Yoshi P Interview Full Translation

Thanks to Slycer over at BG:

Quote:

Yoshida GDC Interview with Dengeki (and others)

Is this your first time coming to GDC?

Yoshida: No, I've had been participating in the GDC workshops for eight years, but I stopped the last couple of years once we started working on A Realm Reborn. This year is my first time in about three years.

It's good to come to GDC once in a while just to develop our skills further. There are so many people who are serious about making games in the world, and it's good to see them talking frankly about their successes and failures. That's one of the parts that really surprised me at first, but we're all gathered here so that we can make better games.

Are any other staff members from A Realm Reborn coming to GDC?

Yoshida: No, just me. Hopefully by next year we can have a whole FFXIV session at GDC. With this game we've gotten a variety of experiences with production, sound, graphics, programming, task management which we can talk about. We're also going to be launching in China soon. Since we've only just launched, I didn't want to lead any sessions at this year's GDC.

The PS4 version beta test began on February 22. Can you tell us what the players' reactions were like?

Yoshida: We had a substantial number of downloads of the PS4 version. We haven't publicized the number so I can't say specifically... but one of the main concerns that came up which surprised us was people saying that the UI was small and hard to see. It's actually the same size as the PC version, but it may be a difficult transition when moving from the PS3 version. Because of that, with the next beta test phase that starts April 4, we'll have a UI appearance which is more in line with the PS3 version. Of course, it'll also be possible to change the UI resolution to match the PC version.However, since the characters become blurred when you simply expand it, we'll have separate resources for it. Similarly for the cross hot bar, it's implemented separately.

If you play the PC version, it would be strange to revert back to the size of the UI in the PS3 version.

Yoshida: Yeah, it's a completely different look. We've been developing the PS4 version with the idea of console gameplay in mind, but the UI can also be reduced if you choose to.

Is that because you're expecting a lot of players to transition from the PS3 version?

Yoshida: No, not particularly. We're expecting a lot of new customers to start playing.

I know the PS4 version can be played like the PC version, but do you also plan to support gaming device key assignment like Logitech G13 and G600?

Yoshida: It'll depend on the manufacturer. Some products which require special drivers may not work correctly because of the PS4 specifications. If the peripherals manufacturer is making peripherals which are supported by SCE, they will work.

On the software side for A Realm Reborn, you may lack support for particular gaming devices.

Yoshida: If a button press is recognized, you'll be able to set a macro or other function to that button by using the key bindings in the game. There could be problems if drivers change though, since there isn't full support for that yet. The PS4 just launched, though, so there could be support for in the future.

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I'd like to ask you a bit about the current service for A Realm Reborn. To maintain the game's success moving forward, are there certain parts that you're concerned about?

Yoshida:The most important thing to me is that we are honest and upfront in describing the current situation and to keep up with the promises we make. I think we were able to make good on our biggest commitment to players when we finally launched the game.

That said, A Realm Reborn is just getting started. We have concerns about whether the game would be able to survive the waves of subscription with the monthly fee since not many MMORPGs have done so successfully in the past few years. Part of it is that we're still lacking on content, so the planned additions to the game will be addressing this. We can't just sit back and celebrate.

When we first started talking about A Realm Reborn, you had mentioned that you'd be looking to respond globally to reactions, so aside from those in Japan, how have the reactions from North American players been?

Yoshida: There's not much difference in the feedback we receive from Japanese and North American users. I think a lot of players in Japan are just getting used to A Realm Reborn, but in North America a lot of players draw comparisons to previous experiences with World of Warcraft.

A Realm Reborn has familiar aspects to WoW.

Yoshida: Absolutely. People who are familiar with WoW will recognize a lot of the systems in A Realm Reborn, but there are many players in Japan who are not familiar with them and may question their implementation. That's one of the differences that we see between North American and Japanese players. However, we have about a half and half split for people who are happy with the current degree of difficulty and people who think it's too difficult. The difficulty of WoW has dropped considerably, but the people who loved the time when WoW was difficult are the people who like the difficulty in A Realm Reborn.

As far as the montly billing goes, people are becoming more pragmatic and they're only willing to pay for the things that they want to use. What that means to monthly billing is that there are players who would rather pay based on the amount of time they play in a particular month, after they've played. There used to be no debate about this, since monthly billing was the only standard for MMORPGs, but now F2P is a consideration. We see this desire for players who would rather buy items especially in North America.

