Destructoid Interview with Yoshi P

[ElazulHP]

'I don’t think that all systems we have are going to be perfect for players who want to enjoy the game in the moment'

SOURCE: https://www.destructoid.com/stories/...--605273.phtml

In case anyone didn't see this one yet.

I was there at E3 when XIV debuted. I saw the grimacing faces of press and players alike, and witnessed the rocky launch. I was also there when it was quite literally "reborn," and experienced the drastic upgrade myself. Years later I would come to learn that Yoshi-P's light touch (alongside of his team) was responsible for the revival, and it seems like Square Enix noticed him too; as he's one of the developers heading up Final Fantasy XVI.

But before we shift some of our focus to XVI, I sat down with Yoshi-P to talk XIV: which still has plenty of life left in it.



Destructoid: How do you possibly manage to stuff all of the content you do in each major patch? It's not just PVE content, but nearly every facet of the game is upgraded with quality of life changes.

Naoki Yoshida: We are able to achieve this volume of content in each patch due to a few key elements: the ongoing efforts of each of the development team members, our management team expertly keeping everything on schedule and under control, and the continued support of our infrastructure team. However, I feel the most important factor is our planning of all content implementation even years in advance.

Patch 5.3 already had a completed implementation plan even before development of Shadowbringers was complete. As Producer and Director of the title, I begin the planning by creating an initial draft, and then share it with our team leads who will discuss within their teams and iron out the details. In this way, we avoid just having my recommendation be the final say, but I’ll take feedback and suggestions from each division on content they’d like to make improvements or adjustments to, and after deciding on the overall direction, we would add the specifics into the content implement plan. We can’t create a lot of the proposed content within a single patch cycle (roughly 3.5 months), and most need at least two patch cycles worth of time and resources to complete. You could say that the development team is always living half a year into the future...

Larger projects such as streamlining of the storyline and adding flying to A Realm Reborn areas can take anywhere from nine to even twelve months, where our staff find time in between working on core patch content to get them done. Some other examples include the World visit system, cross-World party finder, and the Bozjan Southern Front (coming in Patch 5.35).

The impact of COVID-19 pushed the release date of Patch 5.3 by about two months, but the reason why the content volume did not decrease was mainly due to long-term planning and detailed management.

In 5.3, I couldn't believe that resurrection immunity got a new timer: I've been waiting for that since 2.0! This is such a small thing to the team I'm sure, but little upgrades like this can be huge for the player base. What led to this inclusion and why wasn't it in sooner?

The Transcendence buff wasn’t the only change made with this patch, as we also made adjustments to content that we flagged all the way back in A Realm Reborn as aspects we wanted to adjust, including giving display priority to your DoTs on the enemy’s health bar. We set the goal more than a year ago in our plans for Patch 5.3 to greatly expand the free trial and to target new players.

With this in mind, we made adjustments to help with server stress and load, and also made very detailed, yet drastic changes to the server back-end processing. All of these various changes were the fruits of that labor, so I believe we’ll continue to have these “small but big surprises” in the future (laughs).



How important are 24-person alliance raids at this point in the game's life cycle? They're one of my favorite parts of the game, but does the team still enjoy working on them and does the player base engage in them regularly?

Our original goal and plan for alliance raids when we were launching A Realm Reborn was for the content to not only be large in scale, but also a higher difficulty than what we see in game. I think it would have netted out somewhere below The Binding Coil of Bahamut in terms of difficulty, but far harder than what we currently have.

Unfortunately, when we determined that the release of the alliance raid would not make it in time for ARR’s launch, we had no choice but to change up the plan of our difficulty hierarchy for our content. We thought players would feel suffocated if we just had high-difficulty content, so alliance raids were positioned as a more casual type of content, even if there were some wipes along the way. This turned out to be well received, and we are also very satisfied with the current difficulty level. We plan to continue including this as one of our main forms of content.

I also think we are able to keep this content fresh and exciting both because of staff growing through their experience on the team, and also by shifting around members who work on alliance raids. Alliance raid bosses tend to have simpler mechanics in comparison to Savage difficulty raids, so it’s a perfect type of content for new and intermediate staff to tackle. I could see them working on this to hone their skills in creating raid content, and then move on to working on Savage battles. This is also a great way to make sure that the same staff isn’t always working on the same type of content.

We also specifically ask staff if they would like to work on certain content after we have solidified some of the basic ideas and information, and I think this may have been a major factor in helping create new, high-quality content. When it came to the NieR crossover, of course all of our staff replied, “I want to work on it!” (laughs).

What percentage of players would you say regularly engage in PVP activities in Final Fantasy XIV? How happy are you with the PVP element of the game? I think it's evolved quite a bit.

