Despite bankrolling Square Enix, 'cost' is somehow the reason Final Fantasy 14's newest raid (which has only been cleared 400 times in 23 days) wasn't given an easier version

Dear reader, my job is to find clever, informative, and interesting ways to deliver news to you—but upon hearing that the Forked Tower, a raid at the end of Final Fantasy 14's recent exploration zone the Occult Crescent, wasn't given a normal version most people could do because of "cost"? I am struggling for words that aren't just 'c'mon, man'.

Some context: FF14 has a prioritisation problem. I go into it in more detail here, but the jist of it is that, since Endwalker, casual-to-midcore activities with long tails have been deprioritised in favour of Savage Raids and Ultimates. Depending on who you ask, this problem's always existed—Bozja didn't come out until Shadowbringers' midpoint, after all—but it's been exacerbated by a dev cycle that's slowed down in recent years, not up.

The Occult Crescent is, overall, a great bit of that missing midcore food for folks to feast on, even if it came out almost a full year after the expansion's launch. There is one problem, though: The Forked Tower is a pain to get into. It's an (up to) 48 player raid within the Occult Crescent that requires strong player coordination, has a high punishment for failure, and is accessible only under certain conditions.

In a recent live letter, producer of FF14 Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) revealed a couple of facts that've just made my stomach sink (thanks to the FFXIV subreddit's Discord for the translations). First off, the Forked Tower has been cleared about 400 times in 23 days—and I need to put that number into perspective, for a moment.

The Forked Tower scales with players up to 48, but let's assume the best-case-scenario. Let's say every clear had 48 players in it (they didn't). That means around 19,200 players (it'll be less) have cleared The Forked Tower in a month.

We're going to get into speculative territory, now, as I draw on the fan census made by LuckyBancho. To be clear, this census is unofficial and an educated guess—LuckyBancho's been doing this for years, they aren't some random, but it's not official. If their estimation of around 950,000 active players is accurate, that means that maximum, 2% of the active playerbase of FF14 has completed The Forked Tower.

In the game's last exploration zone, Bozja, the equivalent raid Delubrum Reginae had both a Normal and a Savage version. The Normal version was still challenging, but could be completed by a pick-up group and queued into—the Savage version was more on the level of The Forked Tower we have today.

So why didn't Square do that, this time around? "The simple answer on why we didn't have a normal and savage version is cost, I know this doesn't 'matter' for a customer … We weren't able to do this for this instance, but for the future instances of Occult Crescent we will try to have both a normal and savage version."

In other words: Creative Studio 3 was making a new patch for a game with a historic problem with delivering casual-to-midcore content, serving a slice of its community that'd been waiting almost a whole year. It ran into budget issues with said exploration zone. Rather than prioritise the kind of experience it had been missing, it then decided to funnel those resources into a harder version of the raid which, almost a month on, has only been cleared 400 times. Why.

"Cost" is also a poor excuse when Square Enix's reports have been sharing that FF14 is a major breadwinner for the entire company. This one's less Yoshi-P's fault, but for the love of Hydaelyn, Square: Why is one of your main earners struggling with its budget when trying to deliver basic features every other MMO has as standard? Your direct competition's been doing laps around you! Wake up!

I'm really baffled and disheartened. Final Fantasy 14 has some work to do before it regains my whole-hearted support, even though it aches to see one of my favourite games put in such a weird spot. I seriously hope some major structural changes are in Creative Studio 3's future, because otherwise Square Enix's golden goose is gonna starve to death.