I was as shocked and surprised as anyone when Sony’s Jack Tretton took the stage at E3 and announced to the world that SquareEnix’s Final Fantasy XIV was not only in the works, not only arriving in 2010, but would be a PlayStation 3 exclusive title (as long as you don’t count the PC format).

Then details began leaking out and it became a lot less impressive. Here’s why: Final Fantasy XIV will be the next “MMO” from SquareEnix. Yup, the company is ready to move on from Final Fantasy XI, which wasn’t nearly as successful as SquareEnix had hoped.

By launching a new MMO in the Final Fantasy series, SquareEnix hopes to take advantage of several new market realities. First, Sony has a much stronger online community built up than in the PS2 generation. Every PS3 has a hard drive. And the next-gen firepower fill allow SquareEnix to make FFXIV that much more impressive.

On the downside, its unlikely that FFXIV will stay a PS3 exclusive for longer than maybe the first year, and the monthly fees are likely to limit the appeal of the title, just as they did for FFXI. As nice as this announcement may be, it still lacks the punch that would have been delivered if FFXIV had been announced as a single-player, offline RPG that was a PS3 exclusive. Color me, and the acne pills-needing crowd for that matter, disappointed.