Final Fantasy 14 lost 300,000 players because of one boss fight, reveals Yoshi-P 

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s infamous Titan boss battle apparently caused about 300,000 players to drop the game when it first appeared. This was revealed by FFXIV’s director Naoki Yoshida at the “Journey to Dawntrail: The 10 Year Adventure of FINAL FANTASY XIV” panel at PAX East 2024. 

During the presentation held on March 23, Yoshida briefly reminisced about the beginnings of the rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV – the MMORPG was successfully released in 2013, but quickly met with serious server issues and overflowing traffic. The early “A Realm Reborn” days of the game were also marked by particularly challenging content, as Yoshida notes. As an example, he names Titan’s Landslide attack, amusedly commenting, “I remember about 300,000 accounts being wiped out because of it.” 

The Extreme Mode Titan battle in The Navel trial in FFXIV is notorious for its difficulty, especially among those who played it “back in the day.” The Titan launches Geocrushes that chip away at the battlefield’s size, all while blasting your party with Landslides that can send you flying over the ledge and kill you.  

According to a past Fan Festival presentation from 2016 held by FFXIV’s battle concept designer Kenji Sudo, the basic premise of the Hard and Extreme Mode Titan battles was to instill a fear of having nowhere to run as the arena narrows around you. Furthermore, for the Extreme Mode battle, Sudo came up with the idea of introducing Upheavals and five-way Landslides (as opposed to one- and three-way ones) in an attempt to “proactively get players to fall of the stage.”  

On the other hand, Sudo mentioned that he “felt really bad about” not taking lag into consideration. Indeed, a lot of the Titan Battle’s difficulty is attributed to how badly it used to be affected by ping, with attack animations not matching the cast bar and players finding themselves blasted by attacks even when they thought they were clear of the red zone. The fact that there was no resurrection at the time also made the whole thing a lot more challenging than it seems today. All this apparently made FFXIV’s Titan Battle too much to handle for a large portion of the game’s player base. 

Final Fantasy XIV is available for the PC (Steam), PS4/PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail launches on July 2.