FFXV's Royal Pack: Facing The Dangers Of "Games As A Service"

Released to coincide with the release of Final Fantasy XV’s PC edition in March of 2018, the Royal Pack downloadable content is the apotheosis of XV’s bizarre, and often disjointed, approach to post-launch content for a single-player game. The fifteenth mainline entry of Square-Enix’s storied Final Fantasy franchise was a divisively modern and unconventional JRPG. Despite launching with the intent to appeal to both new players and long-time fans, XV proved so unpopular with those fans who had numerous preconceptions of what a Final Fantasy game should be that each piece of downloadable content has sought to resolve the criticisms held by the core fan-base. This featured everything from extended narrative sequences to a plethora of combat extensions and, as the content plan has progressed, the changes have become more and more profound. The Royal Pack, and particularly the changes to XV’s Chapter 14, is the culmination of this.

The expansion to XV’s final dungeon does not only add optional content (though it has this in spades, featuring vehicular exploration, side-quests and a new super-boss), but makes fundamental changes to the tone, pacing and even story of XV. These changes expose the poorly conceived post-launch content plan, as each instance works individually but, when combined, fail nonetheless. The new “Rulers of Yore” boss fights are some of the games best, featuring some fantastic music and well conceived quick-time events, and it’s hard to shrug off the other gameplay enhancements (the scale of the City of Insomnia is particularly pleasing). The additional character crescendos work similarly, as each party member gets a “Ruler of Yore” boss to defeat of their own, and these prove necessary to cap off their inclusion in the game as main, playable characters. But, the game wasn’t designed with these instances in mind and it shows. Retroactively adding content to the chapter affects its tone and continuity, as characters transition from sombre to melodramatic seamlessly. The Royal Pack content sticks out blindingly and appears to have been implemented with very little care. Adding a new boss fight between the party’s entry of the citadel and exploration further in leads to the party’s odd exclamation that the room is lit up, long after first entering.

The original XV has, what I feel is, one of modern gaming’s finest endings. It’s sombre, regretful and often feels like a counter to the conventional JRPG ending, which requires incomparable action feats and melodramatic character exclamations. That one of XV’s most powerful scenes is a man struggling to express his emotions to his friends around a campfire highlights the uniqueness of vanilla XV. The Royal Pack content runs antithesis to this, with party members who no longer look, talk and act like the genuine people we had previously enjoyed in the rest of the game. Even when the game provided a fantasy setting, just with cars, the party fulfilled the promise of a “fantasy based on reality”. These melodramatic reimagining’s of the characters which we see in the new Chapter 14 are not only at odds with the rest of the chapter, but with their appearance in the game itself.

It’s not only the characters who are more melodramatic and conventionally ‘JRPG’ either, the relentless boss fights and cinematic moments dilute the special moments that were already there. An addition of Lunafreya and the host of Summons (in-game deities) removes the thrill of seeing both Lunafreya again and the debut of Bahamut, most powerful of the Summons, as he had already showed up in this additional sequence. It shows in actual gameplay, also. With the transformation of a generic encounter into the cinematic Cerberus boss, the already present Ifrit boss, three new “Rulers of Yore” encounters (The Fierce, The Rogue and The Mystic) and Ardyn’s final boss, the Chapter 14 pacing is completely transformed. No longer is there a sombre, regretful walk to your final encounter, its place is taken by bombastic action; there’s no anticipation in the Royal Pack Chapter 14, only the next set piece.

It becomes clear that the Chapter 14 expansion became more about the transmedia Final Fantasy XV Universe than the game itself, working primarily to embed Kingsglaive (the CG prequel film) and Comrades (the multiplayer expansion) into the universe some more. Monsters and themes of Kingsglaive are suitably realised in the expanded dungeon, whilst you can also encounter the player’s custom character and others from Comrades. The failure of Comrades was in its fundamentally misunderstanding of the appeal of XV, creating a dark, bitter world, with no exploration or character, for its multiplayer mode and it is this misunderstanding of their own product that has caused such a tumultuous post-launch content plan to take hold.

So, why, months after release, is it critical to imperil XV’s Royal Pack? Simply, the post-launch meddling sets a concerning precedent for live-service single player games. The original Chapter 14, as it stands, may never gain the benefit of hindsight or any future reconsideration. To question the archivist, which goes in the vault: the Day One Edition, the Royal Edition or both? Those who have paid for the Royal Pack content have a perfectly functional game transformed into something new, whether you feel it as a lesser experience or not. Here, the consumer is paying to have a product renovated according to populist whims, with currently no option to experience the vanilla version (particularly on PC). This brings into question the entire notion of video games as a storytelling medium; are they to tell the stories developers want to tell or stories that fans want to experience?

Final Fantasy XV is arguably the biggest “live-service” single player game we’ve so far seen, which is why the post-launch content has often felt so strange. It’s really the first of its kind. The story is now developed according to the whims of service payers, leading new additions to be implemented in an incongruous and unfocused way. This is important to note in the context of live service multiplayer games damaging interest in single player games (or, at least, the belief of developers that this is the case). Already we have seen a transition towards open, sandbox single player game design, foregoing linearity in exchange for potential Twitch popularity. XV is the next step in this development. It may have been a hybrid live/conventional dlc model (XV had no lootboxes or microtransactions, operating its service on sales of a Season Pass), but the Royal Pack content exposes the future of single player games that attempt to emulate it. For future development of “live” single player games, the lessons on this subject are all to be found in the fraught (and on-going) history of Final Fantasy XV.