It’s been almost seven years since the release of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, a game whose story has been recounted countless times, after putting Naoki Yoshida in the director’s chair, who since pulled the game from the brink of disaster with the release of A Realm Reborn. Fast forward seven years, with a few critically-acclaimed expansions under their belts, the Final Fantasy 14 team looks back at older content, and introducing the game to new players with patch 5.3.
“There isn’t any time to relax, or chill out at the moment,” producer and director Naoki Yoshida tells me over Zoom. Final Fantasy 14 has just hit 20 million registered players, but according to Yoshida it’s still not enough for Square-Enix’s President and CEO, Yosuke Matsuda. “We have to continue driving this forward, so there’s really no time to relax, or lower our guard.”
The latest patch for Final Fantasy 14 was delayed by a few months, due to disruption no thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, as announced via a live stream from Yoshida in May. “The situation has affected us heavily these past months. It’s really hard for us to get back on track.” With schedules out of the window, just what is it like to run an active MMO with millions of players during a pandemic?
“Even through this situation, the FF14 team is in a good workflow, there’s a great team with a high sense of responsibility… At the moment, 90 per cent of developers are working from home currently, and they’re starting to get familiar with the change in environment. As for the mentality and psychological perspective. I’m confident that we’re all quite stable, and we can focus on the work. We’re getting back to normality.”
5.3 is due to be released on the 11th of August, and Square-Enix has since released a mini site for all the new additions to the game. However, just underneath the surface more significant changes are being made to the game in order to accommodate new players, starting with a complete overhaul of the content released in the original game, which was created in just two and a half years, according to Yoshida.
“We needed to create really tight guidelines for creating quests. For example, they have to make each quest 9 minutes long, including all the text and all that. Because we had the concept that we want the players to spend a lot of time on those quests, that’s why we made that kind of guideline for each quest. With that, as a result, it kind of revealed so many quests that may be unnecessary, or lots of excess steps which you don’t really need, so we wanted to revisit and remove all the excess quests and unnecessary bits, because we thought that the focus has to be for players to enjoy the storyline.”