are other areas Square plans to improve upon in the following updates, and the fixes will hopefully convince new players to join the 600K already planning when it launches on PS3 in March.

"Because we have the PS3 version coming out, we do hope both players will enjoy the game and so the subscribers will grow", said Tanaka. "All MMOs usually have a big initial shipment. What happened with FFXI was we introduced the game on different platforms in different regions, so the subscribers grew gradually. That's something we hope will happen with FFXIV – it will continually grow."

The full list of fixes and additions in the new patch can be found here.