Final Fantasy 14 Director Naoki Yoshida Says Developing An MMO And FF16 Isn’t As Different As You Think

gameinformer.com:

I recently previewed Final Fantasy XVI, the new mainline single-player Final Fantasy game coming to PlayStation 5 this summer. You can read my full thoughts on what I think of the game after going hands-on with it for about two hours here. But during this preview, I was also able to participate in a group interview of FFXVI producer Naoki Yoshida, the game’s director Hiroshi Takai, and its combat director Ryota Suzuki. 

One facet of FFXVI’s development I was especially interested in is how Creative Business Unit III, the internal studio behind the upcoming game, is able to balance creating this new title while continuing to develop its extremely successful MMO, Final Fantasy XIV. Yoshida, who is FFXIV’s producer and director, says it’s not as different as you might think. 

“It’s probably not as different as you’d expect creating an ongoing [game like FFXIV] as well as a standalone game because for Final Fantasy XIV, if you look at the original A Realm Reborn and our expansions, they are all stories that have beginnings, middles, and ends,” Yoshida says through a translator. 

He says one thing that is different, though, is that in developing an MMO, you have to create the hook for the next story. 

“You don’t have to do that in Final Fantasy XVI,” Yoshida continues. “If we wanted, we could put a hook in there that gets you excited for maybe future content or something like that. But again, that wasn’t our aim with Final Fantasy XVI. We wanted to create a story that had a beginning and that also ended and so we did. We wanted to focus on [protagonist] Clive’s life and so rather than the story being broader, we are focused on him. That’s not to mean that it’s not as deep as well, because we are so focused that we get a deep