Originally Posted by
Yoji_Fujito
Greetings! Director Fujito here.
Having celebrated our nineteenth anniversary on May 16, we are now less than a year away from the 20th anniversary.
I wanted to personally inform you of developments leading up to next year, and so here I am typing away at my keyboard.
Here’s a basic summary of what we will be doing from here on out.
However, we’re unable to promise a specific timeframe for many of these plans, so please consider it a simple list of goals for myself.
The FFXI team is currently developing the following three features as our primary goals for the 2021 fiscal year.
• The Voracious Resurgence
• Job-related System
• Storage System Revamp
■ The Voracious Resurgence
Aht Urhgan sets the stage of the story in the June 2021 version update.
Who will be featured this time? What is the story relevance of the blue mage mentioned in the news announcement?
As usual, I’m quite sure the story won’t betray your expectations.
We’re planning to continue the scenario for at least another year, so if you haven’t caught up, you should be able to progress through the story at your own pace.
■ Job-related System
In contrast with previous job adjustments where we rotated through individual jobs and made changes to their abilities and traits, this new system could be summed up as “removing shackles.”
Of course, this isn’t meant to completely replace job adjustments, and individual adjustments will still be made as necessary, similar to how certain jobs were changed to bring them up to standard in preparation for this new system.
Our current balancing adjustments are based on the state of the jobs after they have progressed through this new system.
■ Storage System Revamp
This has been in the works for a very long time, but we are looking into increasing inventory space.
Ever since Mog Wardrobes 3 and 4 were added, we’ve repeatedly replied that adding more inventory space wasn’t possible, so this goal may seem like a contradiction, and you might be frustrated with us and wondering why we haven’t implemented it already.
However, this method comes with a risk to gameplay and I would like to warn you that it most likely won’t be a catch-all solution.
Loading times, the aspect with the largest effects on gameplay, cannot be improved beyond their current speeds, so we'll try and tackle it from a different angle.
What I’ve mentioned so far is what we’re hoping to achieve by the end of this fiscal year.
Each of these goals are rather resource-intensive, but we’ll be tackling them with everything we have.
So what then, do we have planned for next year? I can’t go into detail, but here are some keywords.
• Empyrean Armor
• The Voracious Resurgence-related Content
These goals were decided two years ago, and we’ll be working to implement them.
Now that I’ve listed the major features of our plans, many of you may be wondering what we have in store beyond the 20th anniversary.
However, this forum post isn’t the place for a topic of such importance, so Producer Matsui will bring it up at an appropriate timing.
That’s it from me for today.
The world may still be in the midst of battling COVID-19, but I hope that all of you will remain in good health.