The alpha test of the Chinese version has recently started. Have there been any advance reviews from users?

Yoshida: Shanda Games is responsible for the PR of the China services, so please check with them for reactions.

By the way, based on the number of planned users, what's your goal for the total global number of concurrent connections?

Yoshida: Since Shanda Games is operating the Chinese version, it's hard to say, but they have different goals thatn we have compared to Japan. However, we shouldn't just be talking about the number of simultaneous connections. In South Korea and China, F2P online games have been gaining a lot of momentum, and many users are only playing for the free period. We are taking this seriously, but it's one reason why the number of simultaneous connections may not be a measure of the success of the game.

Do you think it's good to have two different billing systems for a MMORPG (F2P and subscription)?

Yoshida: I don't think F2P is necessarily a bad thing, it's just one option. Talking about MMORPGs in general, there were a number of MMORPGs that launched around 2005, and almost all of them were subscription based. The thought was that this would guarantee profit from the start, and the development team wanted to depend on a stable number of users and a stable income. With the F2P model, employment is unstable, since what you sell in one month doesn't necessarily predict the next month's profits. This makes developers uneasy and makes it hard to create a roadmap for the game. It's important that content is provided reliably over time, and you need a development team and a steady income to do that.

To have stable sales for a MMORPG, you have to keep development going. After all, you need to keep providing content with updates and people need to be entertained by that content to want to keep playing. With a F2P game, though, you're not getting money from the content, but just from selling items. So then to make a lot of content you have to make a lot of items, which isn't necessarily linked to the players' enjoyment of the game. Rather than having 100% content update, then, you'd have to dedicate, say, 30% of that to items created to make money. Then it goes back to the ultimate question of what are our goals for the game in the first place.

The development of a MMORPG requires an incredible investment. It takes a lot of money raised from investors, and if you don't get the number of users you planned for at the start of your subscription service, the investors might immediately go into panic mode trying to figure out how to increase profit. These games might be forced to go F2P so that they can use the revenue to return the money to their investors.

There are many users now who don't like the idea of being bound to a game for a long time. I feel that way myself, so that I can stop at any point. I think this model works well for these kind of games where you play for a long time overall but only play a little at a time. These aren't MMOs, but F2P works well for games like "World of Tanks" and "League of Legends."

If there are particular elements which are strongly customizable, F2P works well for those cases so that players can pay to instantly expand their experience. I think that's why the choice was made for those types of games. It's important that the business model for the game is selected based on the kind of experience that you want to provide. It could be a positive change for a game to move from subscription based to F2P as long as the change is based on the users' needs rather than trying to turn an unprofitable game around.

If there's an impression that I'm determined to stick to a subscription service, that's a mistake.

Do you have a response to the example users you gave in the US who are interested in buying items?

Yoshida: We hope to offer some items for sale, but nothing that will affect game balance.

It seems that a lot of users are interested in sales of Fantasia (the item to change your character model), so how about that?

Yoshida: We're going to be talking about that in the LIVE producer letter on the 21st. Also, we're planning to introduce the ability to purchase an additional service which increases the number of available retainers. It'll be even more valuable with the additional retainer systems available with the patch which will make retainers more useful than ever.

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There's been quite a bit of information published about patch 2.2 already - what's been most popular with the players?

Yoshida: The ability to change the looks of your equipment to match your favorite style with glamours. Earlier, we hadn't given details about whether this would work with blue name equipment, but we showed that in the letter I published the other day. Allagan equipment has a blue name and can be changed. Also, we only briefly touched on it, but another hot topic are the Zodiac Weapons.

What the heck is a Zodiac Weapon?

Yoshida: To describe it simply, it's an upgraded Relic weapon. However, the system to upgrade it will take a considerable amount of time.

Even though it will be time-consuming, is this the kind of thing that you plan for everyone to be able to possess if they work at it?

Yoshida: Well, there won't be anything stopping you from doing it.... That said, the strengthening will happen in steps and it won't end with patch 2.2. This will continue with 2.2, 2.25, and 2.3. It's planned in a way that not many people will have finished the elements from the 2.2 patch by the time 2.25 is available. We also have plans to keep the weapons viable even in their final form.

Right now, the highest level weapons can only be obtained by completing the Binding Coil of Bahamut, with another type that was obtained by accumulating tokens. This will be a third type of weapon that gets developed over a long period of time.

