The director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV is also working on the latest main installment in the series: Final Fantasy XVI. However, he does not intend to neglect his MMORPG because of this.
This is the situation: A few weeks ago, Square Enix announced the continuation of their main series with Final Fantasy XVI. The game is being directed by Naoki Yoshida and his Creative Business Unit III.
Yoshida is also responsible for the MMORPG FFXIV. There he simultaneously holds the roles of director and producer, so he is quite busy.
Accordingly, the question arose for many players regarding how Yoshida’s priorities would now be distributed in development.
What did Yoshida say? During the Tokyo Game Show stream, Yoshida shared a few words about his work on the two major games.
In response to a question from co-developer Yoko Taro about whether FFXVI content would also be shown in the stream, Yoshida laughed and said:
No, today in the program there is only FFXIV […] We want to focus on the development of FFXIV until 2021.[…]
Yoshida during the TGS
Apart from a teaser page, we should not expect any major news about FFXVI before 2021. However, FFXIV has a lot of content in the pipeline.
What is still planned for FFXIV until the end of 2020?
What’s next in October: For FFXIV, several major content updates are expected before the end of 2020. The first of these goes online on October 13.
It will continue the questline regarding the Bozjan South Front, where players can further enhance their “Queen’s Weapons.” They are the Shadowbringers equivalent to the relic weapons from earlier expansions.
In the Bozjan update, players can expect large instanced battles involving up to 72 participants. In addition to weapon upgrades, there will also be other rewards such as mounts and companions.
During the upcoming producer live stream on October 9, we will surely learn more about it and see gameplay footage.
Yoshida explained in the TGS stream that this update was slightly delayed. The reason for this was that the development team took a break during this time.
Normally, the break would have occurred in the summer, but that was not possible. Due to the corona lockdown, the team was already behind schedule with the major patch 5.3 and wanted to complete that as quickly as possible.
What’s next in December: Additionally, Yoshida provided a rough timeframe for the release of the next major content patch 5.4 during the TGS stream: The team is aiming for a release in December 2020.
This patch will, as always, continue the story of FFXIV, which now builds up to the next expansion. In addition, the final part of the Eden raid will be released.
Players will experience the conclusion of the Eden story and will be able to obtain new powerful equipment from the regular and epic boss battles.
What else is planned? Originally, the first of the three fan festivals for FFXIV was supposed to take place in November. However, due to corona, both the event in the USA and the one in Japan have already been canceled. Europe is currently still uncertain, even though it is supposed to take place at the end of February 2021.
Traditionally, new expansions of FFXIV are introduced at these fan festivals. The team has been known for a while to be working on the next expansion.
However, it is still unclear how exactly it will be presented to the players. Square Enix could follow the example of other fairs and festivals, such as gamescom 2020 or BlizzConline by Blizzard, and hold a purely online event.
Whether they will actually do that or find another solution remains to be seen.
