Final Fantasy XIV could last at least another five years, says the director

Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida recently spoke about the future of online multiplayer RPG with The Washington Post, saying that at its current growth rate, users can expect the online world to continue expanding with new content for at least another five years, if not indefinitely.

“Even now, [Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda] is encouraging us to fight for more players and 30 million adventurers, and he still has future plans for us, ”said Yoshida The Washington Post via translator. “Fortunately, we don’t see any stop in our momentum. At one point, we thought we might be able to stagnate, but luckily our player base continues to expand and grow. “

While game development is never easy, Final Fantasy XIV expansions and patches continued to arrive at a decent clip under Yoshida’s guidance, thanks to the way his team simplified the process of creating new content. Yoshida said that while planning expansions, they expect about 70% of the work to be done due to previous development, leaving enough space to iterate over these standardized resources.

Writing, added Yoshida, is always done much more in advance. The story for Final Fantasy XIVnext Endwalker the expansion, which begins this fall, was completed in October 2019.

Final Fantasy XIV got off to a rough start when it was released in 2010, but Square Enix’s decision to put Yoshida (at the time mostly known as a talented Dragon Quest X planner) in a leadership role led to the 2013 launch of The Realm Reborn, a restart of the original game that served as the basis for all subsequent expansions.

It is widely assumed that Yoshida’s work transforming MMO has given him a role in producing the next single-player in the series, Final Fantasy XVI. But for now, he is remaining silent about what they have in store to avoid inadvertently raising or destroying the hopes of the diverse Final fantasy fanbase.

“We don’t want to say something that is badly finished and cause speculation about [Final Fantasy XVI]”Said Yoshida. “With any Final fantasy fan depending on which Final fantasy the title is your jam, the point you get excited about tends to be different. ”