Famitsu released its magazine a day early to get ready for Golden Week,
possibly Japan’s biggest holiday week. Apologies for its lateness, but
Aya and I have been working at every moment we can to bring you
Famitsu’s interview with Hiromichi Tanaka and Nobuaki Komoto. In it,
they discuss many things alpha, as well as their plans from here on out.

Source is Famitsu’s May 13th/20th 2010 issue. Scans will be up when I
get back home to my scanner (which will be a while, so I may include
them in a later news).

Translation by Aya and Yours Manly.

Enjoy!

Connections beyond expectations
Famitsu (F): Final Fantasy XIV has finally made it past the development
floor and onto the consumer test phase with the alpha test. How do you
think that’s going so far, and what do you expect to happen after this?
Tanaka (HT): Right now, the alpha tests are taking place during three
separate four-hour slots in three regions: Japan, Europe, and North
America. Right now, the servers aren’t as stable as
we’d like, and a lot of people haven’t been able to play to the fullest.
We’re sorry about the burden this has put on the testers, but we’ll be
upgrading bit by bit, and we’re sure the situation
is going to get better.

F: What’s the problem with the servers?
HT: Each region has the same number of testers, and from our experience
with the FFXI beta test, we were expecting around half of those players
to log in at the same time. However, the amount of
players that logged in exceeded expectations, and we believe
this is because the testers were selected from devoted Final Fantasy XI
players. The North American and European tests didn’t put as much strain
on the servers and bring them down as much as the Japanese tests,
though. With the version update on April 15th, we added a mechanism that
will show you what number you are in the login queue when the server is
crowded, and increased the time you can stay in that queue without
retrying your login to 10 minutes. This made it easier for players to
know when they’d be able to log in, and we feel it also relieved some of
the traffic congestion.
Komoto (NK): We sincerely regret that most players haven’t been able to
have a satisfying testing experience. We’re
extremely thankful that we’ve been able to receive a lot of feedback
despite the current testing situation.

F: How do you feel about the feedback you’ve read so far?
NK: There were a lot of things we didn’t notice since we’re always
looking at the game from a developer’s standpoint. There
were a lot of things that players focused on that surprised us.
On top of that, it was interesting to see some opinions unique to their
regions. Since I’ve been away from FFXI for so long to focus on
developing FFXIV, I’ve been feeling a bit distant from the players. Now
that players are logging in (albeit at an alpha test level) and I’m
going back and forth between the management and development floors for
the first time in a long time, I really feel like I’ve come home.

”Azagba Tanaka” has logged in.
F: Do the developers log into the tests, too?
NK: We’d like to, but since the servers are still limited, we’re restraining ourselves (he laughs). We’d like
to get in as many testers as we can, so we’re keeping developer logins
to a minimum.
HT: I was the only one sitting at my PC from the
very moment the test began, fervently competing with other players at a
game of “Login Online.” (He laughs.) (He doesn’t actually say
“Login Online,” but I thought this would be a nice place to introduce
the terminology the Japanese were using for alpha test’s login-retry
sessions –Manly)

F: Did you? (Interviewer laughs) Players weren’t able to tell it was you
just by looking at your character though, were they?
HT: With a name like “Azagba Tanaka,” I’d hope they would! (He laughs) I
can read the log of player chat and actions from the developers’ side,
but that doesn’t give you a really good feel for how the players are
experiencing the game. I logged in as a
representative for the developers to see what was going on in the game.

F: So the producer himself was checking the game, then! (Interviewer
laughs) Was there any feedback that stood out?
NK: Since the alpha is focused on tweaking movement and controls, there
were a lot of responses saying control response was bad, and many responses that confirmed some misgivings we had
ourselves. We mentioned on the site before the test, “There’s
no tutorial, so let us know if the controls are confusing,” so people
told us: “The controls are confusing.” We’re going to try to work that
out for the final release.
HT: There was a huge difference in the number of feedback we received
from each region. There were about 5000 comments from the Japanese
testers, but there were about 19000 from Europe and 25000 from America.
Even though each region has the same number of players, for every one
comment the Japanese write, the American players write five. It’s
probably a difference in culture. A lot of American
users wrote comments asking for their ideas to be put in the game, too.
They’re all like, “Hey! Listen to my idea! (He laughs)

F: In that sense, I guess Japanese players are just more modest?
NK: Well, a lot of the game isn’t working properly yet, so it’s hard to
tell. We expected a lot of angry responses,
but we didn’t get that many. Actually, we feel like the players are
warmly encouraging us through this process.

