Translations (French -> English)

[Vingtdeux]

Part 1 of more elaborate translations (I'm taking some freedom to combine questions with similar subjects and such):


FFR : The decision to redo FFXIV few months after its launch is a hard decision to take. How did your team take it ? Did you have problemns to motivate them ?

Y-P: Since the team was aware of how the community felt about the game and knew the problems, everyone understood.

They did not lose their motivation, they acted like given a second chance. One thing I insisted on was: “What type of MMO do you want to build ?”.

We want to game to live through the next 10 years, so we felt better to re-work it now than in few years.


FFU : We heard you met Blizzard. What did you talk about ?

Y-P: When we met Blizzard’s director, who is a die hard fan of FFVII, it started the conversation really well (laugh).

The conversation was mostly about managing teams, how updates are managed and additional content.
We discussed about how WoW succeeded, their challenges and problems they face. Everythiung was detailed and precise, and passionate.

In Blizzard’s office, there’s a human size statue with the words: “Priority is game experience”. We learned a lot from their advices, especially on how to make the game experience better for the community. We’ll try to do that for FFXIV.


FFU : Japanese MMORPG’s are deeply different from the others. Did you think about changing the game mechanics to make it more accessible to WoW or Lotro players ?

Y-P: You’ll recognize some aspects from popular MMORPG’s when you try out 2.0 Alpha and Beta. Especially the battle system which is now more dynamic.

I hope you’ll enjoy the improvements. The UI will prolly be the most important change. With this new design, if you played WoW, it will be easy to feel comfortable in the game environment.


Finaland : FFXIV launch has been considered a fail by the fans. You never talked about the number of active accounts. Do you have an objective ?

Y-P: Yes, we do have an objective, but we can’t talk about it. However, the most important thing is to get trust back.

As long as the game is interesting, I think players will come back and motivate others to try it. Game experience is really the priority.

We’re counting on the Beta test to convince many players. When we compare January 2012 accounts and yesterday’s, we doubled the number of active accounts.

The best way to promote the game is to make the players talk about it. We’ll also have a promotional campaign.

[Allistar]

FFU : We heard you met Blizzard. What did you talk about ?

Y-P: When we met Blizzard’s director, who is a die hard fan of FFVII, it started the conversation really well (laugh).

The conversation was mostly about managing teams, how updates are managed and additional content.
We discussed about how WoW succeeded, their challenges and problems they face. Everythiung was detailed and precise, and passionate.

In Blizzard’s office, there’s a human size statue with the words: “Priority is game experience”. We learned a lot from their advices, especially on how to make the game experience better for the community. We’ll try to do that for FFXIV.

I applaud this here...

FFU : Japanese MMORPG’s are deeply different from the others. Did you think about changing the game mechanics to make it more accessible to WoW or Lotro players ?

Y-P: You’ll recognize some aspects from popular MMORPG’s when you try out 2.0 Alpha and Beta. Especially the battle system which is now more dynamic.

I hope you’ll enjoy the improvements. The UI will prolly be the most important change. With this new design, if you played WoW, it will be easy to feel comfortable in the game environment.

But what if after playing WoW, I preferred XI UI and battle system and party mechanics...how wiil this affect other players like myself...???

[Babydoll]

The best way to promote the game is to make the players talk about it.

players talking about it might be good but commercials during prime time and advertising are more successful. ^^; see: wow. All their tv and known commercials were helpful in getting subs..they made that mistake with xi, little to no tv advertisement :x

[Vingtdeux]

Part 2


FFU : You said you wanted better interaction with social medias. How will that affect The Lodestone ?

Y-P: We are recreating The Lodestone for 2.0. We focus on community functionalities. There will be Free Companies, who are like Guilds.

We do not think it is really useful to propose blogs or journals for the players since everyone has Facebook or Twitter today. If we do not have all that on Lodestone, I asked the development team to make sure there are links between guilds and social medias.

Finaland : You mentioned previously that you wanted the possibility for players to have access to their inventory, auctions, etc … through smartphones and PS Vita apps.

Y-P: I don’t remember talking about Vita (note: they link to an interview where he talks about it), but concerning Smartphones, we keep working on it and an application will be available at 2.0’s launch.

This app will allow Free Companies to check their members gear or plan events. We plan other functionalities with this app, which will be free, but we can’t talk about it yet.

FFR : When we met last November, you talked about integrating past FF’s stuff into FFXIV. How will that work ? Aren’t you afraid that will unbalance the game universe with so many references to past FF’s?

