Articles

Yoshida Does More Interviews, Leaks More Info

by Orophen on Nov 2 2011 , 3:29 pm

With the announcement of the Letter From the Producer LIVE Part II broadcast, many FFXIVers are expecting more info about 2.0, as well as the Seventh Umbral Era storyline content promised for the upcoming year. But we may already have a glimpse into some of the things we can expect to hear about during the broadcast, courtesy of a couple of recent interviews that have practically flown under the radar over the past week. FFXIV Producer/Director, Yoshida Naoki sat down with JeuxOnline and FinalFantasy14.eu to answer some questions about the future of Final Fantasy XIV, and revealed quite a bit about what may be coming down the pipeline.

Free Companies Are the Best Companies

For starters, Yoshida spoke a lot about the upcoming Free Company content. In a response to JeuxOnline, he stated that a Free Company is meant to perform the role of a strong community for a group of players. Not only that, but unlike linkshells, you can only belong to one Free Company. That sounds very much like a guild, doesn’t it? Well where does that leave linkshells?

Free Company is something that I really want to have a strong bound between the communities, so the Free Company has to have really really strong bounds. But I think that would be too harsh if that is the only community existing in the world, so I want Linkshells community to be a bit more like a wide layer around the Free Companies. Even if the players belong to different Free Companies, they can still chat with each other, have a really wide community thanks to the Linkshell, while the Free Company is going to be a really tightened, strong community.

So Linkshells are relegated to personal chat channels, while Free Companies will become the real guilds of Final Fantasy XIV? Seems reasonable enough. Linkshells never had the functionality you would expect a full fledged guild to have, not even in Final Fantasy XI. With Free Companies, you get the ability to create a custom crest, although the customization system seems to be one where you can take pre-rendered parts and arrange them the way you want to create your own crest. Not ideal, but it’s something. In addition to that you can create your own ranks within the Free Company, customizing the structure and organization how you see fit. According to Yoshida there will be a lot of different options, so let’s hope they don’t skimp on the features when Free Companies are implemented in 2.0.

Keeping it Classy

When pressed about whether or not there would be Great Swords and Katanas in the game, Yoshida one upped everyone by admitting they were thinking about adding Samurai and Ninja. “If we are going to add Katanas, then of course, we need Samurais,” he stated. “It will be added when we’ll add more new classes, for example, I’m thinking about who should hold two Katanas, should that be Ninja? Should it be a job? In that case, should Thief be the class? We are sort of discussing the things with the dev team.”

Yoshida went on to say that more mage classes would be implemented before they would even think about adding new melee classes, in order to achieve a better class balance. Which is good since the game is sorely lacking in the mage department. One of the popular rumors is that the Arcanist class is the next mage class to be added in the future. In the roadmap Yoshida released recently, we were told to expect the expansion of Armoury, focused on classes and jobs, would be implemented prior to 2.0. It’s likely that classes like Thief and Arcanist could be seen sooner rather than later, due to the fact that mage classes are in short supply, and Thief is a highly requested class to begin with.

The summoner class was also confirmed, although there is no time frame as to when it might be implemented. Yoshida had this to say about summoning the classic beasts like Ifrit, Shiva, and Titan.

You will be able to summon them after 2.0 but with this ff14 we are considering these traditional primals such as ifrit and leviathan like a god. So I want to separate the traditional summoning system from these new primals. You will be able to summon 1 primal per 1 world, such as 1 ifrit for 1 world. So there will be ifrit, Garuda, and so on but only 1 each. So with this new system Im planning to implement, the free companies who have defeated the primal have the ability to summon them. In the previous series, someone could summon Ifrit as well as other people could summon Ifrit. So there would be several Ifrits in one world but I don’t want it to be like that, so people will have to fight each other to have the ability to summon Ifrit.

The Summoner class can expect to have smaller avatars instead of the larger ones like Ifrit. That may be a little disappointing for some of the veterans for the Final Fantasy series, but whatever avatars they decide to allow summoners to wield will probably be pulled from the lore of the past Final Fantasy games. And there are a ton of avatars/espers/summons to pull from. What’s even more interesting is the competition aspect in allowing Free Companies to gain control of the Primals. It’s this kind of twist on classic Final Fantasy concepts that make for a more entertaining experience.

Battling With Style, and Combos

Yoshida also went into detail about the battle system, revealing perhaps some of the most unexpected changes on the 2.0 roadmap. “Towards 1.20, we are really reviewing how the class balance should be, and for the seven battle classes, we’ll be checking all of the class actions, magic skills; we are rebuilding everything…” This would be satisfying enough, except for the fact that there’s even more of a surprise. Self-combos.

Yoshida is looking to create a “dynamic and exciting experience when you’re participating in a battle.” From what he’s said so far we can expect that:

  • Position is going to be very important in the new battle system.
  • Performing certain skills in a specific order results in a combo, which cause the final skill to inflict bonus damage.
  • Ranged attackers will also be able to perform combos.
  • Linking a combo with another combo may create a Battle Regimen or an effect similar to a Battle Regimen.

Linking combos would more or less be a difficult thing to pull off. Not only that, but the words “hissatsu waza” were mentioned, a term that means “Finishing Move.” It was said that a lot of beautiful effects could be expected if players manage to pull this off. There’s no telling just how many of these battle changes will make it into the game or how they will be implemented. But when Final Fantasy XIV was first announced and bandied about the gaming blogs and conventions, were were promised a dynamic battle system based on positioning and distance. If anything even remotely close to these changes are implemented into the game with 2.0, it’ll go a long way towards fulfilling those things promised to players in the first release of the game, most of which were believed would never see the light of day.

The More You Know

There were many other things mentioned in these interviews. Dragoon Knights won’t be getting wyverns. A chocobo raising system will be added, featuring different colors and custom armor. And there is a ton of other information included in these recent interviews. Check out the links below to read the interviews in their entirety:

With the Letter from the Producer LIVE broadcast tomorrow, players should get even more details about these and many other things, so make sure to tune in on Youtube Live at 12:00am PST on the morning of November 3 to check it out. Just follow this URL when midnight rolls around:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1auK6EYTvQ

The topics slated for the broadcast include Patch 1.19 content, Patch 1.20, and beyond/the future of FINAL FANTASY XIV. You can be sure that we’ll also be there to view the live event, and we’ll make sure to cover it on the pages of Zantetsuken for those that miss the chance to see it.