Final Fantasy XIV‘s lead creative director plans to stay with the game for at least another decade while the MMO begins a brand-new era.
The massively popular MMO that boasts millions of players every day recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary and according to the game’s creative director, Naoki Yoshida, the game is showing no signs of slowing down as he plans to remain directly involved with its development for at least another decade. In an interview with Famitsu, Yoshida said he has a strict plan for Final Fantasy‘s future, emphasizing that he hopes he and the game’s development team can continue treading new ground.
Yoshida’s announcement follows the recent reveal of the game’s next expansion, Dawntrail, which will bring a new storyline that is mostly disconnected from the ongoing plot that was resolved inEndwalker. Despite the expansion bringing a close to a decade-long story that began with the game’s launch in 2013, Yoshida said the team still has plenty of ideas for stories they hope to tell and new content they want players to experience.
While Yoshida has been the face of the game for the last ten years, in which he and the development team made it one of the most successful MMOs of all time, when he first took on the role of creative director for the title, he essentially inherited Square Enix’s most expensive failed experiment. Despite now being one of the most popular MMORPGs to date, Final Fantasy started out asa critical commercial flop.
Not wanting to give up on it, however, Square Enix handed Yoshida the reins to the game in 2013 and he began work on restructuring the title, which involved cutting most of the game’s initial content and starting fresh with a huge update later called A Realm Reborn. This massive overhaul of the game’s content and mechanics would turn the title into a major competitor in the MMO market, eventually overtaking even the likes of World of Warcraft in terms of player numbers.
Now, ten years on, the game is coming off of its fourth major expansion, Endwalker, which served as the climax of the last decade of storytelling, though Yoshida reportedly has no plans to leave the game behind any time soon as he prepares for its next major era with 2024’s Dawntrail.
Final Fantasy XIV is available on PlayStation 4 and 5 and PC.
Source: Famitsu and GameRant
