In a Game Rant interview, Yoshi-P talked about everything from login queues to his biggest points of pride for Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail.
Some game developers are like rock stars to their community, like Todd Howard of Bethesda or Hideo Kojima of Kojima Productions. Any list of these industry icons has to include the lead of Final Fantasy 14, Naoki Yoshida, who helms Square-Enix’s Creative Studio 3.
At Gamescom, Game Rant got to sit with Yoshi-P for a wide-ranging interview (via a translator) on Final Fantasy 14 and the recent expansion Dawntrail, including its inspirations, the development of its story and features, and what to expect from the upcoming patch series. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Trailing the Dawn with Yoshi-P
Q: With the release of Dawntrail , we’re kind of officially in the post- Endwalker world now. I was curious if you’ve noticed any major changes to your mindset going forward?
Yoshida: No, the answer would be no for us. After we released Endwalker, we had already released five major patches up until the expansion release, so there wasn’t really any change in the mindset. Our mindset had already changed a long time ago.
We’re currently working on content that will be in 7.1, and 7.2, and even for things that will take a little bit longer, we are working towards 7.3. We are just really working hard to deliver a large variety of content for Final Fantasy 14 moving forward as we look towards the next 10 years. In that regard, we just want to continue straightforward on our journey.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about the Latin American influences on Dawntrail and what they add to the world of Final Fantasy 14 ?
Yoshida: As you know, Final Fantasy 14 has many players around the world, and when we look at existing locations within 14, we can look, for example, at the three city states in Eorzea and even places like Gridania. They draw inspiration from places around the world. We had many players who were waiting for us to incorporate some sort of homage to Central and South America, and we had in mind those players who were really expecting some sort of reference to this area.
But of course, when we look at the world within Final Fantasy 14 as well, and when we consider expanding that world, we have the theories and we also have the other reflections of the Source. But when we wanted to expand on that, we also considered other requests that came from the community, and a lot of players were actually asking for tacos! When will tacos be implemented? We thought, ‘Okay, why don’t we do both of them at the same time?’ We decided to implement a whole continent, and that was our homage to Latin America
Of course, if we think about Latin America as just a single entity, that’s a mistake. It’s more complex than that; it has a history spanning several thousand years. The culture itself is not simple, and because we understood the complexity of that, we didn’t want to take a very simple approach. With that in mind, we did a lot of research, we went to museums, and we read a lot of literature about historical references. We studied a lot about old civilizations in the region, and then we considered how can we adjust that to make it fit perfectly into Final Fantasy 14? That, in itself, was a challenge for us, and when we saw the response from our players in Central and South America, they seemed to be really happy with the results. I think, taking that in mind, we ended up being successful in our endeavors.
Q: For the launch this year, log-in queues were much better than in the past. I was curious to know what the team has learned about managing these queues?
Yoshida: When we look back at Endwalker, we experienced a situation where we had a huge increase in our player base, and as a result of that, we found that the number of players who were trying to access the servers exceeded the server capacity. That was a big factor behind the approach that we took for Dawntrail. But rather than technological aspects, I think it was more the case that we wanted to expand Final Fantasy 14, and we wanted to give back to the player community.
