Final Fantasy XIV is the big game on campus at Square Enix, being so consistently successful that it softens the impact of lower sales elsewhere in the company. That success is attributed to the entire FFXIV team, a mass collective of developers who put out one of the best Final Fantasy games ever and keep it updated on a consistent schedule. At the head of that collective is Naoki Yoshida, the creative director and lead producer on the MMO.
In an interview with Inverse, Yoshida acknowledged that despite FFXIV trying to do its best to be the Final Fantasy for everyone, one entry can’t take up that mantle.
“In terms of whether Final Fantasy is successfully adapting to industry trends, I believe the series is currently struggling,” Yoshida told Inverse in an extensive interview. “We’re now at a point where we receive a wide variety of requests regarding the direction of our game design. To be honest, it’d be impossible to satisfy all those requests with a single title. My current impression is that all we can really do is create multiple games, and continue creating the best that we can at any given time.”
Yoshida himself is also producing the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, which will be a very different game from FFXIV. The single-player RPG is coming sometime in the summer of 2023, likely in the same year as the next expansion for the MMO. And outside of Yoshida’s projects, the Final Fantasy VII universe seems to have a healthy future with a revamped Crisis Core and FFVII: Rebirth on the horizon. Sure enough, Final Fantasy will continue to evolve.
The question is whether Yoshida and company are planning the next Final Fantasy MMO, a game that will stand alongside FFXIV in the same way that title stands alongside the older Final Fantasy XI. Yoshida admitted that he does sometimes think about designing another MMORPG, but falls short of committing to such a project.
“I am a game designer, so I always have several ideas for games. I can’t talk about them here, but I think that goes for any game designer,” said Yoshida. “I am the kind of person who’s happy as long as they can make games, so while there isn’t anything in particular, I occasionally think that I would like to make one more MMORPG title, from scratch, before I die.”
While we wait on what’s next for Final Fantasy, let’s focus on what’s next for FFXIV! We have Patch 6.2 coming on August 23, which is only a week away! You can read all about the all-new Island Sanctuary, brand-new gear, and perhaps a little speculation about where the story is going and what the patch’s continued Final Fantasy IV references could mean.
