GamerEscape

During our time at PAX West this year, we had an opportunity to sit down and chat with Final Fantasy XIV‘s Lead UI Designer Kei Odagiri. Not only was it Odagiri-san’s first time visiting the United States, but it was also the first time that he’s traveled outside of Japan!

On Saturday, August 31, he appeared in the PAX West 2024 Panel “Putting the ‘U’ in UI: Tailoring the Final Fantasy XIV Experience” which can be viewed in its entirety here. Our interview took place the day before, with Aimi Tokutake providing the translation.

Gamer Escape: What is your philosophy when it comes to keeping the user experience consistent, clean and understandable with all the new things that are added into the game?

Odagiri: As a fundamental approach that, not just myself, but my team keeps in mind, is making sure gameplay stays consistent between those that play on mouse and keyboard and those that play on controller, allowing for either parties to experience the game in the same way. Then, with that understanding, making it understandable and easy to grasp for our players. We try not to squish in too many functionalities at once, we have to be mindful of what we include in some of these UI elements. I know we have a tendency of thinking to ourselves how much we can do, and then adding to much at once, but when it happens, there’s just too many functions to handle that the players will not get the intention behind why they were put in there. So, having that objective view of what functions are introduced to our players is also very important. Sometimes we may make a decision to include a limited number of functionality at first, and and then with subsequent updates we’ll add to that system. That’s the kind of approach we take in trying to make it as easy to understand and intuitive for our players as possible.

Gamer Escape: Awhile ago on the Developers Blog, you mentioned that the team is always looking to address small-but-meaningful changes to help bring features up to current standards. Is there anything that you currently have on your mind that you’d like to go back and update?

Odagiri: I would like to go back and touch-up everything, first of all.

There are so many things I’d love to reiterate on in terms of the different elements. But I think its also important to note that we pay attention to player feedback and how they react to different functions being implemented. Sometimes we would anticipate the worst, and sometimes that reaction happens and so we look at it and think “Oh yeah, I knew it would get misunderstood” or that they would receive it in such a way. But, that also prompts us to identify those as pain points that we want to address. Sometimes it might drive us to reconsider a certain functionality and redesign so that it’s more useful. But yes, there are many elements we can always iterate and improve on.

Here’s one example: some of the layout of the buttons. Not nessecery the gamepad, but just on the window, and things like that. That’s something we constantly look at and I would love to sometimes tweak it because sometimes a button layout might make sense if you’re playing with a mouse, but not be as comfortable on a game controller, or vice versa. Somethings might be designed more in mind of gamepad, but then its uncomfortable for mice and keyboard users. Also some of our team members might have different preferences as well, so there’s always something to tweak. I think it’s just a matter of us going back in and playing with content and making sure the feel is right and iterate and tweak as we go along.

Gamer Escape: What is the process, and time table like for developing a new UI skin? Are there any plans for any additional ones at this time?

Odagiri: To answer your question about additional UI skins…there are plans, and there is some movement happening. So please stay tuned for future updates on that!

In terms of timelines…in general, if we’re looking at implementing a new UI skin, we have to make sure that we’re applying it to all of the relevant UI elements, making sure that we’re reflecting the changes, and testing the UI elements so that they’re properly working. It will take us roughly two patches, or the timeframe it takes to develop two patches.

Whenever we think of adding a new skin for our UI elements, and this goes back to the process of creating them, it would either be a suggestion from within the UI team. Perhaps an artist might have an idea for a new design and they would present it as an idea. After seeing the feasibility of it, we would consult Yoshida to see what would be a feasible schedule and if its doable. If there are many different options, we would then narrow it down.

Sometimes, Yoshida might have a vision of some design that he wants to have applied to the UI, so it would be more like a direction from him to the team. That’s the typical process.

Gamer Escape: With the New Game+ Screen…the patch cycle is usually done with say, 6.0, 6.1 up to 6.5. But instead of showing the patches, each expansion on the New Game+ Screen shows Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. What was the reason for designing it this way?

Odagiri: Unfortunately, the way that the story is split up in New Game+ isn’t really my field with the UI team, so I might not be able to give you the official correct answer on this…but what I imagined happened with this is that whenever the game side of things determined which flags are triggered and which quests have been completed, it was probably easier to manage in the way that it was broken up. Again, sorry, but this isn’t my field but I think that’s what happened. I think it was split up in a way that made sense to whoever was designing that.

Gamer Escape: We heard that the Strategy Board feature was delayed from 7.0. What kind of challenges have you encountered during its development?

We do want to clarify first, Yoshida did mention the Strategy Board, but I don’t think we ever officially said it would be for the release of Dawntrail. It was more of “we’re looking to the future and hoping to get this in during the 7.x patch series.”

We do understand there’s a demand for this visual reference for players to know where to go and to strategize. Right now I think players are using text macros in the chat to know that “DPS is placed here” “Tanks go there” and things like that. I think that kind of culture of communication will not go away, but we do want to have some kind of functionality that allows for a really good visual representation of where you want people to go in terms of strategizing.

At the same time, I’m sure players have their own expectations of what they want in a Strategy Board, so we’re also fighting the unspoken pressure of “Can we meet those expectations?” and how do we bridge that gap between what the developers are going to deliver vs what the players are expecting.

We’re still working on it, so stay tuned for further information.

Gamer Escape: Each platform the game releases on has its own unique features. PlayStation 5 for example has its haptic triggers. Were there any unique features you had to deal with in bringing the game to Xbox?

Odagiri: One feature that was specific to Xbox is being able to tell if a player is playing on Xbox. Xbox players need to be able to recognize other Xbox players immediately. So in addition to having a friend list or contact list, we had to make sure we implemented a feature that displays the other Xbox players. That was one of the unique features we had to implement when bringing the game over to Xbox.

Otherwise…there were also Xbox achievements that were unique to the platform, so that had to be addressed as well.

Gamer Escape: What technical debt do you feel still exists from the game’s relaunch with A Realm Reborn? If time and resources weren’t an issue, what would you change?

Odagiri: So if we’re talking about technical debt between 1.0 and 2.0…we drastically changed the UI system when we relaunched as A Realm Reborn, so I don’t think there’s much debt per say.

Yoshida was mentioning this elsewhere, but at the time we were trying to utilize this middleware for UI related things, but we realized it was too much of a load on the memory, so we had to switch over our engine mid-beta. So we’ve already done our big overall of UI related updates when we transitioned over to A Realm Reborn.

There’s not really any specific thing I want to go back and rebuild at this time. That said, the system that we have now and some of the UI tools might start to feel old at this point so I would love to look for means to incorporate new technology that might be available, or be able to improve upon the elements we have that may start to feel more antiquated.