―Raising the level cap to 60 meant a new set of quests for each job. What was behind the decision to introduce new characters for these storylines?
Maehiro: We thought that a change in cast would be a good match for the change in scene. Because Heavensward is kind of the third “season” of
FFXIV, we wanted to bring in some new characters.
―Did you come across any problems when writing the quests?
Maehiro: None of the jobs caused us any major issues. I guess one example would be that the guns the machinists use originally came from Limsa Lominsa, so we couldn’t think of a good reason for the quests to take place in Ishgard. In the end, we decided to differentiate the Lominsan musketeers from the Ishgardian machinists. There were already examples of pirates in Limsa using guns, so we sent the player there as part of their training! [
laughs] Dragoon was another one. Estinien was showing up in the main scenario at that point, so we had to make sure we didn’t create any inconsistencies between that and the job quests.
―Did the increased number of jobs cause any issues with the combat?
Yoshida: Work on combat is divided between two teams: one that works on the battle system, and one that works on enemies and bosses. The battle team deals with the overall design and balance, as well as requesting the necessary animations. In most MMORPGs, new jobs tend to be overpowered at first and then nerfed later, so we deliberately held back to avoid that situation. Unfortunately, this backfired because they seemed kind of underwhelming in terms of overall strength, which is probably the result of us becoming too accustomed to how MMORPGs work.
―How about the visual design for each job?
Suzuki: The astrologian was the hardest job to design for Heavensward. After it was decided that their weapon would be a globe, there were so many questions we had to answer. How is it going to work? Will they use the globe to whack the enemy? How can we show the cards?
Yoshida: That one was really tricky. We thought about having them draw out a long sequence of cards, one after another.
Maehiro: We just wanted to do the “My turn forever!” thing [
laughs].
Suzuki: The combination of globe and card holder that we finally settled on turned out well, I think.
Yoshida: The designers did a great job with that. It has its own unique mechanics and looks absolutely incredible in action.
Suzuki: This is kind of off-topic, but the new areas also caused a lot of headaches.
Yoshida: In A Realm Reborn, one part of the map can have enemies that are level 5, while in another, they’re level 45. If you cross a bridge, you might suddenly find yourself in an area where the monsters are much stronger. From Heavensward onwards, we changed that approach, and now the levels of enemies in a given location are set within a certain range. One place might have monsters from level 51 to 53, for instance. Of course, the introduction of flying mounts was a big part of that decision.
Suzuki: That even affected the way the maps themselves were made. For A Realm Reborn, we were allowed to make each location stretch all the way to the horizon, but with the flying mounts, everything had to look okay when viewed from above, too. You can see a whole lot more when you’re way up in the sky, so we had to consider that as well as how things look from ground level. To make sure that the player could not only see more, but also that those things were displayed correctly, every single thing had to be built using textures and tiny polygons. It was a lot of work.
Maehiro: The lighting caused a lot of problems, too.
Suzuki: We had a hard time with that one, that’s for sure. In A Realm Reborn, there is always a light shining on the player. It’s just a soft glow to make the character look better. The trouble is, for Heavensward, we were asked to create more of a contrast between light and dark, so even the bright areas needed to have shadows that were actually dark, to get the right kind of aesthetic.
Koji: I’d walk past where they were making the maps and hear people yelling at each other [
laughs]. “I can’t even see the character!” “We were told to make it dark, so that’s what we did!” [
laughs]
Suzuki: The cutscene team would say that sometimes it was hard to make out the characters. Or we’d hear that you couldn’t tell what the enemies were doing. But Yoshi-P would tell us he wanted even more of a contrast [
laughs].
Maehiro: In a single-player RPG, you’re the only one there, so it’s fine for everything to revolve around you. With MMORPGS, you’ve got to interact with other players, and not being able to see them is kind of a big deal. This led to fights breaking out all around the studio [
laughs].
Suzuki: We had to help the battle team deal with their problems too, and it took a lot of work to solve all the issues. And when we thought we’d finally put this trouble behind us, we looked at Estinien and found out no matter how much light you shined on him, you still couldn’t see him [
laughs].
Maehiro: Ah, you mean his armor [
laughs].
Suzuki: His gear is jet black, and was designed to always look dark even when there’s a lot of light. In A Realm Reborn, everything was brighter in general, so those black parts made him look lean and stylish. But in Ishgard, it’s much darker, so Estinien kind of blended into the background to the point of being almost invisible. When I spoke to Minagawa about it, he checked the black used as the base color for Estinien’s armor and found out it was set to reflect absolutely zero light. No wonder we couldn’t see him! [
laughs] Anyway, we made a lot of adjustments to the lighting, taking care not to screw things up for A Realm Reborn areas too. It made me realize how hard it is to change things once they’re already up and running. As for the mounts, I wish we could’ve allowed flying in A Realm Reborn maps, but we just didn’t have the time or resources.
Maehiro: We do our best to avoid any glaring inconsistencies, and when there are problems that we can’t deal with at the time, we try to sneak the fixes in later. Some are really minor things that you wouldn’t even notice from playing normally, but we aim to solve all the issues that need solving.