We have been able to increase the overall number of modes available for players in PvP, and we’re trying to steer it down a slightly more casual and accessible route—from this we’ve seen a steady increase in the overall number of players participating in PvP content. Especially for Frontline, there are many people that casually enjoy the content, and we do try our best to accommodate any feedback we receive, most notably through ability adjustments—sometimes subtle, sometimes drastic.

We decide on the direction to take the adjustments for each job based on such things as each job’s win rate in matches or how often it is played in comparison to other jobs, and then we analyze abilities and determine the appropriate adjustments. We do have some future plans in store for PvP, but we would appreciate your patience until we are ready to make those announcements!

Talk to us a bit about the crafting side of Final Fantasy XIV. I feel like it gets left out of the conversation a lot because of how exciting the PVE content is and how glamorous raids are. Is there a dedicated team working on crafting content? What are some things you've been wanting to add to that portion of the game?

First of all, I’d like to point out that the development team and I don’t have the mindset of trying to force people to play all types of content that we bring to the game, and by this I don’t mean just crafting and gathering. FFXIV is part of the Final Fantasy series, so playing through the story is a must. There are battles within the story, and many of the players like to battle; so naturally, battle content becomes the main element. At the same time, modern-day gamers are busy with a lot of things outside of playing games: spending time with family and loved ones, engaging in social media, and the like. Our mindset is to have the players pick and choose what they want to play within their schedule, so we never feel like it is being left out.

We indeed have a dedicated game design team called the “non-combat team” who not only specialize in crafting and gathering content, but they also take care of housing. That team is made up of around six or seven game designers, as well as a dedicated programming team, who all work alongside the UI team to help create those gameplay elements that enrich the player experience in Eorzea.

We have future plans in store for content from these teams, so stay tuned. We’re planning to make announcements at one of our Letter from the Producer Live streams down the line!



Do you see yourself changing anything about how the current endgame PVE system works? The currency system as well as the weekly lockouts still work for many players, but over time, I can see it getting stale. Do you feel like it's working as intended?

I don’t think that all systems we have are going to be perfect for players who want to enjoy the game in the moment. However, FFXIV has always been designed as an MMORPG that is considerate of the modern-day work-life balance, which tries to lessen the gap between players that have been playing since the beginning and those who have joined on later. Additionally, we want to ensure a friendly experience for any players who are coming back after a break from the game. At least as long as I’m in charge of this title, I don’t think this policy would change.

Everyday life in reality is everchanging, and people’s lifestyles change as well. If I feel a need to make adjustments to accommodate any major changes in the real world, then I’m sure we’d look to make changes to this or any other system at any moment.

Do you feel comfortable with your content cadence at this point: with even number patches bringing in big raid content and odd-number patches serving as a catch-up of sorts? Would you ever mix this strategy up?

I think this could go either way, and we could either make drastic changes or continue with the current cadence. I do feel like it’s a bit difficult to talk about this because in doing so, there’s a possibility that it could limit our options down the line.

Our current content implementation cycle is a very powerful tool for the development team in that we are used to it and comfortable working with it. It’s easy for us to make predictions on which areas of development could cause issues, and we can utilize our past experiences to easily make revisions to our forecast. Additionally, since it’s easy to create these plans for us now, there are major benefits such as being able to keep our content volume in updates as large as it is.

However, having the same cycle repeat itself will bring about both predictability and boredom to the players. Stability creates a sense of security, but there is a very fine line between that and boredom, and I am constantly having an internal debate on this. In order to mitigate that boredom, we’ve implemented new types of content such as Ultimate difficulty raids and the race for world first that comes along with it, and also brought content like Eureka and the Bozjan Southern Front into existence. In the end I feel like this could be an endless thesis, so maybe we can leave it at this for now.

[linayar]

Certain key takeaways for me:

Alliance raid:

Our original goal and plan for alliance raids when we were launching A Realm Reborn was for the content to not only be large in scale, but also a higher difficulty than what we see in game. I think it would have netted out somewhere below The Binding Coil of Bahamut in terms of difficulty, but far harder than what we currently have.

Unfortunately, when we determined that the release of the alliance raid would not make it in time for ARR’s launch, we had no choice but to change up the plan of our difficulty hierarchy for our content. We thought players would feel suffocated if we just had high-difficulty content, so alliance raids were positioned as a more casual type of content, even if there were some wipes along the way. This turned out to be well received, and we are also very satisfied with the current difficulty level. We plan to continue including this as one of our main forms of content.

RIP higher difficulty alliance raid, but I'm ok with current difficulty.

PVP:

we’re trying to steer it down a slightly more casual and accessible route—from this we’ve seen a steady increase in the overall number of players participating in PvP content. Especially for Frontline, there are many people that casually enjoy the content

...

