How Final Fantasy 14’s Combat Influences Final Fantasy 16’s Real-Time Action
Final Fantasy XVI is the most action-forward game in the mainline series’ history, and while it’s been a point of contention between players excited for this and fans of the franchise who yearn for something turn-based, it’s hard to deny the combat looks flashy and fun. And as someone who’s played a few hours of the game, I can say it is.
While I attribute most of that to how great it feels to control Clive, it turns out there might be some tricks developer Creative Business Unit III learned developing Final Fantasy XIV’s action to make FFXVI’s combat feel even more satisfying beyond the actual gameplay.
“For example, in boss battles, when you have an attack and you may see certain areas on the ground that light up to show that’s where the attack’s going to be, that’s something you might recognize from Final Fantasy XIV,” Naoki Yoshida, the game’s producer, tells me. “Moving to this real-time action-based battle system, we wanted players not to be overwhelmed with what was going on on-screen because there’s a lot going on. We didn’t want any situations where players will be playing and think, ‘Okay, I just took damage. Why did I take damage? I don’t know why.’ They wanted to make it very understandable to players so they didn’t feel like they were being ripped off.”
By creating these visual cues, players can see precisely where attacks are coming from during the chaos of combat.
“It reduces that stress level [in combat],” Yoshida continues. “That’s something from the early stages of battle design that we wanted to incorporate from Final Fantasy XIV because it works well and allows players to know what’s going to happen.”
Yoshida says the direction for this kind of design came from FFXVI director Hiroshi Takai, who,
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