The fantasy goes online once more...

What is the idea behind Final Fantasy XIV? What are you looking to achieve and what will the player experience be like?

It's quite the looker

There are two unique points to Final Fantasy XIV. The first is ‘guildleve’, a system that allows people to get rewards or learn certain skills in a short time, like 30 minutes. So even if you are a solid player or part of a smaller group you can still manage your time very efficiently and level up your character any way you like. We also have the armoury system, which allows players to change class by holding different equipment, so this allows more flexibility to players. They can learn abilities during this process and by combining different abilities you can customise and create your character. Also, because it’s Final Fantasy, you can expect a huge storyline.

From the mission I played it was difficult to get a handle on the size of the world as we were fighting in a cave setting. How expansive is the in-game world?

So what we have in the beta version is 20 per cent of the actual game content, so it’s like 5 kilometres across.

Graaah! Giant enemy crabs!

It was an unexpected pleasure to play the game in 3D and I understand that’s just an experiment. What do you find exciting about 3D from a game designer’s perspective and why was it important to try that here?

Because it’s an MMO we feel it’s very important to be ‘in the game’ and 3D really adds that aspect to your gaming experience. We believe it’s very suitable for MMOs. It feels like this year is a 3D year for every company in the industry so we thought we’d try it out and experiment to see how it goes.

Can you tell us more about the different character classes and how they relate to Final Fantasy games that we already know?

This time there are four different categories; Disciples of War, Disciples of Magic, Disciples of Land and Disciples of Hand. Within each are many different classes. By changing your equipment you can customise your character, so there are several characters in the game. By learning different abilities you can make your own class and actually this time, we purposely decided not to use job names we used in previous Final Fantasy titles, so you really have to make sure you combine the exact skills you need to become say, a white mage in the future. So it really is up to you how you develop your character.

You mentioned before an epic storyline running throughout the entire game. That’s quite difficult to do in an MMO because you’re either going on a secondary mission or, - the way Warcraft does it – is to have the story going on around the player, rather than through the player. I wanted to see how you’ve made the player feel very much a part of that storyline and to still give them a sense of freedom...

… continued