Ff14 Director Naoki Yoshida Has Big Plans For The Mmo After...

If you throw another moon at me, I'm gonna lose it.

Final Fantasy 14 has been in a bit of a weird state. Endwalker's post-launch patches failed to hit the ground running, despite the main expansion absolutely nailing the climax of its 10-year story. Dawntrail carried these problems forward, and with a lukewarm main quest, it couldn't rest on that good ol' patch story hype to keep folks enthused.

Things have been improving, slowly but surely, with Creative Studio 3 seemingly keen to experiment and shake things up after years of a stale, sluggish formula—and it looks like those efforts are continuing.

That's per an interview with Korean outlet Inven, wherein Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) spoke on the subject. I should note that the following quotes are machine-translated, so the exact meaning is to be taken with a grain of salt, but it certainly looks like Yoshi-P's working on something big:

"Final Fantasy 14 is now moving forward into its next decade. We have a fan festival planned, and we have some pretty big announcements lined up. With the determination to embark on a second iteration, we're rethinking everything from scratch to evolve the game with new goals."

For context, Final Fantasy 14 had a failed initial release in 2010, so dramatic that Yoshi-P was brought in to overhaul the entire game from scratch. It was a major effort, one that saw it turn from an awkward, poorly-optimised game to a standard, but solid MMO: One that's slowly drawn in a deeply affectionate fanbase. Also, they made the reboot to A Realm Reborn diegetic, dropping a moon on everybody. It was pretty cool.

Yoshi-P invoking this sort of language, then, actually means something. In op-eds I've written about this game, I've noted that FF14's problem is that it's history repeating itself. Nowhere near as dramatically as it did in the 1.0 days, mind, but still—1.0 operated on outdated assumptions about what MMO players wanted, and present-day Final Fantasy 14 has been doing the same.

Yoshi-P appears to recognise this: "In the past, MMORPGs were built around repetitive tasks, known as grinding, and time-consuming gameplay. However, things have changed since World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy 14 as well."

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He then goes on to mention the Allagan Tomestones system, which typically lets players grab 450 tomestones a week for gear as the weekly incentive to keep logging in. However, he seem

Source: PC Gamer