Do you think it's maybe almost that you've introduced Final Fantasy players to MMOs?

SETM: Yeah, one of the main concepts when we were designing it was to introduce players to the MMORPG type of world. One of the side effects of doing that was that also a lot of people who had never played an FF game decided to play this as their first MMO as well, especially probably more so in Japan where MMOs weren't very big. And this was also the first MMO on a console, so a lot of players that had played FF and had not played FF started with FFXI because it was the first MMO available.

With the expansion do you expect a pretty sharp spike again? Subscription rates have gone up in the past after expansions, so is it the case that people resubscribe after taking a break?

SS: Yeah, we've already started to see movements back in the several tens of thousands -- people have been getting ready. It goes back to what we said before where, as there are a lot of choices on the market, some people will quit and go play one thing, but they have the freedom to come back when they want to. So yes, with this expansion we've seen another jump and users coming back.

You guys just announced the windowed version and everyone seemed really excited about it. How long had you guys been planning that? Were there technical obstacles in the beginning?

HT: The original FFXI for the PC was based on DirectX 8 technology and to have a windowed mode in this and also be able to run FFXI, there wasn't enough memory-wise. It just didn't work out there program-wise. So when we went to DX9 we had to basically remake the system for that and then there's also the risk of making all these remakes, and that's one of things that took a lot of time, development.

Also once we had it done, because the windowed mode -- basically it affects everything in the game -- we had to go back and do all of our technical type of checks to make sure that it wasn't causing problems anywhere. So the debugging process also took a lot of time.

We started about a year ago we started talking about developing the windowed mode. We started the actual process of building it about a half a year ago. This had a lot to do with Windows Vista and Games for Windows. They require a windowed mode for the games, so that was one of the big reasons that we had to make the push.

Do you eventually plan on a whole new Final Fantasy MMO? Or is it going to be eternally XI, the magic online number?

As you might already know, members from the current FFXI team are working on a next generation MMO, but it still hasn't been decided whether that's going to be a game in the FF series, a continuation, or a totally new game. We are working on it, but it hasn't been decided that far yet.