Famitsu: How Eden's Gate Was Made! (1/2)

Yes. I joined Square-Enix in December 2011. It was the time where both the legacy version of FFXIV and A Realm Reborn were developed concurrently.

I participated briefly in the development for the legacy version of FFXIV, and joined the ARR team after 1 to 2 years.

It’s already 8 years… (laughs).

I’ve been at the position of consolidating battle content as a leader of the monster department since Patch 4.1 onwards.

Sure. (laughs)

I joined Square-Enix in January 2015, and joined the development team for Heavensward during that period. From there on I worked on the Final Steps of Faith, and the 4th floor of the Omega raids since Sigmascape.

That’s exactly correct.

My previous job was completely unrelated to games and I worked as an engineer and was involved in creating firmwares for industrial computers. Though I’ve been playing FFXIV ever since then but I’ve always wanted to get involved in game design since it was my childhood dream, so I resolved to give the application a try. And by some chance, I succeeded, so here I am.

I never thought of actually working on that kind of content so early in my career considering my experiences in game development. It really felt like I’ve made a great dash throughout the period. (laughs)

It was meant to be a joke, but Yoshida-san (referring to Naoki Yoshida, the Producer and Director of FFXIV) and Sudo-san shared that experience in a funny and interesting way that the topic went viral…

But on a serious note, I did learn a lot from Sudo-san and the shape of the content formed as you see it is all thanks to the good aspects I’ve implemented after learning from both Sudo-san and Nakagawa-san. It was Sudo-san who taught me to never give up on coming up with unique mechanics after all.

I joined the company in December 2010. I initially joined the company as an event planner for the legacy version of FFXIV. It was exactly one day before Yoshida-san fully took over the duties and authority for the game when I joined the company.

I was involved in creating other online games at a different company, so when I thought of changing jobs, I gave Square-Enix a try and got accepted. (laughs)

Well, I thought it’d be nice to be involved in online game development so during the interview I was told “alright, then you’ll be with the FFXIV team” and I thought “Oh yeah!”.

Well Yoshida wasn’t involved at that time so I did give a thought on how the game would end up and I had a “recharge” period when I quit my previous company so I was eager in getting to work as soon as possible.

However, the FFXIV team at that time was reaching its limit and the first thing Yoshida did after taking over was to tell the staff members to “give yourselves a good rest”. So to me, it felt like “what, a rest again?” (laughs)

That’s right. (laughs)

From there I worked as a planner for Moonfire Faire while I was in the event division during the legacy period, once I moved to “A Realm Reborn”, I became the first event designer in that team.

I joined the company in September 2013, just right after the launch of “A Realm Reborn”. I was assigned to the battle systems division after joining so I was mainly assigned to deal with job adjustments and planning, while also deal with content creation when the team faces insufficient manpower.

I was invited by Yokozawa (Tsuyoshi Yokozawa, Lead Battle System Designer) who was already working as a member in the FFXIV development team at that time, so that was the trigger.

Although Yokozawa is a game friend of mine, I’ve never thought that I would actually work in the game industry. However, considering Yokozawa extended his hands and wanted me to join and I went “Well, why not?”, hence I joined.

We do have many other things we can talk about other than the raids. (laughs)

We still have lots of staff members like these over here. (laughs)

Once we begin on that, I’m afraid it’ll take around 2 hours… (laughs)

Alright then. There are 3 main points to consider:

The first is to ensure the battle content has to be interesting. To achieve that we have to make sure the boss setting and story matches the content of the battle itself and the integration has to be done naturally.

For example, let’s use Sophia here. The backstory given here is that she’s the “goddess who controls balance and harmony”, and if that’s the case, the plan and mechanic that goes along with the setting were given a thorough thought and thus we came up with the mechanic that evoked the image of scales.

Yes. And onto the second point, we always keep in mind to include as many mechanics and materials that are new and those not seen before into a content, with the meaning of delivering a surprise factor to our playerbase.

While there is a huge amount of content added during each update in FFXIV, adding new materials and mechanics into the battle is actually easier said than done.

However, it’ll be the end if we get completely worn out here so each person in our team is always open to discussing new challenges and surpassing hurdles.

And the third would be creating content that can leave a lasting impression and memories to the players.

