Final Fantasy XVI Preview – Interview with Naoki Yoshida about Eikons, Boss Battles, and When We’ll See More
Square Enix launches a new trailer for Final Fantasy XVI in recent PlayStation state. It’s our biggest look yet at the upcoming RPG, and the trailer has revealed that Final Fantasy XVI will launch next summer.
Game informant spoke with the game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, and director of Final Fantasy XIV, about this new “Dominance” FFXVI trailer, which includes the franchise’s return to a medieval setting more, Eikons, boss fights, and more.
Game informant: Final Fantasy has a history of experimenting with different combat systems in the new mainline entries, and Final Fantasy XVI seems to be doing the same, perhaps with the biggest emphasis on action in the main series. How did the team come to terms with this fighting style, and what it feels like to see it come to life under the guidance of battle director Ryota Suzuki (a designer whose credits include Devil May) Cry 5, Dragon’s Dogma and Marvel vs. Capcom 2)?
Naoki Yoshida: You asked me what direction to go with the combat system and so to answer that, in order to contribute to the overall growth of the Final Fantasy series, we decided that instead of building on the Final Fantasy battle systems Previously, we shifted our focus to one of the real-time actions. And so, once we’ve defined that concept, that we’re going in this direction, it makes it easier for our director and our battle director, Ryota Suzuki, to grasp and delivers something really action-focused.
As for the battle system, we’re not only giving the main character, Clive, an arsenal of powerful attacks and abilities based on these traditional Final Fantasy summons, but we’re also allowing him We cycle through those attacks in real time, to deal with them in real time. [This allows] for a powerful combination and smooth gameplay, style, both look and feel great.
An example of this is the same you have seen in there [Dominance] trailer where you have one of Garuda’s abilities where you lift an enemy into the air and then while in the air Clive can switch to Titan and use one of Titan’s abilities to smash enemies to the ground . Kind of seamlessly transitions and swaps actions and chain them together to create these unique combinations… all depending on how different players play. There’s a lot of room to customize these types of buildings that Clive has, and players finding constructions to suit their playstyle is one of the cool things about the action system we have in place.
Lots of our developers on our development team [Creative Business Unit III] without any experience creating an action game. It was a huge challenge for us. And to get the incredibly talented action veteran Ryota Suzuki to join our team, that has seen our development progress, just from the combat system to the animation and everything. that he got his hands on, transformed, and became something beyond what we believed it could be. We’re really, really happy to have him and we’re so lucky.
HOLD: Throughout the trailer, there are several health bars across the top of the screen, in both the human vs human and the Eikon vs Eikon battle. What’s going on with these, and are they reminiscent of fighting games?
Yoshida: Regarding the health bar and UI, I saw a lot of comments on social media after the trailer was released about the UI like a fighting game. When we started developing the game and we had “Clive vs. Smaller Enemy” or “Eikon vs Eikon” battles, when we first developed them, we did them without there is almost no user interface on the screen. But we found that through playing this game, it was just a bit too little information – we needed more information. That said, we didn’t want the screen to be cluttered and so after a lot of going back and forth and trying a lot of different things, we got to the design… in the trailer, and it felt like a piece of cake. It’s a fighting game. just something finally happened.
However, the overall game design for these Eikon and Eikon battles is meant to be unique and, in fact, we don’t actually use the exact same system twice. Each battle is completely unique in its gameplay and so we’re doing something crazy.
For example, it could be an Eikon vs Eikon match, if you had Eikon A vs Eikon B, that battle would be reminiscent of a 3D shooter. While another Eikon versus another Eikon, it’s more of a pro wrestling match, and then maybe even a third with one Eikon versus another Eikon will turn the entire area into a battleground. And again, we haven’t reused these systems, and each one of these Eikon and Eikon battles is unique and will vary from battle to battle. Therefore, and because battles are so different in nature, the user interface has to change for each battle. And so you’ll see slight UI differences between these battles. However, we ended up having to cut a lot of that from the trailer because it became a story spoiler and we didn’t want that.
Then you ask, “if you have some UI hidden, why don’t you hide all UI like those HP bars? Why would you leave those things out? ” and that’s simply because if you remove all the HP bars and all the UI, then people will start saying, “oh, that’s just pre-rendering, not running in real time.” We wanted to demonstrate that what you see in the trailer is real-time, so we decided to leave that UI a little bit of it.
