During this year’s PAX East, Final Fantasy XIV’s director and producer Naoki Yoshida was in attendance and took part in an interview with GamerEscape about the MMO’s upcoming expansion, Stormblood. You can read an excerpt from the Q&A session below, in which Yoshida discusses the various changes coming in the expansion, including how liberating the city states of Ala Mhigo and Doma will differ, if Deep Dungeon will be returning, and more.


GamerEscape: At FanFest you said that in order to see Ala Mhigo we would need to liberate it and go there. Will there be a similar system for Doma? How will liberation be different between the two cities?

Naoki Yoshida: There may be a bit of misunderstanding on that part in terms of accessing Ala Mhigo. There was a question raised about stepping into the Ala Mhigo region, and there was a mention of first driving away the Garlean power that holds that area. Access to that area is limited. For Doma, you don’t have to worry about liberating it first before you can enter it.


GE: Are you planning on using the Deep Dungeon system in Stormblood?

Yoshida: We do have plans to implement the content yes. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what type of content it is. As you traverse through the areas in Stormblood, you’ll notice where this system is going to be implemented so we encourage players to look around when they get a chance.


GE: On the new world map, the island of Thavnair has been uncovered, but its capitol city has a generic icon with no flag. Is that a sign that we won’t be going there in 4.0?

Yoshida: No, you won’t be able to go in yet. Of course, it has been officially depicted, but you wont be able to access it right away as of the launch of 4.0.


GE: It was said that the last tier of the veteran reward system would be the final one. Are there plans for some kind of loyalty program in another form?

Yoshida: Yes we do plan for one. Moving forward we want to make it so that we’re not rewarding people that have been continuously continuing (subscribing) with us for a long time, but something more in shorter spans. Say you signed up for three months in a row- and you get the rewards in that sort of spurt.


GE: After the last Fan Fest, a lot of people were expecting Proto Ultima to be the first 24-man trial. Instead it was put in the raid content. Were there plans for it to be a separate trial? If so why did it change?

Yoshida: I don’t think we ever mentioned it was going to be a 24-man trial. It was more along the lines of we’d like you to speculate where it would fit in. So it is as the development team planned. Had it been an independent piece of content, it may have been good when it first launched, but at the end it would become content that no one could get matched up in. It was intentional that it would be part of one of the alliance raids.


To read more from GamerEscape’s interview, you can go here.




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