“I haven’t been able to sleep much,”🦩 Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida tells me about his working life on the beloved MMORPG.♍ “It’s not that I’m [not sleeping] for the sake of it. I want to deliver the best possible experience that I can for the players, so if I was to just go home early I wouldn’t be able to do that and it wouldn’t sit well with me. I want to give it my best.”
T﷽he majority of Endwalker’s development has takꦑen place during the pandemic, with Yoshida-san and his team having to adapt to a new way of working as they prepare to close off the Hydaelyn and Zodiark storyline with their biggest expansion yet. It’s a tall order, but despite the amount of work presented before them, the people always came first.
“The team and Square Enix as a whole at an early stage placed an importance on making arrangements for developers to work from home,” Yoshid♛a-san tells me. “The team working on Final Fantasy 14 is huge, but even right now, the number of staff we actually have working in the office is only around 20 percent, and that’s when we’re at the stage where we're working really hard to wrap up the game’s master submission. 80 percent of our staff are working from home, they’re still getting their salary, they’re still getting paid for their work, and are reducing the risk of physical contact with others and contracting the virus.”
Yoshida-san explains that adapting to this changing world quickly allowed the development of Endwalker to become sustainable, with the team able to work together effectively despite the obvious obstacles that come with being spread apart. “If I were😼 to work from home I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate,” he continues. “I might end up reading all of One Piece from the first volume or just watching YouTube. So I come into the office where it’s a great environment for me to work. There might be other people on the team who don’t want to work at home, or can’t because they don’t have the room for the PCs and equipment we need for development. I think the fact we were able to establish a proper system for flexible working has been so important for the wellbeing of our staff.”
Of course, it isn’t all go♉od news, with the pandemic surfacing a number of issues that have to be dealt with time and time again. “As a result of this new system, staff aren’t able to interact directly together, which might have an adverse impact on their mental health,” Yoshida-san says. “They’re just little things that come with developing in the office, like reaching out to a colleague sitting next to them, or showing friends what you’re currently wor🌳king on. As a result of this, I’ve noticed the overall quality level we expect is sometimes not being met. We’re just falling short of the quality we need to be reaching, so in those cases, we need to look at the workflow and incorporate new improvements.”
Final Fantasy 14 has an unparalleled sense of community, with millions of players treating Yoshi꧅da-san and his colleagues with a celebrity status afforded to only a few across the entire industry. When asked about this reputation and how support has helped with morale during the pandemic, his answer is surprisingly humbling. “I’m not exactly sure how the players feel, but from our perspective, we don’t simply see them as players, we look at them as our friends and part of our family,” he explains. “We’re really in this together, and if players are happy with how they can experience our relationship together,⛎ that’s just the best thing for us to hear. For me, that’s it, I couldn’t be happier hearing that, and hearing about new players coming into Final Fantasy 14. If players really do treasure the relationship we have, then I’m extremely happy about that. I will say that for the next fan festival, I hope we can make it a physical event so I can see everyone together sharing their passion.”
Endwalker will s🎀ee the emotional conclusion of a storyline players have been following for almost a decade, but Yoshida-san wasn’t willing to spill any beans surrounding the plot. So instead I aske🌸d about the world of the expansion and the challenges that arise with creating new civilizations that help expand upon the existing lore while standing neatly alongside it.
“That’s a co🎃mplicated question to answer, so I’ll try and approach it from each different expa🐻nsion,” he tells me.
“In Stormblood we had Ala-Mhigo, but that location was already established in the wider lore of Final Fantasy 14, so we didn’t have much freedom to incorporate our own ideas that didn’t already exist. What we would think about is the areas that hadn’t been shown to the player yet, and how many unique areas we could include in each expansion. We’d write the storyline around that idea while simultaneously producing the maps they’d take place in. This was the process we took with Stormblood. Shadowbringers, as you know, has players travelling from The Source to The First, and while Ether exists in both of these locations, the histories they’ve experienced are completely different. We introduced Lakeland, which is the equivalent to Mor Dhona in The Source, but because of its different history, we were able to incorporate deeper elements of high fantasy with more freedom to explore new♐ ideas.
“Endwalker is the end of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark storyline, so the concept sa👍w us looking at all loose ends in the current story arc. We’ll see what happens to Garlemalꦛd and players will go to the moon. We’ll look at what happens there and try to answer those parts of the story. While we’re deciding on those aspects we were designing the maps, so the approach we took to this expansion is very similar to Stormblood.”
Yoshida-san describes Shadowbringers as a challenge because it was all about creating a sense of unity in this new world, and ensuring all of its distinct locations formed together to create a whole that felt natural and immer🅺sive. Endwalker feels like it takes some of these design tenets and combines them with a faithful dedication to the existing lore. “Endwalker will see a vast amount of different areas being introduced,” Yoshida-san continues. “Old Sharlayan is more akin to old Roman or 🐷Greek architecture, but other locations will be completely different in terms of atmosphere. There’s going to be a huge variety of cultures and settings involved, and there’s even some we haven’t shown yet and I have no intention of announcing them until after the game is released.”