HOLD: A lot of players are excited about the single-player Final Fantasy prospect from the developers behind FFXIV. What lessons, mechanics, systems, and storytelling techniques can fans expect from FFXIV to show up in some way in FFXVI?
Yoshida: So Final Fantasy XIV was designed as an MMORPG from the ground up while Final Fantasy XVI was designed as a single player game from the ground up, so from the very beginning you will have completely different design concepts. MMORPGs, as you know, all go a long way – you’re stringing experiences together over a long period of time to maintain that user base.
Single-player games, on the other hand, are more about that, I guess you could say, instant gratification. They are so fast, they hit you with excitement. That excitement is concentrated into a smaller package. So with that in mind, you can imagine that at least systematically, Final Fantasy XIV won’t have much of an impact on Final Fantasy XVI. That said, however, one of the most unique things about Final Fantasy XIV is the kind of connection the development team has with the community, [and] amount of back-and-forth communication between the development team and the community. Over the past 11 years, interacting with the community has provided us with a wealth of invaluable insights into what you know fans want and expect from the series. And so this 11-year knowledge base has served us well and allowed us to take some of those ideas in and incorporate those ideas into the development of Final Fantasy XVI.
HOLD: Final Fantasy games in the late mainstream have leaned more towards the modern timeline, with a heavy focus on integrating technology with magic, but FFXVI looks more like medieval FF, or classic than. How did the team get to this context and time period when developing the game?
Yoshida: The answer to that is really simple: there are a lot of core members in [Creative Business Unit III] really enjoyed those classic Final Fantasy fantasies as well as the classic medieval European feel – myself included – and we wanted to make a game with that feel. When we created this game, we wanted to take that look, the medieval European classic fantasy look, and combine it with our own unique ideas that we had, and then took all of that. and try to show that with the current level of technology and do something really, really fun.
As you know, the Final Fantasy series is quite famous, or infamous, for its differences with each entry in the series. That said, after doing some recent user research, we found that a lot of users have noticed that a lot of recent Final Fantasy games [games] became static in that vision, so we wanted to use this as an opportunity to step back from there and try something different; not just for us, but with the future of Final Fantasy and upcoming projects in mind, we wanted to try something different and be able to show that yes, the series can go in many different directions. instead of focusing on one.
While we’ve only released the second trailer, we’re currently working on getting the third trailer ready for release this fall. In that trailer, we’re hoping to focus a little more on the world, lore, and plot, and hopefully bring that bit of information back to the players, showing what the story will be like. , the story unfolds. to be like, and how to fit into the world.
HOLD: You are obviously a very busy person with FFXIV, but now you are producing FFXVI. What would it be like to work on a new single-player mainline FF and how will Creative Business Unit III lead the project?
Yoshida: It doesn’t really matter what kind of project I’m on. As the head of any game or any project, the pressure is always immense. There is always a lot of people and money involved in it. As you know, in Final Fantasy XIV, I am both the producer and the director. However, this time in XVI, I’m just the producer. So just in that sense, it has a lot of weight on my shoulders.
Final Fantasy XVI is the newest entry in the series which means all eyes will be on us as pretty much everyone out there is scrambling to figure out what kind of game that will be, and a lot of that pressure. directed directly to the director. And again, with all of that pressure falling not on the producer, but more on, as I said, the director, Hiroshi Takai, or the battlefield director, Ryota Suzuki, or the creative director, and our screenwriter, Kazutoyo Maehiro, or even me becoming the localization director and helping with world lore and the like, there’s a lot of pressure on us. And as a producer, it’s my duty to see that this pressure isn’t too great for the people working below me. Maybe go and do these kinds of interviews and talk to the media and make sure that important information is out there so that burden doesn’t fall on the top of the group. It’s something that I can do, again, to take that burden off them and for me it’s a lot easier than being a director.
Once again, I am extremely honored that the company came to me and [Creative Business Unit III] and asked us to direct the latest numbered Final Fantasy. But again, that opportunity would never have materialized without the time we spent on Final Fantasy XIV and the voices of users and the media that covered us. So I want to thank them for giving us this opportunity to create the latest Final Fantasy.
For more on Final Fantasy XVI, watch the Dominance trailer and Admire the beautiful landscapes in these new screenshots. Then read about how I’m excited for the Kaiju-style battles it looks like it’ll bring usand then check Game Informer ratings of every major Final Fantasy game.
What are you most excited about in Final Fantasy XVI?
