Final Fantasy XVI preview – Interview with Naoki Yoshida on Eikons, Boss Fights, and when we’ll see more

Square Enix debuted a New Final Fantasy XVI Trailer During a recent PlayStation state to play. It was the biggest look yet at the upcoming RPG and the trailer revealed that Final Fantasy XVI will release sometime during the summer of next year.

detective game I spoke with the game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, who is also the director of Final Fantasy XIV, about this new “Dominance” FFXVI trailer, including the franchise’s return to a medieval setting, Eikons, boss fights, and much more.

detective game: Final Fantasy has a history of experimenting with different combat systems in new main entries and Final Fantasy XVI appears to be doing the same, with the biggest focus on action in the main series thus far. How did the team come up with this style of combat, and what’s it like to see it brought to life by combat director Ryota Suzuki (designer whose credits include Devil May Cry 5, Dragon’s Dogma, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2)?

Naoki Yoshida: You asked me about the direction with the combat system and then to answer that, in order to contribute to the overall evolution of the Final Fantasy series, we decided that instead of building on previous Final Fantasy battle systems, we instead shift our focus to one of real-time action. And so, once we had that concept, and that we were going in that direction, it made it easier for our principal and our battle director, Ryota Suzuki, to take the reins and bring in something that’s really focused on the work.

For the battle system, we’ve not only given the main character, Clive, an arsenal of powerful attacks and abilities based on traditional Final Fantasy summons, but we’re letting him roam those attacks in real time, handling those attacks in real time. [This allows] It has powerful combos and smooth and elegant gameplay that looks great at the same time.

An example of that as you have seen in it [Dominance] Trailer where you have one of Garuda’s abilities where you lift the enemy in the air and then while you are in the air Clive can switch to Titan and use one of the Titan abilities to bombard the enemy on the ground. This kind of seamless switching and switching of actions and linking them together to create these unique combos…it’s all left up to the different playing styles of the players. There is plenty of room to customize these types of builds that Clive has and the player finding a build that matches his play style is one of the fun things about our movement system.

Lots of developers we have on our development team at [Creative Business Unit III] He had no experience creating an action game. It was very difficult for us. For the extremely talented veteran Ryota Suzuki to join our team, this has seen the progress in our development, just from battle systems to animations and pretty much everything that touched his hands, transformed and became something beyond what we thought it could have been. We are really, really, really happy to have him.

GI: Throughout the trailer, there are a number of health bars at the top of the screen, whether in human or human battles or ICON vs ICON battles. What’s going on with these, and are they supposed to remind us of fighting games?

Yoshida: Regarding health bars and UI, I saw a lot of comments on social media after the trailer was released about how the UI is kind of like a fighting game. When we started developing the game we had Clive vs Smaller Enemies or our Eikon vs Eikon battles, when we were first developing we did it with almost no onscreen UI at all. But we found that by running this was just a little bit of information – we needed more information. Having said that, we didn’t want the screen cluttered, so after a lot of weighting and trying a lot of different things, we came up with the design…in the trailer, and it looks like a fighting game is just something we ended up with.

The overall design of the Eikon vs Eikon battles game, however, is supposed to be unique and in reality, we don’t actually use the same system twice. Each battle is totally unique in its gameplay so we’re doing something kind of crazy.

For example, maybe an Eikon vs. Eikon battle, if you have an Eikon A vs. Eikon B, then that fight will remind us of a 3D shooter. While another Eikon vs. Eikon is different, it looks a lot like a pro wrestling match, and then maybe even a third with another Eikon vs. Eikon will turn an entire area into a battleground. Once again, we no longer use these systems and each Eikon vs Eikon battle is unique and will change with each battle. For this reason, and because the battles are different in nature, the user interface must change in each battle. Thus you will see slight differences in the user interface between these battles. However, we had to cut a lot of that out of the trailer because it ended up being spoilers for the story and we didn’t want to have that.

Then you ask, “Well, if you hid some of the UI, why didn’t you hide all the UI like HP bars? Why did you leave those out?” And that was simply because if you removed all the HP bars and all the UI, people would start saying, “ Oh, this is just a preview, this doesn’t work in real time.” We wanted to show that what you saw in the trailer was in real time, so we made the decision to leave out a little bit of this user interface.

