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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.
One of two new job classes added with the Wings of the Goddess expansion, the Scholar.
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.
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