In the industry, the development story of Final Fantasy XIV has reached an almost mythical status. After a difficult launch, the second massively multiplayer online RPG of the Final Fantasy franchise needed salvaging. Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida, an avid MMO player himself, was the one tasked with this herculean undertaking, a process that led him and his team to rebuild the game from the ground up and relaunch it under a fitting new name, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
Endwalker’s brand-new title screen, a sight that will welcome players from the 19th of November.
As a 1.0 player myself, I vividly remember Yoshida-san’s initial introduction to the community. Aware of the awkwardness of the situation, the newly appointed producer chose to address players directly. He introduced himself and his preliminary plans in what he called a “Letter from the Producer” – a written account to the community that set the tone for a two-way communication that endures to this day, initially gauging players for direct feedback in a handful of small, targeted surveys, assessing expectations and wishes for the game they were playing despite the tumult.
It wasn’t until months later than the idea of A Realm Reborn was formally introduced. Final Fantasy XIV would be “nuked” to be reborn anew – both figuratively and quite literally. In 2012, after a climactic cinematic and months of increasingly gloomy in-game updates, the servers shut down. A few months later, A Realm Reborn would introduce a brand-new world to explore.
The final days of Final Fantasy XIV before its shutdown and eventual 2.0 rebirth. Players had no idea what terrors slept in Dalamud, the ominous red moon…
Now, eight years since A Realm Reborn’s release and on the eve of its fourth and largest expansion to date, Final Fantasy XIV boasts more than 24 million players and has become the most profitable title in the Final Fantasy franchise, a feat largely attributed to the diligent work of Naoki Yoshida and his team.
As part of Square Enix’s recent Media Tour, I was able to play a preview version of its upcoming expansion, Endwalker. Brimming with content, this new behemoth of an update will increase the character level cap to 90 and will introduce two brand-new playable jobs, a male variant of the fan-favorite Viera race, and a wealth of raids, dungeons, and other new content to the MMO. Tag-teaming with fellow interviewer Jade King from TheGamer, I was able to get Naoki Yoshida’s thoughts on the current state of the game, Endwalker’s development, and his own journey all the way to this new release.
As the lead UI/UX designer for the project, it was my responsibility to marry those two worlds, ensuring the game’s interface was deep and intuitive whilst perfectly in sync with the DualSense controller. Due to ongoing back issues (by spending both work and free time sitting at a desk) I have been using the DualSense controller full time when gaming on PC and PS5. I was thrilled with how well the controller worked across both platforms, so much so that I even transposed my entire UI layout from some of my favourite MMOs (no small feat!). With this unique background, I knew I was up to the task of building Disciples: Liberation as the perfect DualSense controller coupling. If I could give more accessibility to players, allowing any type of person to choose whichever input they would like to play our game, I would consider my job a success.
It was fairly early in development that we started to lean towards a virtual cursor for the in-game menus. For those that don’t know, a virtual cursor is one which players are able to freely move around the screen using the left or right analogue stick. From my experience playing other games using this same system, I knew we could come up with something really special if we spent the time considering how best we could create menus that felt at home on the PS5.
To begin, we put some time into researching a handful of previous titles that had implemented a virtual cursor in their interface and quickly noticed that a fairly fast-moving cursor that slows over buttons and interactive elements, to give players time to react and stop over them, was perfect. We also used Fitt’s Law for the menus and on-screen button interactions, a la