Keeping this secret was difficult XD - We were given the rare opportunity to sit down with Naoki Yoshida himself and talk all things FF14 and where the game is going. both Mike and Yoshi P had a great time so I hope you enjoy as well. Also, we did only have access to 2 LAV mics for the interview so some of the sound is a bit wonky but I've done what I can to make it decent to listen to.
@@melissas4874 Most of the media tours involve a few exclusive interviews - it just means there's only one person doing the interview as opposed to the group sessions or open sessions at other points. You can see there's nobody else here asking questions or recording except preach - that makes it an exclusive.
Having you involved in the XIV community has been great. Your love of games has been on full display since branching out from Blizzard stuff and it's refreshing.
21:27: "A lot of the poeple who haven't played FF14 before, they typically associate FF14 with having an anime style and for them it comes across as childish and they feel that they won't like it" CALLED. OUT. LMAO.
The thing that always gets me about that: Have people SEEN other MMOs? WoW's graphics are literally cartoonish. So were Wildstar's. Runescape's were made in the early Java era and may have been hand drawn. Like, outside of maybe Rift or Elder Scrolls, what are these people looking at that isn't either cartoony, anime-esque, or both?
@@SubduedRadical Probably because those are western developers and anything that doesn't conform to that perspective is weird, or childish. I would wager that it's a mixture of culture shock and potentially some layer of xenophobia.
@@Hawkenwhacker Nah, I'm more saying I don't think that's as much of a reason as people give it credit for. I think it's more people looking for excuses. Some people get very strong MMO brand loyalty and so will be dismissive of anything else for the stupidest made up reasons possible. Because they aren't being dismissive for that reason. They decided to just be dismissive and are latching onto any reason they can find after the fact to justify their pre-decision.
@@waltwhite81262 other reasons for the English to Japanese translation: To help the Japanese audience, and to allow Yoshi P time to think about the question while it is being translated.
@@waltwhite8126 All of this. Yoshi P can actually speak very good English but there was a live letter that came out a few years ago (during shadowbringers) where he said he wasn't confident with it so he hardly speaks it. He can understand a lot of it, judging by his reactions when people ask him things.
I am so, so happy that Naoki Yoshida is the one handling FFXIV and that SE is keeping him at the helm, because oh my god is he ever so damn good at what he does !
He did some great things, especially in regards to 1.0 to 2.0 but the current battle system is very boring and uninspired. And FFXVI was an overall disappointment to me. Still have a lot of respect for YP. It can't be easy. 💛
I hope he keeps well and healthy because this man is probably one of the few people in the games industry i feel like actually fully understand a variety of games and why they should be the way they are.
@@TheOneGreat FFXVI was a success to me and my GOTY 2023 despite some massive flaws. I put in 200+ hours in it. First of all, the game has the best character graphical quality in gaming ever, besides FF7 rebirth. It also arguably has the best voice acting in a game ever. For those two points alone, and creating an incredible cinematic experience, I give the game an 8/10. Yes the combat was mid and the world/questing as well. But they can only improve on that. Also, something to keep in mind is that FF franchise was doing terrible with FF13/FF15 and in comparison FF16 is a solid improvement over those games and put the franchise back on track. So overall, Yoshida did the impossible. Put FF back on the map. Yes it's not a deep RPG. But it put Square Enix on track to make a great FF17.
@@Bahamut998 See, you said it looks and sounds nice so it's amazing. I'm playing a game, not watching a movie. Gameplay is a distant first and that aspect was boring. Not to mention the lifeless overworld and the bafflingly bad side quests. Rebirth is great, though, I agree.
Thank you Preach for always asking for chat bubbles, i have wanted this in the game since the start, being a huge FF fan its one of the things i wanted most in game lol
@@Ryotsu2112 I imagine the difference is a matter of consent. NPCs are automatically consenting to their chat being seen by players. Players aren't automatically consenting to their chat being seen by other players.
@@DameonStarflame But... it already is seen by other players if they speak in public channels? if I say something in /say everyone within certain range that is not blocked by me can see it already. Chat bubbles achieve the same thing. Presumably /tell won't have them like it doesn't in wow etc.
I greatly appreciate the translators being left in as well, I usually catch these when I'm at work so it's nice to be able to just listen to them without having to check subs!
I am a wow Andy for gameplay, but am intrigued by what FF14 is as an RPG and how this game can impact my own. Thank you YohsiP for your time and Mike for the good conversation.
