GamerEscape

At this year’s PAX East, we had a chance to sit down with Final Fantasy XIV Director/Producer Naoki Yoshida. During our interview session we were also joined by the folks over at r/ffxiv– we’ll make sure to include a link to their questions once they’re posted. (Edit: Here is the Reddit interview)

If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the Q and A panel from this year’s event as well.

Q: At FanFest you said that in order to see Ala Mhigo we would need to liberate it and go there. Will there be a similar system for Doma? How will liberation be different between the two cities?

A: There may be a bit of misunderstanding on that part in terms of accessing Ala Mhigo. There was a question raised about stepping into the Ala Mhigo region, and there was a mention of first driving away the Garlean power that holds that area. Access to that area is limited. For Doma, you don’t have to worry about liberating it first before you can enter it.

Q: Are you planning on using the Deep Dungeon system in Stormblood?

A: We do have plans to implement the content yes. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what type of content it is. As you traverse through the areas in Stormblood, you’ll notice where this system is going to be implemented so we encourage players to look around when they get a chance.

Q: On the new world map, the island of Thavnair has been uncovered, but its capitol city has a generic icon with no flag. Is that a sign that we won’t be going there in 4.0?

A: No, you won’t be able to go in yet. Of course, it has been officially depicted, but you wont be able to access it right away as of the launch of 4.0.

Q: It was said that the last tier of the veteran reward system would be the final one. Are there plans for some kind of loyalty program in another form?

A: Yes we do plan for one. Moving forward we want to make it so that we’re not rewarding people that have been continuously continuing (subscribing) with us for a long time, but something more in shorter spans. Say you signed up for three months in a row- and you get the rewards in that sort of spurt.

Q: After the last Fan Fest, a lot of people were expecting Proto Ultima to be the first 24-man trial. Instead it was put in the raid content. Were there plans for it to be a separate trial? If so why did it change?

A: I don’t think we ever mentioned it was going to be a 24-man trial. It was more along the lines of we’d like you to speculate where it would fit in. So it is as the development team planned. Had it been an independent piece of content, it may have been good when it first launched, but at the end it would become content that no one could get matched up in. It was intentional that it would be part of one of the alliance raids.

Q: Each patch we receive a few questions from players regarding having issues downloading the game or the patch itself from the official launcher. Have you considered ways to download the files from an alternative source?

Yoshida: It’s not impossible… how are people having issues?

Reddit: So my computer is OK, but my brother’s machine on the same network has has this issue on his computer, when he downloads the game. We see people asking about this on reddit every week.

Yoshida: Same network? That might be the issue… because the server might be thinking because you only have one static IP and then multiple machines accessing from that- the server might think it’s one person trying to access it many times.

Reddit: I think it’s happening with one person on one network too. VPN is a typical way to get around this. One thing we brought up on Reddit was that at the very least, having descriptive error messages instead of numbers, because we as players don’t know what those error numbers mean, so we as players have a difficult time understanding.

Yoshida: In terms of those numbers, you’re more than welcome to inquire on the forum and we can investigate what that means. In terms of accessing from the same home network and trying to have someone logged in, while someone else patching might cause issues… to double check though if you’re logged out and your brother logs in, do you have the same issues?

Reddit: We do- he’ll patch when I’m not home and we see the issue. I don’t think it’s related to the same network, I think the original question was just asking more in general.

Gamer Escape: The person we received this question from, he said it was the ISP being restrictive.

Yoshida: We’d have to make several considerations… it might not be possible to work with a partner where you can receive the patch and download it alternatively. We also need to think about merging the patch into the game itself. I’ll go back and talk to the engineer when I return. We also have heard on the ISP side that there’s a cache that’s left over and so they have to clear that out and that can take time. In those instances, if you wait for awhile it will resolve itself.

Q: For players that resonate best with crafters and gatherers instead of battle classes, there have been new ways for them to get bonuses and experience, but its not very interactive, it’s solo content. We haven’t seen really social ways to use them since Hamlet in 1.0. Are there any plans for them to be more social and active in content again?

A: Really? This is another one of those “I totally understand your sentiment…” (laughs) In the Anima weapon content, introducing the part about using a crafted item, there was a lot of backlash against that. Of course I’m sure there are DoH/DoL that want to be helpful to others, but if we make it so it’s required to have certain items that only a crafter or gatherer can create or make it advantageous in battle to have those items, now we’ll have the battle classes get angry about it “why do i have to farm gil to pay these crafters and gatherers?” so it’s a very difficult balance to strike. We would love to try it of course… but in baby steps. Sometimes people are very contradictory to one another, but again, I understand the sentiment.

Image courtesy of Reseph