Nobuaki Komoto
Director, Final Fantasy XIV Online

NK: The key word of Final Fantasy XIV is "character development". In addition to the rich story telling prevalent in the Final Fantasy games we plan on incorporating a wide variety of quests designed with a focus on playability, wheras in Final Fantasy XI you would just do simple battles to develop your character. In Final Fantasy XIV we hope to expand on that and have your character develop through the story and not just battles.

We're also planning the implementation of some new systems which greatly expand on past content. In FFXI, yes, there were a lot of problems that we have learned a lot through, things that we thought would work well but failed. We hope to take that and use it in FFXIV to make it a better game.

One of the things we really liked about FFXI, though, was the job system and how it gave players lots of different options. They could try a lot of different things and it kept them playing the game for a long time. We hope to expand on that job system and offer even more options in a different way.

In FFXI the focus was on party play, the unfortunate thing about that was that it would take time to get a party together, and then take time waiting for people to get together to go on the quests or on these missions. Players who did not have much time to play... they would not be able to play in parties. This time we hope to have more solo-oriented play so people that don't have as much time, people don't have to think about their schedules anymore, they can play at anytime without waiting.

The original reason behind PlayOnline was to have multiple contents all on one portal. And because in the recent years the amount of content on that portal has gone down, we felt it just wasn't viable to have this new product on that portal anymore. What we're trying to work on now is more of the connection between the FFXI community and the FFXIV community and how those are going to be working together. We felt that PlayOnline wasn't the correct portal for that.

We believe that the combat system in FFXIV will be very different from the one in FFXI. We believe that it will be closer to that real-time battle that you see in other MMO's. First of all the job type of system will be very different. It depends on the style of play that the player wants for this day, they'll choose this weapon and using that weapon they will develop it a certain way. The next day they'll choose maybe another weapon or a different type of battle and the character will develop in a different way.

During the development process we've always been checking out other MMO's: Warcraft, Age of Conan, War-Hammer Online. But the biggest thing that we have been concentrating on is FFXI to find out what's going on in the FFXI community and how the players are reacting to that because we have the developments in that game as well.

As we are making the game we are constantly thinking of what can we take from the previous Final Fantasy games, whether it be games, monsters, system type things, story pieces, and what we can maybe take from FFXI - We always have ideas of using things from previous games but what we want to do is use that in a way to surprise the user in a way that they won't expect.

Hiromichi Tanaka
Producer, Final Fantasy XIV Online

HT: As we mentioned before, the schedule for the launch of the beta has still not been decided. Basically we're going to continue developing and when we get to the point that we think a beta test would be ready then we'll release it to the public then. In FFXI we did about 3-4 months of beta testing, we hope for FFXIV we have a little bit longer period of beta testing.

One of the main concepts behind FFXIV is to have a game that's tailored to all different types of players and all different types of play styles. Players that have a lot of time - give them something to do. Players that don't have much time - give them something to do, make them have a full experience in that small amount of time while providing new experiences that you can't find in other MMORPGs.

Source: http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/823994/square-enix-ps3-mmorpg-untitled/videos/ff14_vdi_060309.html

Hearing them say that they wish to "keep and expand upon" the job system in XI was quite soothing.

It will be awesome for quests to impact your levelling/growth. They were usually worth it just for the story in XI, and occasional loot, but if they grant experience as well... quest-whoring yesplz.

Yeah, if ain't broke... don't fix it. The job system in FFXI is really good. It's nice having just one character, one name, and being able to change jobs at will, using much of the same items for different jobs. It seems like such a simple concept, yet I can't think of any other MMO who has implemented such a system... after playing FFXI for so long, I can't really imagine why anyone would think it's a good idea NOT to let you switch jobs on one character.

So true! I remember when I stopped playing FFXI for a bit, yes I did realize other MMO's had things that stand out like quests that give exp and job specific items but I hated that if I wanted a new job I had to make a new character, with a new name, who no one will recgonize later in game unless I let people know this is my alt. Enough said really, I love how FFXI did the job system. Everyone who has ever played it knows that :)

Oh and the Chad is right! I loved doing quest simply for story too. Even though some quest took hours to do and get to, I loved having a large group going out to places youd never level in (EVER! haha) and do a quest. Getting a cut scene was always fun :) too bad by the time id be done watching it, the group Im with (usually if theyre lvl 75's helping a brotha out to do a quest :P) would have defeted the monster, got the item etc.

Cant wait!!!