It’s not every day a major game director admits a misstep, but that’s exactly what Naoki Yoshida, better known as Yoshi P, has done. The director of the hugely popular online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV recently spoke out about issues with the game’s latest raid. He openly shared that the development team made a mistake with its design.
Yoshi P told RPG Site at the recent Anime Expo event that the newest raid, called Forked Tower: Blood, was flawed. He explained that it turned out much harder to get into than they ever intended. The goal was never to make it an ultra-tough challenge for only the most dedicated players.
“I feel that the Forked Tower: Blood raid was a wrong step in development,” Yoshi P stated plainly. He added, “I didn’t mean for it to be hardcore content. To be honest, I wanted it to be tough at first. Then, over time, players would get better and challenge it more often. But in the end, we truly made it too difficult to access from the very beginning.”
The real issue with this 48-player raid wasn’t its challenge level, according to Yoshida. The problem was how hard it was just to start playing it. The week before, Yoshida mentioned that players had only cleared this raid about 400 times in 23 days. It seems the game’s “Duty Finder” system was the main culprit. Players use this system to jump into an instance, hoping enough other players join to begin the raid. But this wasn’t happening consistently for Forked Tower: Blood.
Square Enix has actually tried to make raids simpler and faster to complete several times. Now, Yoshi P admits it’s incredibly tough to manage the expectations of millions of players. Some want super challenging content, while others prefer something more relaxed.
“We are trying to work within our set timelines,” Yoshida said, referring to the team’s efforts to please both casual and hardcore players. “But even if we doubled our development team, I don’t think the work produced would double too. We’re always trying to keep our quality high.” It seems balancing content for a massive, diverse player base remains a puzzle for even the biggest game studios.