In my experience from playing both this is spot on. I play wow when I want some good mmo gameplay and/or am watching tv. I play ffxiv when I’m in the mood for more focused story while questing or just goofing around with other players in the world/housing/gold saucer, etc. it would be cool to see both continue to improve the areas the other excels at but I also enjoy just being able to decide which one to play based on my mood and what I’m after at the time
I think more than just MMOs but a lot of RPGs could stand to learn what FFXIV does to make the story and characters so compelling. I do not cry for video games, but o have been brought to tears multiple times by this one. Evoking such strong emotion is what any media wants to achieve.
"Chat Bubbles CONFIRMED!" FINALLY! I was legit in the closed Beta for this game and one of the pieces of feedback I tried to tell the dev team was to include chat bubbles and WHY for RP/social reasons. I created a whole forum post about it back then. A bunch of random people came in and shut me down saying it wouldn't improve the social aspect and not everything should borrow from WoW. To this day I still sit in SW or in front of Goldshire and chat people up. Chat bubbles will ALWAYS feel more personal than the chat box. I also suggested they be an option to toggle off and on for players who don't want it. But here I am like 10 years later and the thing I said to have from the beginning finally happens! This is soooo cool. Now walking up to people they will know you are talking to them even easier!
@@numberc8420 there's a certain vibe that the FF14 community is often faulty of, is that the game is free of serious oversights or flaws, even when the developers don't benefit from the overly positive feedback. It's almost like players are traumatised that if they don't practice toxic positivity regarding FF14, their toy will be taken away. Which is patently false, especially with the negative community feedback being the main reason the game survived past Alexander Gordias/Midas
@@taggertrose6952 they never said when but for now you will have to settle for third party plugins, in that case you need XIVlauncher and Dalamud. Technically they are against ToS but it's a don't ask don't tell kind of thing and as Preach mentioned in the past, they don't seem to care for minor things like chat bubbles.
Fascinating that they prioritize the time it takes to complete a dungeon rather than the content in itself. Which probably is why I never feel too taxed to complete one in a roulette. That said, with how simple the dungeons can be, they are seeking other ways to give more complicated, longer dungeons via the other systems, I wonder what they will come up with
"Mechanics are for cars." Despite it being a meme, it can be said it's helped form the way people approach the game. I've been in groups where people completely ignore them, and then we wipe and the group doesn't know how or doesn't care to learn from it. The player base is just as responsible. It's a symbiotic relationship after all.
I would love to see a Boss Rush dungeon or trial/raid. No trash inbetween, just one boss after another. Not Ultimate level difficulty, but you know, one normal version and one extreme. That'd be interesting.
So like Cuff of the Son Alexander raid? That's just 4 lil boss fights back to back with no trash in between- the normal version has some trash at the very start but that's the only trash mobs- savage doesn't have any of the trash mobs I believe. Would be interesting to see more non-ultimate fights be structured like that again but I think the durability of the average player wouldn't be as agreeable haha.
Then we need dungeons where it's largely JUST trash but the trash is more impactful, similar to criterion but not to the same degree. I'd love to see just vast variety of how different dungeons COULD work.
Man, I would've loved for you two to talk longer. Someday it will happen. Maybe even out of media tour season and you can have each other for the whole day.
as soon as I heard Yoshi P say "world of warcraft" I knew shit was about to go hard, and he really did know Preach. This interview is FIRE. Blizz could frankly never lmao. Well done Preach!
@@therabbits69 hell yoship has always stated that wow and ff14 are both equally good games. The tribalism that has seperated the ex wow ff14 players is so stupid, both do different things better or worse but both are made better by the other existing and pushing new ideas, both teams talk to each and play each others game and strive the best mmos they can.