F: Doesn’t sound like you have a lot of time to sit back and enjoy that
feeling, though.
NK: Things have been really busy and it doesn’t really feel like I’ve
gotten much done (He laughs). Now that the game is running, though, I’ve
been able to enjoy the nostalgia of managing the game.
HT: There’s still a lot to do (he laughs). We’re
only releasing a little bit of the game at the alpha stage, so
we’re trying to see what we need to change right now. Even so, after
release we’re going to be working on the next content for the game, so
we’ll probably never get a sense that we’ve completed it.

F: Well, one of the unique things about MMORPGs is that there’s never
really a “completed” version.
NK: At fan events, we feel a sort of sense of accomplishment, but as of
right now… (He laughs.)
HT: I usually feel that sense of accomplishment when I can enter the
game and play alongside the players and see how they enjoy it. We’re still not quite there in the alpha version, so we’re
going to work real hard to get to that point.

We would like to hear users’ opinions
F: You guys have been saying that it would be great to reflect the
opinions of users who took parts in the test into the game since FFXIV
was announced. Do you still feel this way?
NK: Yes, and that won’t change even after the official service has
started. There are so many things we would like to change; however, we
will not be able to start the official service if we keep trying to fix
every single thing, so we would like to know what is wanted the most at
this point. Of course, we’ll not only be fixing the problems, but also
strengthening the parts the players like. We’d like
to know the users’ opinions and think about what to do.

F: Then, it is better that alpha and beta testers give you honest
opinions, however trivial they are.
HT: Of course.
NK: As I said earlier, there are many surprising
things we, the developers, may miss if not for the users’ opinions.
For instance, we already got some opinions on the manual for the
tester’s site before the alpha started. Developers also agreed with some
of the opinions about the manual.
HT: Even reading opinions that match our own serve to reassure us.
NK: Yes, there are two purposes for collecting users’ opinions: to alert us to problems or ideas and reassure us about
existing problems or ideas we’ve had. Therefore, every single opinion is important.

Where do we go from here?
F: You plan on increasing the number and scale of the tests as testing
goes on, correct?
HT: For now, the first step is to conduct three tests a week without
problems.
NK: To let users play without problems, the first
goal is stability for now.
HT: We think that maybe the time of tests should be changed at some
point, since there are some people who can’t play at that time.

F: How long will the current alpha test run?
NK: There are some problems in stability of the server, so it is getting
longer than it was planned at the beginning. We will think about it
when users finish raising their characters to some extent.
HT: In fact, there are two patterns planned for the speed of characters’
growth, and we are planning to do a data wipe
sometime during the alpha test. After collecting enough data
from the current pattern, we’d like to switch it into the other one.

F: So at some point, things will be started over again.
NK: Right. It is not just for the alpha, we’ll do it
over and over till the official service after the beta gets stable.

F: Does that mean you will switch to the beta test after adjusting the
speed of character growth?
HT: The current alpha test is done on a single world server, but for the
next step, we’d like to have several world servers and increase the
number of testers. We may call it beta one or alpha two.

F: So the schedule will change depending on the situation.
HT: During that time, we will work on opinions we got and start the version which looks closer to the official service
at some point. I guess that will be what we call the beta
version.

F: At this point in the test, users log in depending on region. When can
users all over the world play together?
HT: Most likely, it will be when world servers
become playable around the clock. We are currently working on
it.

65 percent is completed so far
F: Please tell us how development is coming.
HT: The graphics are almost done. We are working on the final
arrangements for planners and programmers, but it is hard to express in
percentage. (He laughs). Even though the graphics are almost done, we’ve
just started adjusting them. For instance, lighting
in the city of Limsa Lominsa will be totally changed.

F: Then the basic frame of the world is done now?
HT: The basic parts are almost done. As I said before, a few little
touch ups are needed (He laughs). We are still working on system,
designs, user interface, and mass production tasks such as creating
quests. Though you can say that the time between now
and release is 10 percent if you think that we have been developing
FFXIV for the last five years, the amount we develop during this short
period can occupy 50 percent of the game.
NK: Though the alpha has started, if you think about the growth of
characters and the expanse of the world and quests, only a small
fraction is playable in the tests. The Eorzea you can see in the alpha
test comprises less than 10 percent of the content
in the actual game.
HT: As for the progress of development, I’d be modest and say about 65
percent.(Tanaka laughs)

F: The alpha test is for PC only. What about the PS3 version?
HT: We are working on it earnestly along with the PC version. We are
trying to make them start service at the same time.

F: So that means PS3 users should be looking forward to it?
HT, NK: Yes, definitely.