With the arrival of Endwalker, Square Enix is dealing with an unparalleled level of popularity. Digital copies of the game have somehow managed to sell out, while queue times have become a regular occu🌱rrence just to run regular content outside of major updates. It’s a problem that wi﷽ll only grow worse with time, and the team seems keenly aware of that.
“It’s great that so many players are joining the game,” Yoshida-san says. “But on the flipside, because it’s a very sudden increase in popularity, we do obviously have concerns about capacity. A huge new influx of players are joining the community, and it will take them time to get used to howꦅ things are done in FF14. In that respect it will take the existing community a little time to adjust to this new development, but these new players are all enjoying themselves and I’m so happy about tꦫhat.”
Final Fantasy 14 is also reaching a point where it has begun to eclipse other titles like World of Warcraft, a bittersweet moment for the team given that so much of the game’s success relied on aping Western giants, and escaping the obsession with visual fidelity that almost doomed the MMO forever over ten years ago. “When I was put in the position [of producer] I had to do something about the project, there was no room for failure,🥃” Yoshida-san explains. “It just wasn’t possible for us to let this project fail again, so it was so important to get things right. I looked at the golden standard of the industry, which at the time was World of Warcraft, which is one of the best games in the MMO genre. I really looked at that as reference material and studied it so I could incorporate that type of feedback into Final Fantasy 14 and approach the position World of Warcraft had in the market at the time. A lot of people picked up the game and called it a clone of World of Warcraft and in a way I think they are right in saying that because we did look towards it as a model to follow.”
But for Square Enix the narrative was the element that ruled above𒁏 all others. “The thing that we placed the most importance on in Final Fantasy 14 is the story,” Yoshida-san continues. “When the game was originally released, it was the latest installment in the franchise, and everyone expects Final Fantasy to have a great story. A lot of time has passed since it first came out, but in a way we try to keep Final Fantasy 14 as the latest title because we’re always working on new content, we’re always expanding upon it. We really want the player to experience the best story they can, because they’re the hero, they go through this adventure to save the world and we still place importance on that. If there’s one thing that really sets Final Fantasy 14 apart from other titles in the genre, it’s that we really aim for it to be the global standard for story-driven MMOs.”
However, the team understands how much of an under🧸taking Final Fantasy 14 is, especially for newcomers or those who are already immersed in similar titles alongside a group of dedicated friends. It isn’t easy, and improvements to A Realm Reborn haven’t remedied all of the rough patches. Despite this, it’s ཧworth the journey. “We know many players are playing different games and we don’t want them to go out of their way to always be playing Final Fantasy 14,” Yoshida-san says. “Between patches, we’d be happy for them to play other titles as well, just like we ourselves on the team play many different types of games. There are various developments all of the time, so recently New World has been released, and as developers I think it’s really important to try various games, since doing so will stimulate us to create even better content. We always need that stimulation as developers, so we make an effort to play different types of games and we’re happy to see players make that effort as well.”
Regardless of how many players stick with Final Fantasy 14, and I imagine it will be millions, Endwalker is an unparalleled conclusion for the MMORPG’🧜s first major story arc, and this comes with huge amounts of fan anticipation. For Yoshida-san, he’s taking all of this anxiety in his stride. “I wasn’t really feeling any kind of pressure,” he jokes. “If I was to think about whether or not I feel any pressure when developing Endwalker because of [Shadowbringer’s success], th♔at’s not really the case.
“My case might be similar to a𓃲 movie director. When a director works on a new creation, they’re always trying to develop it to the best of their ability, they’re always trying to create the best story or the best thing that they can. That’s the same approach that I have, I also think that players will have their own opinions and their preferences about what they like in the story. There might be some who enjoyed Heavensward more than Shadowbringers, or there might be others who like the concept of going on a journey as stalwarts. There might be some who play through Eౠndwalker and once they’ve done that they’ll think, ‘Oh, well Shadowbringers really was the best!’ But in that case, we’re always striving to go one step further and raise the bar that we established.
“Having said that, in Endwalker we’re obviously drawing the Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga to a close, which has been carrying on since FF14 originally launched. In that respect, we are working towards a huge climax. As a standalone 🍸expansion, the volume of content in Endwalker is huge, there’s really a lot to get through. After you’ve finished Endwalker, why not go through the previous expansions, play them through again, and then you might be able to appreciate the direction we’ve taken and all of those intricate things we’ve done with the plot. Of course, you can take your time!”
Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker will launch for PS4, PS5, and PC on November 23. (Also thanks to for sharing their interview responses with us!)
