Regarding that Finaland Interview...

[JunseiKei]

IIRC, personal housing was supposed to be separate from FC housing, but it isn't, and so we have the hot mess that we know as XIV's housing. I'm a big fan of instanced housing. Even with instanced housing, I've seen games that still allow you to have neighbors/friends in your instance (RIP Wildstar). As it is now, housing wards are pretty pointless. They're huge, and mostly dead - even on Balmung.

Yeah, it was, wasn't it? I observed that FC houses weren't exactly selling hotly. Very few large houses (and when you have a large, active FC that actually did want to hang out, a small quickly became cramped feeling). There were more mediums than larges and they were an OK middle ground, but small houses were not really wanted for active and large FCs. Also, houses cost a lot back then. Not like now where gil rains from the heavens or legacy servers that kept their gil. A small was 5m - pretty hard to get back then when dungeons didn't drop any gil at all; 200k was considered rich. Larges were as high as 87m. I'd guess our current apartments were set up to be that affordable, separate personal housing, but because Yoshida didn't want the wards to stay as vacant as they were then, he just opened them up to FC and personal. That's just my speculation, though.