On 27th August 2013 Naoki Yoshida, over-worked, overtired and twitching on caffeine, paced backstage at a press conference in Shibuya, Tokyo. In a few minutes he was due to proclaim the arrival of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn to the world in a live broadcast. It should have been a happy moment, yet Yoshida felt nothing but nausea.
Big budget video game development can be a traumatic experience. A blockbuster game's gestation is, after the initial thrill and excitement of conception, long, gruelling and problematic. The final push of delivery is painful; the team is up all night (the word for these prolonged hours, "crunch", bespeaks unbearable pressure) and, when the game finally emerges into the world, spent.
Yoshida's experience was especially traumatic. Final Fantasy 14's original launch in 2010 had been a multi-million dollar flop, a massively multiplayer online RPG that launched prematurely and in a broken state. The president of Square Enix, the game's publisher, said it had "greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy brand. For three years Yoshida's job had been to work to undo this damage, to ready the realm for a rebirth. He had carried the weight of a world on his shoulders.
from Eurogamer.net http://ift.tt/1f26aF3
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