During the Gamescom 2014 in Cologne, we had the chance to talk to Naoki Yoshida who is the producer of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Here’s the english script.
JPGAMES.DE: When you took on the job of Hiromichi Tanaka, what were your feelings? It must have been a great pile of tasks that you took on. Did you know what kind of work you had to expect and what were the first things you changed in the game when you took on development?
Yoshida-San: Before I joined XIV I was more focused on the Dragon Quest side of the series, so until then I was more like a fan boy of Final Fantasy. When I tried out XIV I must admit, I was a bit annoyed. I thought: what is this? My main thought at the time was: I need to do something about this. Whenever you want to change something you need a thorough plan and you need to know what you’re doing. So before I changed anything all I’ve done was a thorough research and planning. That being said, changing nothing in the game wouldn’t be exciting so one of the first things I’ve done was to scale up the monsters since the world of XIV seemed too peaceful. That was the quickest thing to do. I believe it was important to change things quickly at the time so we changed things anywhere we could as fast as possible.
JPGAMES.DE: You hear many good things about A Realm Reborn, the reception by both media and fans were positive. Do you think your hard work paid off in the end? Has the game fullfilled all of the expectations of the fans?
Yoshida-San: Regarding the first part of the question: absolutely. I’m so lucky. If I say I’m not satisfied with the reception by the community or media I feel people are going to hate me so.. (laughs). About my satisfaction with the result: I have been receiving this question from many people. Our biggest aim was to regain the trust from our community. That’s not something you can measure with numbers. But seeing many players enjoying our game, that’s definitely a great thing. Also, on 25th August we are going to start the Chinese version of the game. That’s another big step in reaching more players on the globe.
JPGAMES.DE: During production, members of other Square Enix development teams joined your production. How many people are currently working on your game and are still developers from other teams working for you?
Yoshida-San: First of all, I usually like to answer any question but this is something I’ve been forbidden by the company to answer. I cannot disclose the exact number of dev team members. But I can tell you we have more than 250 people in the dev team. I said ‚more than‘ so it could be three hundred or even four hundred. It’s not 250, it’s more than that. And for example: graphic assets are something that have been developed in-house as well as outsourced, so we do have outsourced studios all over the world and the numbers of those studios are not incluced in the 250 number I mentioned earlier.
And if we start adding up the operations teams, the infrastructure and community teams I lose the count. I don’t know how many hundreds of people we have involved with the game. To clarify, when you say members of other Square Enix teams joined our production, those were people who worked on Final Fantasy games in the past. But we didn’t pull them from current productions of other games. For example, we have the main game designers from Final Fantasy V and VI there, and we also have Final Fantasy XI staff there, as well as development people from Final Fanasy XII. Especially a lot of people from the XII staff.
JPGAMES.DE: What’s the current status of the development of the Direct X 11 client? Do you know when you are going to release it?
Yoshida-San: Two days before I left for Cologne we tested the Direct X 11 version to check the quality. We have already covered all the graphics shaders and all the technology required for the Direct X 11 version. However, some codes haven’t been optimized yet which is affecting the perfomance. Our graphics team is working on optimizing those codes. At the final stage, NVIDIA engineers are going to join us. They are very cooperative and will work with our graphics team to further optimize the client. At the earliest, the client will be released at the end of this year. Before then, we will probably have a trailer ready to compare the Direct X 9 and 11 versions.
JPGAMES.DE: Will there be a PvP game mode where free companies are going to be able to fight against each other?
Yoshida-San: I think that’s a great idea. I am a huge PvP fan myself so it’s really exciting to think about a mode where we’ll see which free companies are the strongest. I really want to increase the number of pvp players in the game and we will make sure the the balance is adjusted and there are more exciting rules brought into the game. So yeah, I think the idea is cool.
JPGAMES.DE: With your last big update you implemented fantasia potions which can change the race and sex of your own character. Will it be possible to change the characters name in the near future?
Yoshida-San: We are already working on it. Bear with us a little longer.
JPGAMES.DE: You are a very busy man but do you still have to time to play games yourself? What are the games you enjoyed in the past?
Yoshida-San: The most exciting game I’m playing at the moment is Final Fantasy XIV. But also I believe it is the obvious thing to do for an MMO director. I’ve played over 250 matches in frontline mode. I’m sacrifing my time to sleep to work on and play Final Fantasy XIV but I’m enjoying it. The only thing I’m really sad about being in Germany is that I don’t have time to play XIV.
JPGAMES.DE: Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Yoshida.