I feel like items that correspond to Allagan Tomestones of Philosophy will basically be a waste after this patch. How are you dealing with that?

Yoshida: After the patch, you won't obtain Philosophy anywhere - it will be replaced with Mythology. There will be a NPC available which allows you to exchange currency at a predetermined rate.

What will happen to Darklight equipment which you were able to obtain for Philosophy?

Yoshida: It will be changed to a normal dungeon drop. It will drop in the dungeons which are added to the high level roulette. Instanced dungeons will have equipment at level 70, Crystal Tower will be level 80, and Turns 1-5 of Bahamut Coil as well as mythology gear will be level 90. The increase in item level should lead to growth on the main job. When we raise the level cap with an expansion and add additional dungeons and field area, that will lead to overall character growth.

Increasing the item level is just one direction, though, we also need to increase the breadth of items available at each level, which we plan to address in the future.

About how much content do you have in mind?

Yoshida: We have about two years' worth of content planned. We've actually been working on the design for 3.0 for a long time now. We've already come up with dungeon names and the number of dungeons, as well as the theme and the name of the new top tier dungeon which will be like the next rendition of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. We've also come up with the look of the city area, as well as the number and theme of the field areas to be added.

However, if we look closer on the development schedule, things are more up in the air. For example, we haven't yet finalized the content for patch 2.3 because 2.3 is still in development and we want to have some level of improvisation available to us so that we can add things based on requests.

So you're already hard at work on content planned for a few years out.

Yoshida: Yes, we'll continue to working hard on it until we get told to cut back on our development costs.

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Let's end on a note about content. It feels like a lot of content has been heaped into A Realm Reborn so far. On the other hand, back in February, I was speaking with the president of Sony Online Entertainment and he said his opinion is that content-driven MMORPGs are unsustainable. What are you thoughts on this opinion?

Yoshida: It's not really an extreme opinion. Just because an MMORPG has a lot of content, doesn't mean that it's content driven. I'm thinking that they can coexist.

Also, even though it's said that it may be impossible, "WoW" is one example of a successful content-driven MMORPG. I think the success of WoW can be attributed to Blizzard having a future path planned and not giving up. WoW is in its ninth year and is still adding lots of monster content and other content that doesn't need to be cleared. It's on a scale now where you can play with any number of people and have your own goals.

It wasn't that way from the start, either. The balance was a mess and with the initial level 30 cap PvP was all there was to do. I was wondering what Blizzard was doing at the time, but they didn't give up.

Once the Blizzard staff started focusing on the gamers and listening to their player feedback, things changed for them. TV commercials started appearing, and the game even became popular in the United Kingdom, which was not traditionally a successful area for MMORPGs. They put amazing effort into the title from the ground up.

There are certainly may comparisons you can draw between WoW and A Realm Reborn. When you used to compare WoW and EverQuest, there was a lot of initial feedback about poor balance or not enough to do, but they continued to add content and refined their approach over time.

I think the original FFXIV was certainly a failure. But even while we were working on A Realm Reborn, we didn't neglect to continue adding content to the old FFXIV. Actually, the number of users we have now is three times as many as there were when the old FFXIV started charging. If we continued to update the content in ways that users find interesting, we were able to maintain subscriptions, although some of that might have been due to some expected value at the release of A Realm Reborn.

With WoW, there's a demonstrated example of a game which continued to add content and was hugely successful. It might be unreasonable to think that we'll be another WoW, but we'll continue to strive towards that goal.

So WoW is still one of your role models for A Realm Reborn.

Yoshida: That's right. We aren't making a fully next generation MMORPG with A Realm Reborn. We want our users to get used to the MMORPGs at the end of this generation first. Also, with A Realm Reborn, we had the tough task to move from the old FFXIV to the new one. There has never been a MMORPG in a situation like that before.

We've also decided to aim towards being more inclusive of Japanese users who haven't really experienced MMORPGs yet and may give up upon starting in WoW.

We may start adding next generation elements as we continue to expand the game. Of course, we are also planning challenges that WoW isn't doing. And also, there's that certain FF quality which you won't find in WoW.

Can you give us some idea of when we'll start seeing things from 3.0?

Yoshida: Well, when it looks like it's at its end. Also, I'm thinking about a variety of things for the end of the patch 2.X series.