Final Fantasy XIV Director Talks PS3 Beta, Promises Version 2.0 Won’t Suck

Regardless of what you think about the Final Fantasy series, the gaming industry can collectively agree that Final Fantasy XIV on PC was just plain terrible. Even more baffling, Square Enix has actually done the MMO thing right with FFXI to a genuine degree of moderate success, so the shortcomings with the last core game in the series is all the more worrisome.

Square Enix lost a lot of money on the first release of FFXIV, with the game battling a huge amount of issues:

Several localization errors
Low player populations
Mass-generated gold farming bots
Confusing world maps
“Fatigue system” (eventually removed)
Several duplicated environments

And yet, Square Enix refuses to give up on the game, with the PS3 public beta of “Version 2.0” still set for this winter. Give them credit for sticking to their guns, I guess.

Due to FFXIV’s bad reputation, you also have to give Naoki Yoshida a ton of credit for taking on the game. Sony’s PlayStation Blog threw him a lot of softball questions in a recent interview, but they did confirm that the PS3 release is about “50-percent” ready to roll, while the PC version is fully optimized (although it wasn’t quite ready to be seen at E3 2012).

Most importantly, the game will be adding more tutorials and a better user interface, which was a key problem with the last release:

Of course, bringing an MMORPG to a console system means tackling some big challenges. “It is a thing that didn’t have been done a lot in the past, and we have to make sure that we design an user interface and control scheme specially for these players”, explains Yoshida. “And we’ll also be adding in-game tutorials and quests that will help players that might not be comfortable with MMOs, and when they play the game, they will feel like they’re playing a console game that just happens to be online.”

If you do most of your gaming on the PS3 and haven’t bought FFXIV on PC, you’re one of the lucky ones. But even though FFXIV 2.0 is now cross-platform, there won’t be any special content for either version:

PlayStation.Blog: Besides the new control scheme and new user interface, does the PS3 version has any new exclusive features compared to the PC version?

Yoshida: Because players that’ll be playing on the PS3 client and on the PC client will all be on the same servers, we can’t give either group something special, because everyone is playing together.

Yoshida also hinted that certain places and quests from the series’ previous 13 core games would be included as Easter eggs, citing the Crystal Tower in FFIII as an example of something the new team is bringing to FFXIV. Hopefully, they skip anything from Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel.

Source: PlayStation Blog

Square Enix lost a lot of money on the first release of FFXIV, with the game battling a huge amount of issues:

Several localization errors
Low player populations
Mass-generated gold farming bots
Confusing world maps
“Fatigue system” (eventually removed)
Several duplicated environments

And yet, Square Enix refuses to give up on the game, with the PS3 public beta of “Version 2.0” still set for this winter. Give them credit for sticking to their guns, I guess.

Most importantly, the game will be adding more tutorials and a better user interface, which was a key problem with the last release:

Of course, bringing an MMORPG to a console system means tackling some big challenges. “It is a thing that didn’t have been done a lot in the past, and we have to make sure that we design an user interface and control scheme specially for these players”, explains Yoshida. “And we’ll also be adding in-game tutorials and quests that will help players that might not be comfortable with MMOs, and when they play the game, they will feel like they’re playing a console game that just happens to be online.”

PlayStation.Blog: Besides the new control scheme and new user interface, does the PS3 version has any new exclusive features compared to the PC version?

Yoshida: Because players that’ll be playing on the PS3 client and on the PC client will all be on the same servers, we can’t give either group something special, because everyone is playing together.

Source: PlayStation Blog