Naoki Yoshida and the Square Enix team showed up at PAX Prime in Seattle this past weekend to offer Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn fans an in-person apology regarding the current state of affairs for the login and character creation servers as well as the not-so-beloved errors we’ve grown quite accustomed to since launch. Yoshi reiterated that the team severely underestimated how many fans would pick up the re-release of the game and said that by Wednesday– after the extended maintenance is over– most login issues should be fixed.
During PAX, the team had a bunch of goodies for fans, of course, most of which coming in the way of new bits of information and interviews. Massively, especially, caught a pretty awesome interview with Naoki Yoshida himself. Let’s take a look at some of those tasty tidbits, shall we? Keep reading to take a look.
- Naoki Yoshida intends for the endgame content in FFXIV: ARR to be truly difficult and reward players who work awesomely together and employ perfect teamwork.
- Square Enix is already working on the next three updates for the game– 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3. The plot for the next expansion is even already written.
- 2.1 will include the PvP Wolves’ Den, player housing, daily quests, hardmode dungeons, and instance battles. All of these features are ready to go.
- Future updates are going to be meaty, each featuring a great deal of content that should satisfy both casual and hardcore players.
- The team plans to introduce Gilgamesh at some point. They want to make him part of a multiple-patch update or a broad questline in order to not make the introduction a “one time” deal.
- We’ll probably see more classes branch off into multiple jobs like the current Arcanist -> Summoner or Scholar setup. Dark Knight, anyone?
- He also mentioned the possibility of having new jobs that require multiple current jobs. A Red Mage, for example, might be created by obtaining both White Mage and Black Mage.
- Speaking of which, there’s a high possibility of us seeing new jobs before a future expansion.
- Server transfers will be available within two to three months.
- Daily quests will expand on the story behind the beast tribes in Eorzea. They will feature new rewards to encourage players to check them out.
- One of Yoshida’s goals was to make FFXIV: ARR accessible to both an MMORPG player and a pure single-player RPG gamer who’s in love with the Final Fantasy universe. The tutorials at the beginning of the game and the way the game slowly ramps up in difficulty help ease single-player gamers into an MMO world.
- Yoshida seems open to the idea of flying mounts, and even mentioned that the way the game is set up, the control systems would support such a feature.
- The team’s looking at how to give players the functionality of using the world map to travel to other Aetherytes instead of having to hassle with menus.
As always, Yoshida expressed his deepest thanks and gratitude to the community for giving him and Final Fantasy XIV a second chance. He’s ecstatic with how much the fans have enjoyed it so far (when we can log in, of course). It’s quite unprecedented to see an MMORPG go through a massive revival like this one, and I think it’s safe to say that if Square Enix’s server fixes work as planned, FFXIV: ARR‘s revival has been a success.
Special thanks to Massively for both pieces of FFXIV: ARR PAX coverage that helped us fill in the gaps.
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