During the press tour for Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, we at MeinMMO had the opportunity to speak with the MMORPG’s director, Naoki Yoshida. Here’s what he had to tell us.
This is Naoki Yoshida: The head of the MMORPG took over shortly after the disastrous launch of version 1.0 and is considered the savior of the game in the FFXIV community. Since the successful reboot in 2013, he and his team have released 3 expansions and made FFXIV the most lucrative FF title ever.
Currently, Yoshida and his team are putting the final touches on the upcoming expansion Endwalker, which will conclude the current storyline of the game. The narrative has been ongoing for over 10 years and is expected to find a worthy ending.
In the interview during the press tour, we discussed comparisons to WoW, the classes and jobs of FF14, and the newly improved Trust system. The interview was conducted together with our colleagues from GameStar, Games.ch, and PCGames.
“This game is good, this game is bad. As if there were a war.”
Question: World of Warcraft is currently facing issues, and many WoW players are switching to Final Fantasy 14 as their main game. What do you think about this development? Are there any opportunities or challenges that come with this transition, especially for Endwalker?
Naoki Yoshida: I think there are some people who always try to make comparisons. There aren’t as many as before, but some. They say: “This game is good, this game is bad.” As if there were a war that this game has won and that game has lost. And to be honest, I don’t like it at all; I’m really not happy about it.
[…] When we look at World of Warcraft, we’re just looking back at the time when Square Enix originally released 1.0, it was a huge failure and the game was terrible. So when I took on the responsibility for the project and worked on “A Realm Reborn”, I looked at what the best MMORPG model on the market was as reference material.
And that was of course World of Warcraft. And because I used that as reference material, one can certainly say that without WoW, there would be no FF14 as we know it today.
I think that when people make such comparisons, they are primarily rude to World of Warcraft. And since I really respect them [Blizzard] as developers, it’s really rude when people make such criticism.
So, the fact that players from World of Warcraft have been playing the game for so long and are now trying out Final Fantasy 14 and just talking about it. I must say, it just makes me so happy to know that they are so open and starting with FFXIV now.
So I think in your question, you mentioned a switch from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy 14, but I want to say that it’s really good to play many different kinds of games. If someone, for example, finishes Endwalker and completes all raids, they might want to try out New World, which has just been released. Or when the new World of Warcraft expansion comes out, they can try that too.
Even for me as a developer, it stimulates me when I try out these other games, and it gives me different new insights that I might not have had before. So I think it’s really good to play many different games.
But in general terms, when it comes to the fact that there are now so many new players enjoying the game. I’m really glad to hear that. That’s really something nice to hear.
Question: Final Fantasy XIV has received a lot of attention from WoW players and content creators in recent months. What is your opinion on this, and what feedback have you received from them?
Naoki Yoshida: I’ve noticed that WoW players, when they play FFXIV, are very fair in their assessment of the experience.
Of course, it doesn’t make sense to compare a high-end raid from “A Realm Reborn” to content, because those are naturally two different things.
They [the WoW players] also appreciate that you’re still learning your job at level 30, that you’re still getting used to the actions and the rotations.
They also know that you have to see things from the right perspective when comparing and evaluating things. And they say that directly and clearly in their streams and comments. This fair assessment that they make and that they enjoy both games really makes me happy.
The result of this is that we are now in a situation where players level up faster than the story of FFXIV progresses.
So when players enter content that was originally designed for a certain level, they are higher than the level of the content. That could be a dungeon. This means they are downscaled.
But this reduces the number of abilities they can use in the content, even though they are already at a higher level. That was something we obviously didn’t realize when we made the level adjustments back then.
Yoshida wants to abolish the class system, but…
Question: I had a lot of fun playing the Sage, and I think it’s one of the most interesting classes in any MMO I’ve ever played. I would really like to know what the design process looked like or what inspirations you may have drawn from other things.
Naoki Yoshida: When we decide which jobs to add to each expansion, we consider which roles we need to add jobs for. When we announced Shadowbringers and then the Gunbreaker as a new tank, we received a lot of feedback from players.
