The Looming Threat of Cancelation: Phantasy Star Online 2

When Phantasy Star Online 2 debuted at Microsoft Xbox’s E3 Conference in 2019, many of my friends were ecstatic. There was a wave of excitement for people to finally get their hands on Phantasy Star Online 2 in the west after nearly 7 years of it being available to play in Japan. And yet…I couldn’t help but feel skeptical about it. Is PSO 2 really coming out? Like really, really Sega/Microsoft?

Now, I don’t mean to sound bleak as the title would suggest. I want to make it very clear that I am hoping for the release of Phantasy Star Online 2 on Xbox consoles very soon. I also don’t like to completely judge companies based on their past decisions. Market’s change. Public interests change. Just like people, companies can change for the better or worse.

But it would be foolish to not look at these examples of Microsoft’s history with MMORPG’s and not speculate what the future could entail, and well, let’s just say the relationship between Xbox and MMORPG’s has kind of a rocky history.

Back in the early days of Xbox, there was a small game being made by Microsoft Game Studios called Mythica. The story centered on you playing as a fallen warrior Viking tasked with assisting Odin in the upcoming apocalyptic event Ragnarok. To prepare for that battle, the player would need to increase their strength, and in order to do that, the player would need to secure the worship and admiration of one of the games denizen races.

With the inclusion of what Microsoft called “private realms technology” the playspace and quests would also change depending on your actions within the area. Pretty nifty idea for 2003. However, the game was soon scrapped a year later in 2004, due to the competition between rival MMORPG’s and Microsoft not wanting to ” “spread ourselves out over multiple MMORPG projects.”

The other “project” Microsoft referenced was an even bigger endeavor by a reputable company known as Level-5. You may know them as the developers of Dragon Quest VIII, Ni No Kuni, or the Professor Layton series. The project was called True Fantasy Live Online and it was supposed to be a massive fantasy MMORPG where you can play with over 3,000 players to fight monsters, do quests, and collect rare items.

The game was apparently fully playable by 2004. So what happened to it? Well, there was one big thing that Microsoft stated it NEEDED to have before it’s release. Voice chat compatibility. As shown in the video above it does look like the game was capable of doing just that, but with such a large scale of players online, the process of handling it would’ve taken a large amount of work. Xbox Live was a relatively new service at the time and to implement it on such a large scale with voice chat had never been done before.

Due to the lack of progress, Microsoft canceled the game on June 3, 2004 after nearly two years of development and just four months after the cancellation of Mythica.

All this isn’t to say that Microsoft isn’t capable of putting MMORPG’s on the Xbox. Black Desert Online, Elder Scrolls Online, and Tera are three games that are compatible on Xbox’s current hardware so it seems like Microsoft has finally established how to successfully implement MMORPG’s on its system…right?

One of the biggest MMORPG’s right now is Final Fantasy XIV. And it’s fanbase is rapidly growing, despite not being free to play. Sitting at 16 million players its fanbase is nothing to laugh at. Despite its success, however, while Microsoft would love to have it on Xbox, it has two rules in order for it to do so.

One: There cannot be any chat between people playing on different systems. And two: players cannot create or join guilds from other platforms. Director Naoki Yoshida stated that this was not something he wanted to do:

“I would like to have Microsoft change their regulations. For an MMORPG, a game which full communication is possible, regulations need to be created considering how massive an MMORPG is to have true crossplay FFXIV will not release crossplay without making this clear because that would only hurt the players. I think we can only try to continue having our discussions with those parties.”

The request does seem to be widespread with games such as Tera, that have no crossplay between PC, PS4, and Xbox though.

So it appears that Microsoft prefers to keep its players on their own servers. Why could this be? Brand loyalty? I’m not entirely sure myself but It does make me curious as to how they’ll choose to handle Phantasy Star Online 2. They’ve had an interesting history with putting MMO’s on their systems to say the least. And while I hope that Phantasy Star Online 2 is an improvement on their ability to establish MMO’s on their console, I can’t help but feel a bit hesitant.