Great Interview, really great questions and really great and direct answers! I'm so relieved to see a developer whose answers are not only "We will see" or "We dont know yet" without any other perspective given. Yoshi-P is just one of THE greats in the MMO industry and with every each interview, rightfully so! :)
@@Honzaj Tyjo fakt joo? Tak to jsem vůbec nevěděl! Jsem si to myslel na základě youtube žejo :D Hraješ na Chaosu? :) btw, na chaosu jsem díky tvému videu, protože jsi říkal, že tam hraje nejvíc čechů :D
For anyone like me that doesn't want to see gameplay for Dawntrail to go in as blind as possible, go audio only at 13:04 - 18:04 and 33:56 - 37:13! Great interview though, also you're looking very good Preach! If you've been looking after your health lately it shows. :D
I am smiling so much. I am soooo glad you got into the game and subsequently into the media tour preach! I know you had a hard year and I did as well. So seeing this whole video so far during my work, I am smiling so hard. Big ❤ from me Mike. May the rat bless us all. Best, Molotov
Love interviews like this. They're always so different and interesting from the usual developer interviews that people usually have. I loved both this one and the Blzzard one you did previously. Keep it up.
Hopefully they give you the option to turn off chat bubbles. Imagine being in a main city with 100+ people talking with chat bubbles. That would be so much screen bloat.
The deep and insightful answers is quite refreshing. I'm too used to useless fluff like "we are listening, we are working on it". I want to know why its not possible. The in-depth philosophy to some design changes and why the obvious solutions isn't so simple for the devs.
The next time you go to meet yoshi-p you should bring whiteboard cutouts in the shape of chat bubbles for you two to write messages to each other on lmfao
Kinda sad ... i was happy to hear they would take more risk but i dont really like the package approach i do get that players expect a certain length then they que up into a dungeon or raid but i think there more then just one package to accomplish a length between 12 and 25 minutes they could try this in a very soft manner ... like a dungeon with only 2 normal bosses and trash and the third area maybe has more trash and maybe 2 minibosses ... i really would enjoy more variety in the dungeon landscape
I really hope they stick to that ideal of not abandoning mechanic ideas in favor of safer ones (limit cut, buddy stacks, etc). Nothing drags at this game quite like playing tier after tier that makes me wonder why we haven't had any more fights as compelling to progress as Titan Savage was. I love cool shit like Uplift and I really don't want them to abandon them just because people get upset at losing uptime or the boss going invincible or whatever else. There's cool ideas that deserve to see more play in this game so the raids are fresh, not just difficult.
12:57 In another interview I saw, he spoke about how when he first started working on FFXIV back in 1.0, there was a case where White Mage could cast Cure 3 basically as much as they wanted without fear of running out of MP. Of course, this meant that all the other healing spells were rendered moot and there was never a reason to cast anything else. It was just bad game balance, so he implemented changes to make it so they would run out of MP if they just spammed their most powerful healing ability. However, this led to backlash from the players who now felt stressed, because now they had to actually consider their resources and what spells to use when. He said it was something that surprised him, but it was also a valuable learning experience. From then on, whenever they make a mistake, they always try to correct it ASAP and give an explanation to the players *why* the change is necessary, so that people don't get accustomed to a broken mechanic. But he also believes that small adjustments on a larger scale will allow people to enjoy the game and slowly be ushered towards a new direction, rather than suddenly changing direction all at once, which can be disorienting and lead to people not enjoying the game. It's a very interesting design philosophy. Of course, if the adjustments are too small, it can make people feel like the game is stagnating or not really going anywhere, so it's a balancing act.
pso2 can be a fine example of using chat bubbles. but if the dev were frustrated and reluctant to have the option there is an idea for the player wanted to see the chat bubbles and the others who don't. Try go with an option to enable and disable the bubble chat. I too, really curious to have an option having a bubble chat so we can know who the hell is talking to us, wait... somehow bubble chat can also make us know who's the one saying it, despite us disable the name of the character display on players head?
The thing I love about this, and Mike even says it, for the longest time Mike was always instant NOPE to FFXIV, and now here he is, ranking it multiple times as his favorite video game story, talking to the man himself, I said it in chat when you showed it off live but just in case you see it here, but massive congrats Mike!
To a few hundred thousand people in the world Preach is basically a rock star, but then in his day-to-day life he has to deal with the same b.s. as all the rest of us.
I wonder what they'll do with the level cap afterwards. Will we just keep going to higher numbers? What older MMOs like Ragnarok Online used to have was advanced jobs. Basically you prestige into a slightly more advanced form of what you are, in some instances relevel from 1, sometimes continue from lets say 50-70.
I personally am guessing levels will keep going up. The job stone system already does a sort of advanced class thing and they seem to regret that system existing. Maybe a level squish or xp curve being adjusted down the line.
It’s for the Japanese audience. It’s to make sure that they can watch all the FF content and understand, even if they don’t speak English. It’s easy to forget sometimes that this is a Japanese game, made in Japan, with a Japanese audience in mind first.
