10 Exact Moments Hated Video Games Were Saved

Version 1.0 of Final Fantasy XIV was, frankly, unplayable.

Whatever horror stories you've heard from 1.0 veterans, younger players, I promise they're not only all true, but that it was worse. Easily the worst MMO on the market at the time, an all time low for Square as a company and Final Fantasy as a brand. It didn't even do anything all that scummy like other infamous MMOs, it was just incompetently built all the way down.

There have been thesis papers and video essays on the failures of 1.0, so intriguing a disaster it was. So how exactly did it become the top selling and most played entry in the entire series? Well, simply put, they burned the whole thing to the ground.

Square kicked off almost the entire dev team and rebuilt it from scratch, putting the new direction in the hands of Naoki Yoshida. 1.0 was gloriously obliterated in one of Final Fantasy's most famous CG cutscenes. And when it came back, fans were treated to A Realm Reborn.

And while fan opinion on this little reboot that could are, shall we say, mixed, it doesn't change the fact that, without it, FFXIV would have gone down as the franchise's lowest point, instead of one of the greatest comeback stories in gaming history.