A walk through the end with Naoki Yoshida
The problem with a lot of long-lived MMOs is that, eventually, the villains get so powerful that they become absurd. But Naoki Yoshida, game director of Final Fantasy XIV, isn’t worried about villain power creep. In an interview with The Verge, the celebrated director of the phenomenally popular Final Fantasy XIV MMO shared insight into Endwalker’s phenomenal story and why he’s not worried about creating an even bigger Big Bad.
In Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, the game’s final boss is the military general of a fascist nation and an ancient being bent on destruction and death. After that, in the Heavensward expansion, players fight ancient alien dragons who, after years of conflict with the mortal races of the world, are unable to put aside their hate and work toward a peaceful coexistence. In Stormblood, the warriors of light fought a megalomaniacal despot imbued with the powers of a dragon god, and in Shadowbringers, you fought that despot’s even more powerful great grandfather. Finally, in the most recent expansion Endwalker, players face and defeat the embodiment of hopelessness and sorrow.
One would imagine, in light of ever-increasing stakes and ever more powerful enemies, it’d be tough for Yoshida’s team to craft a villain more threatening than essentially death itself. But when I asked him if he was at all worried that he and his team painted themselves in a corner, he simply said, “No.”
“The world is always full of mysteries,” Yoshida said via email. “And, even in real-world affairs, some unbelievably sorrowful incidents do happen. They may not necessarily be from some overwhelming threat; they could be horrors born from personal ideology, or tragedies caused by a concentration of power, or things that
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