If you love or hate skillchains in Final Fantasy XI, Koichi Ishii is the one to credit with them. Another interview on the game’s 20-year anniversary site has gone live with the game’s original director, and Ishii explains that he was inspired to add the skillchain mechanic to help foster a sense of a unified battle system for the party as a whole. And it was contentious within the team, especially because the game had a very brief development window considering the size of the team and the importance of the title overall.
Ishii also relates stories about managing the sheer scale of the team going into the project, as well as wrestling with the need for the PlayStation 2 hard drive and the fact that much of the first expansion was built from content that was cut from the base game. He even talks about the team secretly playing the game with fans to get a sense of what players thought. Check out the full interview for some insights into what contributed to the initial launch of FFXI.