GI: Lots of gamers are excited about the prospect of a single player Final Fantasy from the developers behind FFXIV. What lessons, mechanics, systems, and storytelling techniques, if any, from FFXIV somehow fans can expect in FFXVI?

Yoshida: So Final Fantasy XIV was built as an MMORPG from the ground up while Final Fantasy XVI was built as a single player game from the ground up, so right from the start, you’ll have completely different design concepts. MMORPGs, as you know, are about the long run – you’re putting experiences together over a long period of time to maintain that user base.

On the other hand, single player games are much more than that, I guess you could say, instant gratification. They are fast, they hit you with excitement. This excitement is concentrated in a smaller package. So with that in mind, you can imagine that Final Fantasy XIV at least from a system perspective wouldn’t have much of an impact on Final Fantasy XVI. However, one of the most unique things about Final Fantasy XIV is the kind of connection that the development team has with the community, [and] The amount of back-and-forth communication between the development team and the community. In the past 11 years, interacting with the community has given us a lot of very valuable information about what you know fans want and expect from the series. So having an 11-year knowledge base helped us and allowed us to put some of these ideas together and incorporate them into the development of Final Fantasy XVI.

GI: Mainline’s Final Fantasy games of late have veered more toward modern timelines, with a heavy emphasis on integrating technology with magic, but FFXVI definitely feels more medieval, or classic FF. How did the team get to this setting and time period when developing the game?

Yoshida: The answer to that is actually kind of simple: it happens to have a lot of core members in it [Creative Business Unit III] I really enjoyed the classic Final Fantasies as well as that classic European medieval fantasy feel – myself included – and we wanted to create a game with that feeling. When creating this game we wanted to take this look, this classic European medieval fantasy look, and combine that with our unique idea that we had, and then take all of that and try to express that with the current level of technology and make something really exciting.

As you know, the Final Fantasy series is famous, or notorious, for being different with each entry in the series. However, after doing some recent user research, we found that a lot of users discovered that a lot of the latest Final Fantasy game [games] We kind of became steadfast in that vision, so we wanted to use this as an opportunity to step back from that and try something different; Not just for us, but thinking about the future of Final Fantasy and upcoming projects, we wanted to try something different and maybe show that yes, the series can go in different directions instead of focusing on one.

While we just released a second trailer, we’re currently working on getting a third trailer ready for release this fall. In this trailer, we hope to focus a bit more on the world, the lore, and the story, and hopefully give more of that information to players, showing what the story is going to be, what the narrative will be like, and how that will fit into the world.

GI: You’re obviously a very busy person with FFXIV, but now you’re producing FFXVI. What does it look like to work on a new major FF for single player and what does it feel to lead the Creative Business Unit III for the project?

Yoshida: It doesn’t really matter what kind of project I’m working on. Being the boss of any game or any project, the pressure is always enormous. There is always a lot of people and money involved in this. You know, in Final Fantasy XIV, I’m a producer and a director. However, this time on the sixteenth, I’m the only producer. Only in this sense, it is such a heavy burden on my shoulders.

With Final Fantasy XVI being the latest installment in the series, it means that all eyes will be on us as everyone is scrambling to see what kind of game it’s going to be, and a lot of that pressure goes straight into the game. boss. And again, with all this pressure not on the producer, it falls more on, as I said, the director, Hiroshi Takai, or the battle director, Ryota Suzuki, or the creative director and screenwriter, Kazutoyo Mihiro, or even I fell into being the localization director and I help figure out World traditions and things like that, there’s a lot of pressure on us. And as a producer, it’s my job to see that this pressure is not affected too much by those people working under me. Being able to come in and do these kinds of interviews and talk to the media and make sure the important information gets there so that the burden doesn’t fall on the team. It’s something I can do, again, to take that burden away from them and for me, that’s a lot easier than being a way out.

Once again, I was very honored when the company came to me and [Creative Business Unit III] We were asked to drive the latest numbered Final Fantasy. But then again, this opportunity would never have been possible without our time in Final Fantasy XIV and the users’ voice and media voice that covered us. So I want to thank them for giving us this opportunity to create the latest Final Fantasy game.

To learn more about Final Fantasy XVI, Check out the Dominance trailer And the Enjoy the beautiful landscapes in these new shots. Next, read about how to do it I’m excited for the Kaiju-style battles that they seem to offer usthen check out Game Informer rating for each major Final Fantasy game.

What excites you most about Final Fantasy XVI?