jpgames.de Gamescom 2015 interview with Naoki Yoshida

[SecretCrowds]

http://jpgames.de/2015/08/gamescom-2...naoki-yoshida/

Some points:

No plans for 1 vs 1 dueling system. Jobs not balanced for 1 vs 1

3.1: new 24-player raid content after the Crystal Tower
3.1: big update for Goldsaucer
3.1: exploration using your airship.

Snowboarding won't make it for next winter season

No plans to make harder version of old primals. Better to make new primals.

Next cross-over event decided

Housing: Working on abandoned houses
Housing: Changing and moving house
Housing: Ishgard plots or more plots

EU data centre: There will be 4 to 5 days maintenance

And regarding inventory

MMORPG.de: After the 3.0 patch player struggle with inventory space. Are there plans for more inventory space or some other method to keep more items?

NY: The whole development team are Final Fantasy XIV players and also want more inventory, so we understand the situation you are in. There are actually two reasons why we can not expand the inventory. It may look simple in game, but actually the size of data for only one item is really huge. If you look at the inventory and compare it to other MMOs, Final Fantasy XIV has the biggest inventory.

We have a few 100,000 players in all worlds at the same time, and every 15 seconds data will be going to the servers and stored, so a lot of data is transmitted. If we have more items in the inventory, there will be more data to handle; times a few 1,000 bytes per item per character. That’s going to be a high load on the servers. There then might be some risk that your data is not safed properly, and we want to avoid this risk. That is why we are so careful with expanding the inventory. It is not that we don’t do anything at all, we are working on this issue by optimizing the backend data so that the data will be read properly with less stress. If there is no high server load, we can probably work more on actually addressing this issue. This is the first point.

Another issue is that when you use the Duty Finder, you will go to the contents server. But when your character is going there, you bring all your items to the server. If you have more items, you have to wait a longer time to go to the server, you will feel a lot of stress. This optimization process takes a lot of time and we are working on it slowly, but that is the only way we can actually keep your game experience and the desire for more inventory space.

Although we won’t be able to expand inventory straight away, we want to make it more convenient to use retainers. So you can e.g. access all retainers in certain areas, rather than one by one.