Y-P: I’m not afraid of breaking the game universe, since each Final Fantasy is radically different with each game, and everything can happen, which is really nice from a development point of view.

For 2.0, we’ll have the Crystal Tower from FFIII. We also plan to add a casino that we might call Golden Saucer, that FFVII player will remember. That’s the kind of references that we want to do, and we hope fans like them.

For Chocobo racing, I received a lot of suggestion from the developers, but none pleased me enough so far. They weren’t adapted for a MMORPG. They are still motivated to find the perfect idea, and we’ll talk about it when we have it.

For FFXIV uniqueness, we’ll have the return of Battle Regiments. It will be very dynamic and specific to FFXIV.

Also, MMO lately trend a lot toward MO. For FFXIV, we want to make sure that instanced and open world content are correctly balanced, to have content for everyone (hardcores and casuals). You will understand when you play, but this balance will be unique to FFXIV in the world of MMORPG’s.


FFU : Ever went to Vana’fest ? Do you want similar events for FFXIV ?

Y-P: I couldn’t go to Vana’fest this year because of 2.0 work. Having a specific festival for FFXIV is something I’d like. This will be studied once 2.0 is launched and everyone enjoy the game experience.

[Zdenka]

Erk. Also the last bit kind of contradicts everyone saying XIV will fade out of existence once they started billing. :3

Since billing doesn't include the players they lost when it started so lets say

Free Players 100,000
Billing Start 5,000
Current 10,000

(this was an example to show just that piece of information doesn't say a ton)

So it doesn't provide much information other than that since Jan12 there's 2x as many players, which may be a lot less than the # of free players was in Dec11.

[Chinook]

Third and last part:


FFR: Recently, FFXIII-2 producer Motomu Toriyama was saying that Square Enix was thinking on reducing his own teams to use more outsourcing. As producer of a big team, what do you think about this ?

Y-P: I know I'm one of the rare to talk about the size of his team, but to tell you the thruth, we also have an external one at Square Enix, one time and half bigger than ours.
Outsourcing is really important, and is efficient in development. This technique allows us to rapidly increase the size of a project, without having to hire more people.


Finaland: You said in the past that FFXIV didn't have enough mage classes. We do not have any information at the moment, but can we expect new classes at 2.0 launch ? A Red Mage for example, or a Summoner ?

Y-P: For now, I will say «*no comment*» (laughs). But I hope you know what that means. If you know how to read between the lines …

I am a big MMORPG player, I have a precise idea of what class balance should be. I don't have stereotypes like X class should be Y type of class. 2,0 will allow us to rebalance everything. We'll give out mmore information soon.



FFU: In a recent Producer's Letter, you mentioned that the promised trailer would soon be revealed. Can you tell us when, and what it will be about ?

Y-P: I can tell you it's soon. This summer, sometimes around Gamescom … (laughs). There will only be 1 trailer. It will mean for us that it's time to start the promotional campaign and talk about game aspects.


At the end of this interview, Yoshi-P invited us to watch the game live on his laptop, and we were satisfied even though the game wasn't optimized yet and was playing on an i5. Lighting effects and 3d details were impressive.

Some notes on what we talked about during the demo:
- The possibility of a Mac OS version of the game will be studied once PC and PS3 versions are launched.
- Xbox Live and its 44m members are appealing, but servers would need to be separated from the rest since Xbox 360 is a “closed” system.

[Munba]

Thanks a lot Sephrick, Vingtdeux and Chinook!

[Munba]

Another interview if you want XD

http://www.finaland.com/?rub=site&page=news&id=4593

[Sephrick]

Another interview if you want XD

http://www.finaland.com/?rub=site&page=news&id=4593

Unfortunately it's the same exact thing as the other interview. Finaland and Final Fantasy Ring interviewed him at the same time and published each others questions as well as their own.

[Duelle]

Finaland: You said in the past that FFXIV didn't have enough mage classes. We do not have any information at the moment, but can we expect new classes at 2.0 launch ? A Red Mage for example, or a Summoner ?

Y-P: For now, I will say «*no comment*» (laughs). But I hope you know what that means. If you know how to read between the lines …

I am a big MMORPG player, I have a precise idea of what class balance should be. I don't have stereotypes like X class should be Y type of class. 2,0 will allow us to rebalance everything. We'll give out mmore information soon.

*starts gathering the reagents to necro one of the several Red Mage threads in this part of the forums* >.>

Nice work on the translation, guys.