Director and producer Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida has revealed that Final Fantasy 14's original Titan fight caused 300,000 players to abandon the MMO.
This past weekend, PAX East 2024 took place in Boston, and Naoki Yoshida was there to give a presentation about Final Fantasy 14, reflecting on the hit MMO's last decade. As reported by Automaton Media, Yoshida humorously recalled the infamous boss fight against Titan in A Realm Reborn and how players despised its Landslide attack.
"I remember about 300,000 accounts being wiped out because of it," Yoshida recalls of Titan's fight. Yoshida's comment actually relates to the 'Extreme' difficulty level of the Titan fight, in which the boss can chip away at the literal arena around players, causing some of them to fall to their deaths, all while letting rip with the Landslide attack that can similarly push you to your death.
Titan's Extreme fight is rightly feared among Final Fantasy 14 players and particularly notorious among those who've been going with the MMO since its earliest days. It's interesting that players were quick to drop Final Fantasy 14 back in the day from this one fight - you'd generally see a lot more player 'goodwill' towards the beloved MMO nowadays, but this was at a time when Final Fantasy 14's base version had fundamentally failed.
It's also worth noting that Titan's Extreme fight came about when Final Fantasy 14 didn't have a resurrection feature for gauntlets like these. The thought of deceased players waiting around for minutes, staring at players who would similarly fall to their deaths in the end, probably wasn't enticing an offer enough for people to stick around and try the fight again.
There could well be fights on a similar difficulty level to this in the upcoming Dawntrail expansion, but I'd say Final Fantasy 14 players are probably more up for the challenge these days than back in 2014. Speaking of, Dawntrail officially launches later this year on June 2, but early access starts a few days prior on July 28. Yes, Yoshida is basically giving players a week to beat Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtee DLC, which releases on June 21.
