When Sony dropped support of the HDD hard drive for the PlayStation 2, effective with the launch of the PSTwo redesign, the flow of new players ground to a trickle, with the only real options either being the PC version of the game, or for gamers to hunt down refurbished, original style PS2s. While the game has sustained itself, the Final Fantasy XI community is now in for its first real infusion of new players in quite some time, thanks to the upcoming Xbox 360 version of the game. While the 360 version made its debut at this past E3, then its first public appearance at Square-Enix's event in Japan over the summer (and subsequently at the 2005 Tokyo Game Show), 1UP made a special trip to Japan to get some hands-on time with the game at the Square-Enix headquarters in Shinjuku, Tokyo. We also took the opportunity to sit down with Final Fantasy XI producer, Hiromichi Tanaka, to discuss the status of the game as is, as well as the upcoming expansion pack, FFXI: Treasures of Aht Urghan, along with the 360 version in particular.
While the 360 version of the game offers little in the way of surprises, it does offer the same visuals of the game running on a high-end PC, but at a fraction of the cost. If you wanted to play the game, but don't have a good gaming PC to generate the best possible graphics, the Xbox 360 version should suit your needs. As Tanaka-san will eventually clarify in this interview, however, it does no more than this. The textures are the same low-res textures found on the PS2 and PC versions, and the characters and environments bear the same polygon counts, meaning that this is practically a pixel-perfect port of the PC iteration.
While it's certainly not optimized yet, even a single character running around Southern San d'Oria caused the framerate to cap at around 25 frames-per-second when we checked it out. The good news is that the sound will most likely be better than the PC version (FFXI usually has so many things going on in party areas that most sound-cards can't keep up as well as the PS2 version does), and that the resolution is crisp, especially when running on a widescreen HDTV. Color saturation and contrast are improved over the PC version, resulting in sharper shadows, and more solid-looking characters. The controls translate wonderfully to the 360 controller and offer the same functionality and response of the PS2 Dual Shock. How all of this handles under the stress of a full screen of characters remains to be seen, but we have no doubt FFXI will hold up under such duress, seeing as how the game could technically have run just fine on the original Xbox.
We inquired when the Beta period would begin, and learned that it will start in Japan first, and the U.S. after, and it has been undecided whether characters created during the Beta period will be transferred over to the public servers. Tanaka did say, however, that if there are enough players joining the game, whether on the 360 or otherwise, if the demand is there for additional worlds to be created, that they would certainly do so, allaying fears that existing servers would be overwhelmed with newcomers. But although the 360 version of the game will offer little more than the existing game with sharper graphics -- at least until the arrival of the next expansion pack (due sometime in 2006) -- Tanaka-san offered plenty of insights into the world of Vana'diel as we know it. Read on to discover all the things the development team has in store, and make sure to follow our weekly coverage of the game in My Life in Vana'diel.
1UP: Chains of Promathia is generally regarded as having a steep grade of difficulty, making it very hard for all but the most seasoned players to enjoy. Can you tell us what you think you did well with CoP and what could have been better?
Hiromichi Tanaka: I don't know if the readers are familiar with the difference between what we call 1.0 and the basic FFXI packages. The first expansion is Zilart, the second expansion is Promathia. If you can think back to the time when the game was first designed, we're talking about an area that only encompassed, well, none of the areas that even Zilart included. So basically the three countries. I ended up feeling that the players are accustomed to doing missions and quests in separate areas, and sort of controlling the number of characters in each area, to make sure there were not too many people compressed and spoiling one area. From the very beginning, we always thought it was a good idea to separate things. Then along came Promathia, and the main concept of Promathia was to focus on story and fewer system side changes. And to have everyone do the same story, unlike the country missions, you needed to have everyone in the same area. So rather than have people go to Tavnazia in droves, and spoil the Tavnazia experience, I thought "let's make the entrance to that area tough enough so that people don't arrive in such large numbers." It's sort of like an immigrant policy or something. We don't regret a single thing about the story and the way we developed it, but looking back we made that entrance to where most of Promathia takes place a little too difficult, and we tried to scale that back in updates later.
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