Welcome the new Assistant Director for FFXIV: ARR

[Eckhart]

Etrian Odyssey : Probably the best dungeon crawler saga of games of this generation. This man joining the ARR crew can only mean good things, this only shows that SE is pretty good at choosing competent individuals when they want to.

[Yrusama]

I am going to say a few things:

Developing a successful MMO now in days has less to do with your experience having developed an MMO in the past and more to do with knowing your target audience and knowing what works and doesn't work. Yoshi-P had little experience other then playing different MMOs and he is already doing a better job then Tanaka. What's that say?

Proof of this has one name: Tanaka. He was in charge of FFXI for years there is NO reason at allthis game should have failed so bad at launch. It was in development for years, so no excuses. Following the logic of "mmo development experience" It just isn't a fact. He did a terrible job and didn't know his target audience well enough to make what they wanted to see.

Now I don't know about this new assistant director so long as he doesn't have the final say in choices being made and just helps guide the path it should be alright.

MMOs now in days are all about low member content before endgame and even then endgame usually is under 15 people except in the most extreme and hardest content. Then it can be between 20 and 30 usually.

Don't agree with that, that's fine but I know plenty of people that would rather not do a new form of dynamis and would rather run with a 4 person group. Its how many MMOs have over 600,000 subscribers yet if you put FFXI and FFXIV together I highly doubt you'll get half of that.

What we should know is where he stands on many issues having to deal with MMOs as a whole.

Tanaka may have stepped down and left SE entirely, but are we sure XIV's failing was his fault? My impression is that his hands were tied on a lot of things, particularly the game's launch date. Believe it or not, he had a boss to please and it could easily have been his boss making the mistake to launch an unfinished game. I can't imagine any of us players knew the full situation at SE, and they only told us so much about the circumstances surrounding XIV's initial flop and Tanaka's departure.

Regardless, welcome! We hope to see great things from you (and you're likely to see some outrageous demands). May this turn out to be a career highlight for you as a developer!

[Yrusama]

As far as Tanaka, I respect the man for doing what he did during the SNES and PSX eras. I don't and never will like how he handled things in FFXI. From RDM's ruination to letting Utsusemi tanking live to shoddy job balance to adding and forgetting features multiple times over throughout the life of the game and conditioning the playerbase to be skeptical about anything they ever added because there was always a "but" somewhere in there.

Lol, I really need to stop posting before reading the whole thread. A lot of you guys blew my knowledge of XIV's first launch out of the water.

Anyway, Hironobu Sakaguhi left some time after FFXII, and Uematsu left some time around then as well. Tanaka is one of the last big-name FF creators to leave, and Nomura (FFIV onward) is being spread across so many games it almost feels like he barely contributes to each. It's no wonder Versus XIII is taking so damn long.

Sakaguchi and Uematsu have done some nice games with Mistwalker, and I read Sakaguchi even recruited Amano to work with them. I wonder how well they'd do if Tanaka reunited with them. The Last Story seemed about as close to the old Final Fantasy as you could get nowadays, and without the need for chocobos and crystals.

[SpringLeaf]

Maybe this guy has an amazing resume with degree's/Schooling up the arse. He might have been brought it for other things, not for designing.

[Skies]

Blasphemy! The director of the amazing Etrian Odyssey could never turn a game to crap! *w* Etrian Odyssey is a beautiful, compelling, and heart-pumpingly challenging game with some really kickass class builds. I hope very very much to see some essence of Etrian Odyssey leak into ARR.

Tell me which Etrian Odyssey you liked the best, young lalafell, tell me and I will tell you how much this particular director had to do with it (hint, if you like 3 or 2 better than 1 then he definitely did not have anything to do with them).

I personally love the EO series, I like 3 the best.