Highlights

  • Xbox's profanity filter on Final Fantasy 14 over-censors innocent words and phrases, disrupting communication for players on the new platform.
  • Frustrated fans on Xbox have also faced bans for recruitment attempts on their free companies, leading to more disruptions in gameplay.
  • Hopefully, Microsoft will address these issues before the upcoming Dawntrail expansion to ensure a smooth player experience in Final Fantasy 14.

The profanity filter for the Xbox client of Final Fantasy 14 is going a bit overboard, censoring bizarre phrases and letter combinations in its chat interface. This is causing parts of otherwise innocuous words to be censored, even if they are across multiple words or a part of automatically-generated emote text in Final Fantasy 14.

After years of waiting, Final Fantasy 14 has finally been made available on Xbox Series X|S. Though it took more than a decade, the critically-acclaimed MMORPG has thrown wide the gates to a whole new community of players in doing so.

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However, it seems these Xbox Final Fantasy 14 fans are encountering some big problems on the new platform. The automated Xbox profanity filter is falsely flagging parts of words in Final Fantasy 14, replacing them with a series of question marks instead. Sequences of letters like “f up,” “std,” and other curses, slurs, and other words Xbox deems inappropriate are being censored in innocent phrases – even within system-generated emote text or across multiple words. “Yourself up,” “knight,” “harvest dance,” and even “class” are among the affected phrases, all of which appear in the story of Final Fantasy 14 frequently.

Xbox Censors Bizarre Words in Final Fantasy 14

Final Fantasy 14 has its own word filter that can be turned on or off, but the automated Xbox profanity system cannot be fully disabled. This not only leads to frustrating gaps in communication as players are forced to figure out what erroneously-censored words are, but also breaks immersion in the process. It is possible Xbox could fix its over-active profanity filter in the MMO in the future, but it has shown no indication of doing so yet, so Final Fantasy 14 fans will have to deal with the disruption indefinitely.

This isn’t the only frustration FF14 fans on Xbox have experienced. Some Final Fantasy 14 players have had their Xbox accounts banned for trying to recruit others to their free companies after being falsely accused of solicitation. Like the profanity filter, these bans are on Microsoft’s hands, so Final Fantasy 14 can do little about it.

Hopefully, Microsoft can iron out these bumps in its Xbox client before Dawntrail arrives. The next expansion for Final Fantasy 14 launches on July 2, with early access beginning on June 28. Dawntrail will be the first new expansion to release on Xbox, so it will be up to Microsoft as much as Square Enix to ensure the big update launches with as few disruptions to the player experience as possible.