Final Fantasy XI Reboot- A First Look
This week at the Nexon Developers Conference, the first ever images of the new Final Fantasy Mobile game were shown and wound up on a Japanese blog, the images bearing the title, “Final Fantasy XI Reboot”.
As many of you well remember, back in March 2015, Square Enix announced The Vana’Diel Project– a means to finally wind down the epic MMORPG Final Fantasy XI, first through a final chapter to the game’s story in Rhapsodies of Vana’Diel, and second, through two new mobile games.
The first was Final Fantasy Grandmasters, a mobile game currently only released in Japan that uses the world and jobs of Final Fantasy XI as its backdrop.
The second was a brand new type of game Square Enix dubbed an MMMORPG- Massively Multiplayer Mobile Online Role Playing Game which in turn was tentatively titled the “Final Fantasy XI Mobile”.
RablaAndrews of the /r/FFXI Subreddit translated the article:
In a session at Nexon Developers Conference 2016, Nexon revealed the ‘FINAL FANTASY XI Reboot’ Project in co-development with Square Enix will be using Unreal Engine 4 as it’s primary engine They also shared the first look at the game screen. Typically, a lot of developers use a HTTP Enivronment to power a mobile title, but with this there is a struggle to display the player’s movements and and changes on the field in real-time. To solve this, they are using a combination of Web servers and TCP servers, in order to reproduce the environments to match the PC version of the title in the mobile terminal. FFXI Reboot is currently planned for release on both iOS and Android platforms. Currently it is still in the early stages of development, with more work to do on Field and Battle portions of the software.
If you listened to our initial reactions to The Vana’Diel Project, nobody was really optimistic for the future of Final Fantasy XI as a mobile game; needing buttons, potential drop in quality, why not just develop it for PC or an actual handheld console etc… however, after viewing these screenshots, the first I’m assuming comes from a cutscene and the second of actual game play footage, I’m genuinely impressed in how beautiful it looks, especially considering it’s still in the very early stages of development.
Final Fantasy XI Reboot is currently planned to be released on iOS and Android at an unknown date.