You forgot to ask about the hardest ultimate boss ever - mog station and creation of new account and payments. It's the biggest obstacle for new players and even old ones. SE needs to just copy/paste it from WoW or GW2 or ESO and be done with it. Look at Zepla's struggles with her account and/or the boys from Trah Taste. This should be the top priority imho.
Yaaaay! I'm so happy you got to sit down, legend to legend! Can't wait for chat bubbles, and I hope one day to be there in "person" for one of chats amazing plays!
Cannot believe the dude who I used to watch mess around recording a webshow about the game I loved back then, on his couch with a mate, is now sitting across a couch from Yoshi-P talking about the game I love now.
Japanese translator is doing a really poor job translating Preach's questions but YoshiP is answering pretty well shows that he understands English almost perfectly.
@@VaporeonEnjoyer1 probably inexperience because he has to do it so quickly. He probably jot down notes about what he thinks Preach means to get ahead
I'm glad the team is going to keep dungeon design as is.. People asking for more from basic dungeons aren't considering the role these dungeons play in our progression. For those of us playing actively during an expansion, capping tomestones, gearing, etc, it is really nice to have our dungeons be more formulaic, because we're doing them every day. We can be surprised in other ways with specific content catered to the audience who wants more, like with variant/criterion.
@@xalmor6044 They want them over with ASAP since they're doing them every day. These aren't the things that get them exited, so in and out, quick and done. There are other things in the game they go to for engagement.
I don't think the issue is even the jobs being more and more casual, it's more like.. let me play and learn and feel good about playing it properly... Can't do that with an Wac-a-mole job =/
lettts gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! i just started playing and i cant live without chat bubbles. I know in wow, in raids/whispers you dont have them.. which is fine. But if we are just talking or in a party or yelling... Then BAM it works. In here they should hide them in raids but if you say or shout / yell you should show those. It makes sense that way. Thank you for convincing him for it
It's incredible how far Mike has come in the FFXIV community. If someone told past him, before he tried the game, that he would one day be talking face to face with the game director of this "weeb game" himself, he probably would have laughed his ass off
My only issue here is that you would use gaming footage when Yoshi was talking but not when you are. I don't understand this. Apart from that this is a great interview.
IMO one reason FFXIV gets away with a lighter touch and adjustments are typically somewhat minor is because there's no real choice within individual classes. A class is a class, there's no talents or alternate advancement or skill selection etc. This makes it really easy to keep balance exactly how they want it. The only real balance is tweaking the difficulty of individual classes in terms of how hard it is to maximize that potential damage (whether it's positionals or perfecting rotations etc) This is both FFXIV's weakness and greatest strength in different ways. IMO I think it's a great choice for FFXIV because it helps shift the focus away from min/maxing and towards the story and community. Edit: to add onto this comment from a later point in the interview... I don't think FFXIV will have a problem with having too many jobs because of the lack of flexibility within the jobs. Warcraft has 3 or 4 totally different roles per class, and depending on the expansion you have some flexibility within those roles. So basically, instead of having to come up with gimmicks and continually tweaking the balance between the different specs of a class, FFXIV can continue to perfect the jobs they have and add new jobs so long as they can come up with a fresh mechanic/gimmick so one job doesn't feel too much like another job.
I still think in general for dungeon design, i like the idea of just having all dungeon corridors being open similar to dungeons like mt gulg where you can freely pull corridor to corridor if you so please or you can do wall to wall. even just that at least imo would be a massive dungeon design thing that might be simple enough to do?
This is supper exciting to see happen... I love all your talks with all different developers you have a very unique and way of asking question that I find very entertaining to watch keep up the great work Preach.
The only thing bad with FF 14 is the frustration of trying to get your friends to experience it, against their unfair beliefs about the game and somewhat slow start.
What makes FFXIV unique compare to every other mmo game that it is almost JRPG first and mmo as second. You can pretty much play the game and the main story pure solo and it is still damn great experience storywise. Unlike other mmo games which usually mmo first and story is kinda secondary.
wtf i been asking for chat bubbles for years, its so dead looking without it and hard to tell whos talking, i had to use a mod and it was sooooo much better... i can walk up to someone who just said something .. and makes it feel like the characters are talking.. so dumb to not have it for so dam long instead of staring at the dam chat box
