Interview with YoshiP - PAX Aus 2024

[VerdeLuck]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

From my perspective this seems like both Yoshida and his team put way too much stock into Wuk in the 10 year plan, they were really hoping this would be a grand slam character everyone would love, the next Graha Tia, the next Zenos, the next Haurchefaunt. The fact player very decidedly do not like her on every poll and in every metric shown, every time she gets even a slight feature in the back ground of a promotional image, that post on reddit/twitter explodes with 10x the comment all fighting each other, and so on tells them they were wrong. But they have an ego now, they're the great CS3, the best developers in SE and in MMOs, they know better than us. It seems like they took this personally and also are reluctant to change the story they had mapped out years in advance to allow for Wuk Lamat to fall into the background.

It's so weird to see an entirely different Yoshida from ARR coming into this game, at the start he was humble, took player opinion seriously, read the forums, changed entire sections ased on player feedback. Now we have a monolithic dev team who churns out templated content on a regular schedule and the story is planned out years in advance so if anything goes wrong, they have to power through it and there's no stopping it. We are at a crossroads, either Yoshi-P and the team get it in gear and fix longstanding issues and become more flexible again, or this game starts to fall off and we hit maintenance mode much faster than we anticipated.

[Aniise]

The other factor was Wuk Lamat. She’s a very complex character, and she even has a bit of a complex about herself. Unfortunately, we didn’t delve very far into the background of why she had those feelings, so it appeared as if she left a negative impression. We accept that feedback. I feel a little sorry that we weren’t able to properly depict her. We may have been able to make her more straightforward, so we’re pushing her in the forefront as this character. But again, we’re going to be reflecting that learning into [content patch 7.1] and onward, we’re hoping that we can show more of what makes Wuk Lamat so great, and I’m hoping that we can regain from there.

Lol. Lmao even.

[AlucaDragonheart]

Let them continue to be tone deaf until their profits suffer, and then the dev team crawls back to go "We're listening guys! Trust us! Please don't unsub!"

[Kisshu]

In some way, I kinda want them to double/triple down on Wuk as a focal point and even main character in XIV. Make her a Scion and lead the team. Just to see the reactions from people.

On a more serious note, I do wonder how the next fanfest will be. If they keep going the current direction, I would not be surprised if the fanfests aren't sold out.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I had to double check that this interview wasn't an Onion article.

[Avoidy]

I don't even think they're ignorant to the criticism, because you'd have to be blind to not see it. More likely it's what the PC Gamer article was saying: that the studio just can't course correct in a timely manner. And now we're seeing the product of it. It's likely they already wrote this awful script for 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 already, and rather than write up a new scenario and make new cutscenes and new gameplay and new trials and new dungeons for it after learning that the prominent character was disliked, they're stuck in this position where they have to just grit their teeth and white-knuckle through a year+ of crappy msq since it's already written and the gears have been set in motion.

If they just said "look, we're sorry you don't like it, but this is what we have," followed by "we'll make it up to you with good gameplay content" or something, I could vibe with it. But the actual content has been really bare bones once you finish the story stuff, and now the story stuff is bad too. So it's just bad all around, really. The actual battle content (dungeons/raids I mean) have been enjoyable, but the scripted nature of a ff14 encounter means you'll tire of it after a couple of runs unless the job you're playing is just really fun... but all they did for jobs was tack on an extra button to press during one's burst, so that's pretty stale too. It all just feels quite bad right now, and whenever people say they'd like more things to do in the mmo that they pay monthly to play, fans come out of the woodwork telling them that ackshually it's a good thing that dawntrail's a barren wasteland because it gives you the opportunity to quit and play wow instead.

[VerdeLuck]

I don't even think they're ignorant to the criticism, because you'd have to be blind to not see it. More likely it's what the PC Gamer article was saying: that the studio just can't course correct in a timely manner. And now we're seeing the product of it. It's likely they already wrote this awful script for 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 already, and rather than write up a new scenario and make new cutscenes and new gameplay and new trials and new dungeons for it after learning that the prominent character was disliked, they're stuck in this position where they have to just grit their teeth and white-knuckle through a year+ of crappy msq since it's already written and the gears have been set in motion.

The article linked in the OP implies the exact opposite, Yoshi-P cites feedback from 7.0 being used to develop "7.1 and beyond" in regards to characterization of Wuk Lamat. If they're really so slow at developing patches that it takes them 4.5 months to make 2-3 hours of story and 5 instances of combat then they really deserve to get their world shaken up a little, that is an abysmally slow pace to develop at. People seem to have some idea that everything up to 8.0 is already developed, written, and recorded which just isn't true. It's not set in stone, it's malleable, they can react to feedback otherwise they deserve to fail as an MMO.

If they are unable to rewrite small sections to diminish a character's presence in the story without scrapping everything then they are bad writers. They even did it in endwalker when they delayed the expansion 2 weeks before launch to rewrite the Emet section in Ultima Thule and then got it voiced. They CAN do it and providing this cover is unneeeded, let the developers take the heat for their mistakes. They need to fix it.

[AnimaAnimus]

Even if they are somehow, the most unlikely of scenarios happens and they are able to redeem Wuk through good, well crafted writing, her voice actress basically tainted the character for me for good. Yeah there was a lot of transphobia, but her reaction was so juvenile and just downright vile that much like Kevin Sorbo, James Woods, Roseanne, Kelsey Grammer and other incredibly toxic actors she forever tainted everything she does for me. If she would have handled it with a little more grace it would be fine, but her kneejerk reaction was full on salting the earth mode.

Growing up gay in the 90s in a very small town I faced a lot of name calling, death threats, danger, etc myself and I completely understand, from experience, how it feels. These were not online trolls though, these were real life, in my face, immediate danger sort of threats that I faced on a day to day basis that got so bad I ended up leaving my home town as soon as I was able. Standing up for yourself is good and you do not always have to be the bigger person, but going off like she did on everyone who was not a sycophant for her is just not an acceptable responce.

Wuk is forever tainted, by writing for some and for other reasons by others, and they just need to accept that and move on.

[Valence]

Even if they are somehow, the most unlikely of scenarios happens and they are able to redeem Wuk through good, well crafted writing, her voice actress basically tainted the character for me for good. Yeah there was a lot of transphobia, but her reaction was so juvenile and just downright vile that much like Kevin Sorbo, James Woods, Roseanne, Kelsey Grammer and other incredibly toxic actors she forever tainted everything she does for me. If she would have handled it with a little more grace it would be fine, but her kneejerk reaction was full on salting the earth mode.

Growing up gay in the 90s in a very small town I faced a lot of name calling, death threats, danger, etc myself and I completely understand, from experience, how it feels. These were not online trolls though, these were real life, in my face, immediate danger sort of threats that I faced on a day to day basis that got so bad I ended up leaving my home town as soon as I was able. Standing up for yourself is good and you do not always have to be the bigger person, but going off like she did on everyone who was not a sycophant for her is just not an acceptable responce.

Wuk is forever tainted, by writing for some and for other reasons by others, and they just need to accept that and move on.

Since I do not dwell much on social media and especially not twitter and whatnot, could you enlighten me on what she replied and what she said exactly? I'm asking out of curiosity, not malice. I would like to make my own opinion about it.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Since I do not dwell much on social media and especially not twitter and whatnot, could you enlighten me on what she replied and what she said exactly? I'm asking out of curiosity, not malice. I would like to make my own opinion about it.

I'd recommend you go to her account directly, but she locked it. It's probably best not to rehash here in the context of this article though - usually it just spirals threads into being locked. You may be able to run a search on the forums assuming they haven't all been deleted by mods at this point.