We do have some future plans in store for PvP, but we would appreciate your patience until we are ready to make those announcements!

PVP doesn't really interest me, even in WoW (though I did complete the entire Garo event and got all the rewards in the past on a previous character), but for those who would like to PVP in FFXIV, hopefully their future plans would satisfy you, as long as you enjoy a "more casual and accessible" approach to PVP.

Content mindset:

First of all, I’d like to point out that the development team and I don’t have the mindset of trying to force people to play all types of content that we bring to the game, and by this I don’t mean just crafting and gathering. FFXIV is part of the Final Fantasy series, so playing through the story is a must.

...

Our mindset is to have the players pick and choose what they want to play within their schedule, so we never feel like it is being left out.

Good, story is required but everything else is up to the players.

Non-PVE:

We indeed have a dedicated game design team called the “non-combat team” who not only specialize in crafting and gathering content, but they also take care of housing. That team is made up of around six or seven game designers, as well as a dedicated programming team, who all work alongside the UI team to help create those gameplay elements that enrich the player experience in Eorzea.

We have future plans in store for content from these teams, so stay tuned. We’re planning to make announcements at one of our Letter from the Producer Live streams down the line!

I'm always up for QoL features, though I'm not always interested in non-combat features/rewards.

Main endgame progression system (question included):

Do you see yourself changing anything about how the current endgame PVE system works? The currency system as well as the weekly lockouts still work for many players, but over time, I can see it getting stale. Do you feel like it's working as intended?

I don’t think that all systems we have are going to be perfect for players who want to enjoy the game in the moment. However, FFXIV has always been designed as an MMORPG that is considerate of the modern-day work-life balance, which tries to lessen the gap between players that have been playing since the beginning and those who have joined on later. Additionally, we want to ensure a friendly experience for any players who are coming back after a break from the game. At least as long as I’m in charge of this title, I don’t think this policy would change.

Everyday life in reality is everchanging, and people’s lifestyles change as well. If I feel a need to make adjustments to accommodate any major changes in the real world, then I’m sure we’d look to make changes to this or any other system at any moment.

FFXIV's endgame progression system is what it is, take it or leave it (barring any adjustment due to real world situation). I'll take it personally.

Content cadence (question included):

Do you feel comfortable with your content cadence at this point: with even number patches bringing in big raid content and odd-number patches serving as a catch-up of sorts? Would you ever mix this strategy up?

I think this could go either way, and we could either make drastic changes or continue with the current cadence. I do feel like it’s a bit difficult to talk about this because in doing so, there’s a possibility that it could limit our options down the line.

Our current content implementation cycle is a very powerful tool for the development team in that we are used to it and comfortable working with it. It’s easy for us to make predictions on which areas of development could cause issues, and we can utilize our past experiences to easily make revisions to our forecast. Additionally, since it’s easy to create these plans for us now, there are major benefits such as being able to keep our content volume in updates as large as it is.

However, having the same cycle repeat itself will bring about both predictability and boredom to the players. Stability creates a sense of security, but there is a very fine line between that and boredom, and I am constantly having an internal debate on this. In order to mitigate that boredom, we’ve implemented new types of content such as Ultimate difficulty raids and the race for world first that comes along with it, and also brought content like Eureka and the Bozjan Southern Front into existence. In the end I feel like this could be an endless thesis, so maybe we can leave it at this for now.

So while the basic endgame progression is what it is, they do try offering new content like Eureka and Bozja. Whether or not the new stuff works, this approach is fine by me and preferable to changing the main progression system.

[ADVSS]

These were really some Softball questions. They might as well asked Yoshi p how his day was going, and what his favorite color was

[Shougun]

With not much time on my hands, usually, this is my gold:

Do you see yourself changing anything about how the current endgame PVE system works? The currency system as well as the weekly lockouts still work for many players, but over time, I can see it getting stale. Do you feel like it's working as intended?

I don’t think that all systems we have are going to be perfect for players who want to enjoy the game in the moment. However, FFXIV has always been designed as an MMORPG that is considerate of the modern-day work-life balance, which tries to lessen the gap between players that have been playing since the beginning and those who have joined on later. Additionally, we want to ensure a friendly experience for any players who are coming back after a break from the game. At least as long as I’m in charge of this title, I don’t think this policy would change.

Everyday life in reality is everchanging, and people’s lifestyles change as well. If I feel a need to make adjustments to accommodate any major changes in the real world, then I’m sure we’d look to make changes to this or any other system at any moment.

