If you’ve ever thought that Final Fantasy XIV’s earlier main scenario and quests don’t really reflect the game’s overall quality, you should know that Naoki Yoshida agrees with you. He acknowledged this fact in a recent interview with Eurogamer, stating that the team wants to make improvements to the early experience moving forward (with 5.3 as a target for several improvements) while also acknowledging that some of this was an inevitable result of the team working on a very tight timeframe:
Speaking about the development of A Realm Reborn, normally when you create an MMORPG title you would need to spend four to five years but our development team crammed and did that work within two-and-a-half years. The dev team is fully aware that there would be some functions that were missing or that the storyline was forced to look like a sequence from the 1.0 ,so there was a glitch here and there as well. That’s how it was created. Because we know it might not be in perfect shape, we’re really torn. Even the battle content team wishes they could recreate all the dungeons that were there it came out because they are not 100 per cent happy with how the current situation is.
Yoshida also claims that it’s too early to state anything definitively, but the talks with Microsoft have been encouraging and that players should “think positively” about the game appearing on Xbox One, as well as future consoles such as the PlayStation 5. He also notes that porting for modern consoles tends to be a less arduous process than it was back in the days of the PlayStation 2 and thus presents fewer problems:
Your understanding is a different perspective to what we have. There’s a big difference. When we’re looking back about the time when PS2 was out and PS3 was out in the market, they have specific unique characteristics to those consoles back then. But after any console released after Xbox 360 – so Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and Scarlett in the future – you can see them more as a PC. There might be a difference in memory size or GPU or CPU but we can safely assume that they are kind of PC.