We found that they had already asked before the release of Shadowbringers, “Why didn’t you add a healer?” and then we decided that we definitely needed a new healer. In this regard, it was actually a very smooth and quick process to choose this job for Endwalker.
However, for the Sage, it was a tricky process. Whenever we introduce a new job to the game, it’s difficult to showcase the unique features of that job or to get the most out of it.
With the introduction of the Sage, that would mean there are now a total of four healers in the game. So we decided to split them into two categories: shield healers and pure power healers. And they had their own objectives or roles as healers. Based on that, we decided to bring the Sage in the direction of a technical barrier healer. That was the goal we pursued with the introduction of the Sage.
So we’ve received a lot of feedback from players who play healers. These players, who enjoy participating in high-end content like raids, often give feedback that they would like more options for attacking rather than just healing. For these players, we decided to implement this concept in the Sage.
- For example, there are elements where when you attack, you also heal someone else,
- or it’s connected to a barrier for another person. And when the barrier breaks, you receive a resource that you can also use to attack.
In this regard, the Sage is quite a technical task to attack the enemy and also heal. And that’s why it’s difficult to use at the beginning. You need to take your time and get used to it. But it’s more of a technical challenge for those who want to try it out.
Question: New players have to level up a lot before they can play jobs like Gunbreaker or Reaper. Have you ever considered abolishing the class system and starting with jobs?
Yoshida: So if you ask me whether I want to abolish classes or not, then I want to abolish them. The reason it would be difficult is that it’s just an enormous effort. At the moment, many elements in the game are structured based on the class system. So when you start at level one, you have class quests. It would be a question of whether we could replace these and introduce job quests instead.
And many elements of the system, like experience points depend on the class and not their job. So if we wanted to abolish the classes, we would have to replace all these elements in the system. And that’s why it would cost a lot of money. Our honest feeling is that we want to do this for the players, but we just don’t have the capacity to do it. But I want to achieve that one day. […]
“The story is everything”
Question: Since Shadowbringers, you can play dungeons alone thanks to the Trust system. But this system is not implemented in older content. You mentioned in the past the possibility of implementing the system in content before Shadowbringers. What’s the current status of that?
Naoki Yoshida: I would like to explain the background of this feature. When we developed the system for 5.0, the basis of it was quite difficult to handle. The system itself was very technical and that meant only a handful of our very experienced developers could work with the system to produce content. This included things like preparing the gambits or the combat AI and such elements, and ensuring that they worked like a human.
It was about ensuring that the NPCs solved the mechanics in the dungeons correctly. So that was a very technical matter. When we planned 6.0, we made preparations to work on the base system that we have for the Trust system. So we revised it to make it “more generic,” in the positive sense of the word.
This means that it is now accessible to more developers:
- For example, we built it so that the tank retaliates at the right time during an incoming AoE attack.
- The tank will also correctly and appropriately apply defensive buffs.
- And when a spell comes that attacks the player, they can interrupt that as well.
There are also other elements of this expanded Trust system that I can’t unfortunately reveal; that would be a spoiler for the players.
Unfortunately, we are not able to implement it for older content for 6.0. But after the release of 6.0, I would like to take some time to report in a producer letter. And I would love to share some plans of what we want to do in the future with the players, but that will only happen after the release of Endwalker.
Question: A casual question to finish: What is your favorite new content or innovation in Endwalker?
Naoki Yoshida: We create different content and we really want players to enjoy it all. But I think the main focus lies on the main story of Endwalker; the main story is everything.
In Shadowbringers, the main premise of the story was that the player is responsible for bringing the darkness back to the world. And in that sense, it was a very straightforward development. The drama was focused on that.
In Endwalker it’s different because in Endwalker there are different parts of the world where various dramas unfold, but all of which are somehow connected. In that sense, I think players will experience a wide range of emotions. It will be a very emotional experience.
So I really hope that players don’t rush through the story. I really want them to take their time, enjoy it, and soak in the dialogues, really look closely, and analyze the dialogue with the characters. I would be very happy about that.
We thank Yoshida-san for the interview.
Here by the way, is what my colleague Mary from GameStar, a long-time WoW player, thinks about the Endwalker expansion:
Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker wants to deliver what I sorely miss in WoW.