I'm sure there are more ideas, more interesting ideas, but on the last one about stability and predictability vs unique features and instability I hope they can at some point include some more long term casual content. Casual, that means not forced into PF (/queue dagger eyes at Blue Mage) lol. Something I can calmly work on, sometimes relic fits this, sometimes not, was kind of hoping they try something unique (new) under this guise if they get impassioned about a concept.

Some of my suggestions (doesn't mean they're good/only ones) were things like:

• Exploration content based around a airship outpost base like vision (acting as a long term growth source, as well as a way to interact with the world).
• Chocobo content including beast tribe / new jobs / dungeon expansion / visual customization (like custom tail feather tip, beaks, and feather types, fluffy boco vs streamlined - etc), hot and cold that acts as both a mini-game and an archelogy profession (as seen in other games like WoW, but hopefully better lol)
• Cosmetic and role play merit system that allows players to spend excess exp (and some situations like FATEs or whatever) to buy things that make your character more personal / have a vibe of growth and role play (say for example unlocking new bard instruments, unlocking a special jump transportation ability on dragoon, reducing and then nullfying fall damage on dragoon, new equipment that is non-standard like holy breast plate on white mage to give a battle cleric vibe, new optional spell effects like changing dark knight aura effect to the shadow effect of the trailer, new other role play spell concepts even perhaps bringing teleports to certain locations to mages, etc, things can come with upgrades too such that white mage may learn to teleport to a special place and for a much larger price upgrade so you can do it without changing your job even).
• Crystal Library and Forge (which act as a data friendly way to have glamour logs and also help control some of the randomness of dungeons if you were unlucky- but a completely 1:1 perfect glamour log would be nice too lol, I just listed this as a sort of content + compromise + value tool option as it bundled it all together).
• Museum / beast tribe / library in that one final area of ShB - a place we can grow over time that includes content from the other areas even, allowing us to collect a sort of codex of all the books we found, collectors paradise (log heaven), loads of lore, good place to put the forge/library lol, chocobo hot and cold archelogy going well to work with this.

[Divinemights]

These were really some Softball questions. They might as well asked Yoshi p how his day was going, and what his favorite color was

What type of questions are consider hard ball?
Parser?
Housing?
Issues that no one cant agree on?

[DrWho2010]

PR would also have to agree to questions asked. they're not going to answer any "hardball" questions if they don't want to. and we'll never know about them either. unless it's an open q&a session and I've heard friend stories in there that they will straight up not answer questions they don't want to deal with.

[SenorPatty]

What type of questions are consider hard ball?
Parser?
Housing?
Issues that no one cant agree on?

Uncomfortable questions like the ever increasing technical hang ups the game possesses and its impact on the game.

Questions like what the future of job gameplay looks like, especially concerning healers.

Questions like what 6.0 holds for viera and hrothgars. Will they get their opposite genders? Will Hrothgar players continue to buy fantasia just for changing heads/hairstyles? Will Viera finally get their "unique" hairstyles that was said that would get implemented in future patch cycles? Or at least get access to the new hairs that were released up to now.

You kno, questions that SE and/or Yoshida have been pretty to tight lipped about.

[linayar]

You kno, questions that SE and/or Yoshida have been pretty to tight lipped about.

So, questions that they will continue to be tight-lipped about until they're ready to make announcements about them? That would be a waste of an interview. This kind of interview is much better to see the design mindset. I'm happy that Yoshida confirms that story is required moving forward and that the progression system will basically be unchanged, and am ok that alliance raid will retain its difficulty (though I wonder if a harder mode will be possible).

[Divinemights]

Uncomfortable questions like the ever increasing technical hang ups the game possesses and its impact on the game.

Questions like what the future of job gameplay looks like, especially concerning healers.

Questions like what 6.0 holds for viera and hrothgars. Will they get their opposite genders? Will Hrothgar players continue to buy fantasia just for changing heads/hairstyles? Will Viera finally get their "unique" hairstyles that was said that would get implemented in future patch cycles? Or at least get access to the new hairs that were released up to now.

You kno, questions that SE and/or Yoshida have been pretty to tight lipped about.

You are expecting media journalist to waste their interview opportunity when they cares about FF14 at macro level not micro level.
Not going to happen.
The questions you are asking are micro level that impact maybe less than 1% of player base
Not every Viera or Hrothgar really care about hairstyle you know

[ADVSS]

You are expecting media journalist to waste their interview opportunity when they cares about FF14 at macro level not micro level.
Not going to happen.
The questions you are asking are micro level that impact maybe less than 1% of player base
Not every Viera or Hrothgar really care about hairstyle you know

My question to anyone taking the questions seriously, what new information did you get out of this interview? Nothing that was said was never said before. So yeah, nothing of value was asked. Nothing of value was learned.