With news that The Rising Tide, the second of two DLC packs for , will launch on April 18 announced only a few floors away from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 14 Online - Dawntrail’s imposing presence on the show floor, Square E🐬nix meant business this year at PAX East. Their booth in the expo hall was definitely ജimpressive, loaded with photo ops and chances to try Final Fantasy 14 Online - Dawntrail before its launch in July. My time with Square Enix was taking place elsewhere, though, with everything we’d be discussing and seeing tightly under lock and key until after the convention.

I had the pleasure of sitting down in a meeting room with Naoki Yoshida (director and producer on numerous Fin൩al Fantasy titles, FF16 included), Takeo Kujiraoka (director for The Rising Tide DLC), and Michael-Christoper Koji Fox (localization director) to talk about The Rising Tide. Speaking with Yoshida and Kujiraoka through a translator with their answers provided by Fox, I came equipped with plenty of questions from TheG𝕴amer’s most avid Final Fantasy fans about both Final Fantasy 16 and its DLC.

“When asking ourselves, ‘What is Final Fantasy? What kind of Final Fantasy do we want to do?' We wanted to take it back to our roots, what we grew up with,” Yoshida tells me through Fox about the process of creating a game with more classical fantasy elements than we’ve seen in recent years. “In this low-fantasy setting with games being HD-quality, you have all these materials that are very dull, you don’t have a lot of lighting or reflection. [It] was kind of difficult to make something that was still going to pop.”

Though we are getting more content for Final Fantasy 16 with its two DLCs, Yoshida believes the story of the base game is finished, with no need for a sequel exploring the misery in Mysidia. “We’re not thinking about making a sequel in this future without magic, with people living on their own terms. We want people to think about what they think would happen in a world like that, and leav♈e it up to the imagination of the player.”

The decisio🔜n to omit the ugliness was inspired by the goings-on in the real world right now.

“You have this resource, this magic, and all of a sudden, you take that away. Think abo💧ut what would happen to us if we took away our technology or our internet. What would happen to the world? There’d be panic, there’d be all this chaos,” Yoshida says. “But in Final Fantasy 16’s [epilogue], you have that peaceful scene of a mother and her children, but you have to think, what happened to get there? Turning that into a game, is that going to be a positive experience?”

We asked as well about using Final Fantasy 16 as the base for a new Tactics title, but Yoshida, Ku๊jiraoka, and Fox all agreed that its scale may not be the best choice for a revival. “What would we even call it?” Fox laughs, “Final Fantasy 16 Tactics? That&♛rsquo;s a lot.”

“We have a lot of our staff who worke꧅d on previous games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Final Fantasy 12, so you’re going to have a lot of that [Tactics] feel because a lot of the same people are on the team,” Yoshida explains. “We’re very happy for you to suggest this because we’re all fans, but if we were going to make this, we wouldn’t want to do the same story that turns out to be a different story.”

When thinking about the scope of the project from strictly a size perspective, Yoshida laughs again, continuing, “How would we even do the Eikon versus Eikon battles in that style? If you have the Eikons, how many squares is✱ an Eikon going to be? You have more people out there as well, so what about the wait time in between? … But the series does lend itself well to that kind of storytelling, and we love Tactics as well. It’s probably about time that we do a new one.”

&♚quot;But the series does lend itself well to that kind of storytellin🅠g, and we love Tactics as well. It’s probably about time that we do a new one.”

But with the focus on the future of the game and the DLC release date announcement the day after my interview, there was🏅 plenty to discuss about The Rising Tide and what it was like to design something as major as the Leviathan fight looks to be.

Yoshida explains, “Up until now, with the Eikon battles, we wanted to make them very unique, but… accessible to the players as well. But this is the last Eikon🌟 versus Eikon battle before the final boss, so we wanted to make it something that was very, very challenging. It builds upon what you learned controlling Ifrit, and you’ll have to use everything you learned.”

Part of what makes The Rising Tide so imposing is the upcoming battle against Leviathan, who Yoshida said was always on deck to be in the DLC should such a thing have come about. “The DLC was kind of a thought of, ‘If the players respond well to the game, then we want to make DLC.’ … We had an idea of, if we are going to make a DLC, then we’d want to have Leviathan in there to kind of 🐼complete the set.”

“Leviathan was touched on in the main story,” he continues, “but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:why was Leviathan lost? And the Domin꧑ant, what is this Dominant’s past and their destiny? How is Clive going to approach that? It tells a really interesting story.”

When asked to elaborate on the announcement trailer, Kujiraoka immediately highlighted a new character, Shula. “Shula is a key person in this quest," he says. "She becomes one of Clive’s allies, and so will participate in battle with Clive. As we progress through the DLC, you’ll be able to 🌼learn more about her. She’s got a very interesting story that’s very different from the other NPCs that we have.”

Before I finished asking the question of how they’d play into the new DLC, Kujiraoka smiled immediately at the mention of Jill and Joshua. “In our first DLC… Joshua had a lot more lines, so he got to be a bit more front-forward while Jill is in the back. In this DLC, Jill is more forward in this. T♐he adventure takes place in a new area… in the Northern Territories, which is where Jill is from, so you get to hear a little more about Jill’s past. There are more parts of this story that connect in with Jill’s story.”

Asking about the future of the series from here, all three were vibrantly optimistic. Kujiraoka explains, “In finishing Final Fantasy 16, a lot of people on our team - myself included - now have the experience of working on a Triple-A title. [We’re] taking that experience and using🥂 it as a stepping stone to the next title and doing it in a different way. We can’t relax too much - th▨ere’s always something!”

“I’m really proud of the team,” Yoshida summarizes. “In such a short amount of time, they’ve put together something that is incredible. We have a whole new area, we have this deep, engaging storyline. We’ve created something that we got the feedback [that] at the end of the game, the sky is dark and it’s a very gloomy place, so we wanted to c🐠reate something brighter and a little bit more cheerful. I think we’ve been🌳 able to do that with the DLC.”