Final Fantasy 14 E3 2009 Interview Transcript

Director Nobuaki Komoto:

"The keyword with Final Fantasy 14 is character development. In addition to the rich story telling prevalent in the Final Fantasy games we plan on incorporating a wide variety of quests designed with a focus on playability, where as in Final Fantasy XI you would just do maybe simple battles, concentrate on the battles to develop your character. In Final Fantasy 14 we hope to maybe expand on that and have your character develop through the story and not just battles. We are also planning the implantation of some new systems which really expand on past contents."

"In Final Fantasy XI, yes there were alot of problems, we learned alot through things we thought would work well but maybe failed and we hope to take that and use that in Final Fantasy 14, to make it a better game. One of the things that we really liked about FF XI though was the job system, and how it gave the players alot of different options and they could try alot of different things and it kept them playing the game for a long time. We hope to expand on that job system and offer even more options in a different way."

"As you said in Final Fantasy XI the focus was on party play, the unfortunate thing with that was it would take time get a party together and it would take time waiting you know for people to get together, to go on the quests or go on these missions. Players that didn't have much time to play they would not be able to play in parties. This time we hope to have more solo orientated play, so people that don't have as much time, people don't have to think about their schedules, they can play at any time without waiting."

"The original reasoning behind PlayOnline was to have multiple contents all on one portal and because in the recent years the content on that portal has gone down, we felt that it wasn't justifiable to have this new product on that portal any more. What we are trying to work on now is more of the connection between the FF XI community and FF 14 community and how those are going to be working together, and we felt that PlayOnline wasn't correct portal for that."

"We believe that the combat system in Final Fantasy 14 will be very different from the one in Final Fantasy XI, we believe that it will be closer to that real time battle that you see in other MMO's. First of all the job type of system will be very different. It depends on again the style of play that the player wants, for this day they'll choose this weapon and with using that weapon they will develop in this certain way. The next day they choose maybe another weapon for a different type of battle and their character will develop in a different way."

"During development process we have always been checking out lots of other MMO's, War Craft, Age of Conan, War Hammer Online. But the biggest thing that we have been concentrating on is more of Final Fantasy XI, to find out whats going on in the Final Fantasy XI community and how the players are reacting to that but we have the developments in that game aswell."

"As we are making the game we are constantly thinking what we can take from previous Final Fantasy games, weather it be names, monsters, system type things, story pieces and what we can take from other games, what we can take maybe from XI. We always and we have ideas of maybe using things from previous games, but what we wanna do is maybe use them in a way that will surprise users, something that they don't expect."

Producer Hiromichi Tanaka:

"As we mentioned before, the schedule for the launch of the beta is still not been decided. Basically we're going to continue development and when we get to a point that we think that a beta test would be ready, then we'll release it to the public then. In Final Fantasy XI we did about 3 to 4 months of beta testing but we hope that for Final Fantasy 14 to have a little bit longer period of beta testing."

"One of the main concepts behind Final Fantasy 14 is to have a game that's tailored to all different types of players with all different play styles. Players that have alot of time, give them something to do, have players that don't have much time, players without time, give them something to do and make them have a full experience in that small amount of time, while providing new experiences that you can't find in any other MMORPG's."