It feels like we've been observing Final Fantasy 11's refusal to die for years at this point. Probably because we have been. The game, which at one point Square Enix doubtless expected to dwindle into unprofitable status with the arrival of Final Fantasy 14, simply keeps on keepin' on. This is in spite of FF14's own meteoric success—at its height between 2019's Shadowbringers and the first few post-Endwalker patches stretching into 2023, the game's subscription numbers were truly outstanding. Even today, they remain terrific enough.
Make no mistake: FF11 doesn't have nearly as active a playerbase as its successor. But it doesn't need to. The game turns 24 years old this year. Twenty-four. Years. Old. The developers have shifted from releasing no new content to a steady drip of smallish-scale updates which keep Vana'diel worth coming back to. This resource pour has doubtless contributed in large part to the remarkable truth: server overcrowding is an actual problem for an MMO so old that it once ran on PlayStation 2. So long as you purchased the hard drive component, of course.
Final Fantasy 11's latest director, Yoji Fujito, took to the game's official...
