Naoki Yoshida is grinning. The Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn director and producer’s expression suggests each an air of fond nostalgia and horrified recollection as he talks concerning the daunting strategy of overhauling the sport.
“We had a list of about 10,000 points that we wanted to change or improve when we began the process of turning Final Fantasy XIV into Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn,” he tells us. “When reviewing those we realised that we couldn’t address all of those points. Something like 80% per cent of them couldn’t be achieved with our 1.0 release, because the structure itself at the heart of the game was broken.”
Last time we spoke to Yoshida the topic was what will be next for Final Fantasy XIV after Stormblood.
Yoshida appears to have stepped straight out of the sport itself, wearing its new-found success. His hair is rigorously manicured, formed to look as if it has not been touched, his fingers are coated within the sort of jewelry you’ll anticipate from a JRPG protagonist, whereas the subtlety of his glasses betray their expense.
He laughs, too. Often. Which will not be at all times typical in interviews which are sure by the formalities and rigidity you should adhere to when speaking via a translator. In complete, he presents a youthful, extra progressive face of an organization and sequence that – it may very well be argued – have already skilled their most interesting hours. If anybody was going to resurrect and reinvent the ailing recreation then, on reflection, it was going to be Yoshida.
“We decided to start over from scratch so that we could offer something really cool with FFXIV and give something back to those players already with us and, along with that, attract new ones,” Yoshida continues. “I think that was the right thing to do, and if we hadn’t started over again we wouldn’t have been able to have come back in such a successful way.”
Yoshida’s need to ‘give something back’ to the gamers is smart after you may have spoken to him about his historical past with the Final Fantasy sequence. A Realm Reborn is the primary time he labored on it – previous to this, he was centered on Dragon Quest, together with Dragon Quest X, the fantasy sequence’ foray into the MMO style. But all through this time he describes himself as “just another Final Fantasy fan boy” who was “particularly fond of FFIII and FVII.” He sees himself as a Final Fantasy fan first, and a developer second.
“When playing Final Fantasy before I came to work on the series I had thought that the level of fan service was sometimes lacking and that the games didn’t always match what the players wanted,” Yoshida says.
“Of course, we – the developers – are the ones giving out the entertainment, and so it’s up to us deliver something that’s relevant. However, it’s important for the players to let us know what it is that they want us to make and I have always thought that it is very important for Final Fantasy to embrace this.”
This core imaginative and prescient impressed the inspiration for A Realm Reborn. Yoshida got down to create an MMO that was akin to a modern-day theme park, one by which all ages of gamers – from youngsters to millennials, to the now middle-aged followers of the primary Final Fantasy releases – may come collectively and expertise the identical occasions via their very own filters of understanding and curiosity.
Such an inclusive strategy feels particularly related at the moment provided that the sequence will likely be celebrating its 30th anniversary this December. However, Yoshida nonetheless needed to observe the broad guidelines that Final Fantasy has outlined for its core titles up till now. Most importantly, A Realm Reborn needed to have a story.
“FFXIV is an MMO, but before that it’s an RPG, and before that it’s a Final Fantasy game,” Yoshida states firmly. “At the heart of that rests a focus on making the main scenario something that players care about. We have spent a huge amount of time making sure that the story is as vital to this game as it is to other numbered Final Fantasy titles.”
Players have been taking part in A Realm Reborn and its varied expansions for over 4 years now. The Garleans have been pushed again, the Scions stay amongst The Rising Stones, and the liberation of Ala Mhigo and Doma has been undertaken. Where is the story going from right here on out?
“The overall story is ongoing and we have some plans as to how to end it. We’re gradually moving towards that point, but that doesn’t mean that the game is going to end as a service,” Yoshida says. “Hypothetically speaking, there is a chance that a new storyline could start up once this one is finished – but nothing has been decided yet. It’s all just a bunch of options at the moment and our main priority to make sure players are still having fun.”
Keeping gamers engaged – regardless of if there’s new story content material accessible to them or not – represents arguably the best problem builders of MMOs will face, and A Realm Reborn is not any completely different in that regard.
Whether it’s engaged on enhancing the expertise for brand spanking new gamers, tweaking and progressing the top-level content material for veterans, or understanding exactly how new kinds and examples of fan service could be added with out undermining the sport’s standing as an entity in its personal proper, an MMO’s standing as a ‘service’ units it aside from different creations.
But there can nonetheless be progress and achievements inside such an ongoing entity, and even a way of decision – not simply when it comes to the yarn spun by its writers, but in addition within the vindication earnt by a group of builders who’ve remodeled what was as soon as disastrous into an unmitigated success.
“I’d never tell you that the game is perfect,” Yoshida says, “as a result of that wouldn’t be true provided that we’ve at all times received issues that we wish to add and alter. There isn’t a degree at which you’ll be able to say that an MMO is completed.
“Still, if you happen to look again to 2013 after we launched A Realm Reborn we have been in a troublesome state of affairs given the time constraints and the quantity of labor we needed to get via. I don’t suppose we may have achieved something greater than we did at that time.”
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