Although I have been working on game design for around 8 years now, I sometimes do hold a conservative mindset of “creating things that don’t attract criticisms’’ as well.

FFXIV is updated once every 3 and a half months, and during that, many players would send us their feedback, and it’s inevitable that we’ll face criticisms over the things we’ve created.

As things continue, there may be times where we tend to end up with a mindset that, instead of making things that are interesting, we’ll end up making things that don’t attract criticisms. So if we fall into that mindset and go along with it, we’ll end up losing our creativity. The content would end up less memorable and it’ll result in a content that scored 70 out of 100 at best.

To make it simpler to understand, instead of having a content that gets a score of 70 out of 100 by 100 players that rate it, it would be better to have 50 players among 100 that gives a score of 100, or 40, depending on their preference. Of course that’s only if we are aiming to have a full 100 score given by all 100 players to begin with.

We too have team members here who tend to have that conservative feeling.

And if they themselves end up giving into this feeling, they will no longer be able to create interesting things.

Since I’m also one of the players of this game, I made sure to hold this simple creed of creating content that I think I’ll be able to enjoy if I were to play it. If I were to think “This is boring” when I imagine it, no matter how fitting it would be during the planning stage, I’ll not let it pass.

The rest is just as Nakagawa mentioned earlier, that MMORPGs are meant to be played continuously for a long term, and if the implemented content structure remains the same throughout, players will definitely end up bored.

We always have to pay attention to that and find out what we should do in order to not let players get bored of it, or what we should do to let the players feel surprised every time. There are many types of surprises here and if we have to go through them, I’m afraid it’s going to take another 2 hours here… (laughs)

Jokes aside (laughs), putting it straightforward, we’re forming plans based on how the bosses would fit the lore, and whether we would be able to come out with mechanics that are both fun and be able to deliver the surprise factor, as well as the others.

My policy is always thinking of creating content while delivering as many new experiences as possible to the players.

While I did have the experience of level design creation for the past 3 years, I’d like to think that my strong point is to create mechanics that combine level design and battle content, and I thought by doing so I’ll be able to deliver new experiences to the players around.

Since we have 4 of our members here we will have some overlaps…but my absolute requirement is to create content that is fun and interesting when I play it myself.

When it comes to bosses, the lore behind the bosses is important and is something I need to take care of.

As for the rest, although I’m one of the designers assigned to create the deepest floors of Deep Dungeon, I find myself enjoying the difficulty and the challenging aspects that come with designing the floors.

First, the discussion on high difficulty raids would start by having Yoshida, Oda (Banri Oda, The Lore Setting and Main Scenario Writer), Ishikawa (Natsuko Ishikawa, Main Scenario Writer), Yokozawa and myself to decide on the overall direction.

Taking The Bend of Time Omega series as an example here, the scenario and lore setting behind the series is written as, “Omega, in order to strengthen itself, sets up a tournament in order to ascertain their opponent, ultimately accept that humanity has reached its peak, and finally emulate humanity itself”.

This would be the simple brief that we will receive during that phase. We’ll then take that brief and propose ideas on which bosses will appear, and have the artists from the art team draw us a rough design after everything is decided.

We’ll then look through the rough artwork, and have the previously mentioned members to decide on the structure of how the battle goes.

Once the overall direction is decided, it will then be assigned to battle content designers to work on further details. This is the basic gist behind our development scene.

Actually, most of them weren’t decided until the end. Though Deltascape (The Bend of Time - Omega: Deltascape) was based on FFV as its theme, we were in bind on how to proceed for Sigmascape (The Bend of Time - Omega: Sigmascape).

Since Sudo was the one handling Deltascape 4th floor, and there was also that major gimmick where we utilised Exdeath for that floor itself, I was wondering how we should proceed from there… (laughs bitterly)

When I then discussed with the team, we then came up with two choices of utilizing either “FFVI’’ or “FFIX” as our next theme. So, if we went with “FFIX”, then the structure would be this; And if “FFVI”, the structure would be that. With that, we then conducted our presentation to Yoshida. From there we chose “FFVI”, and the final result would be what we see today.

Of course we do leave some questions to ponder in this overall direction we’ve come up with, so there are aspects that were decided while some others remain undecided.

For the direction in FFXIV, we would usually look into the feedback post release, add some flavour into our initial idea based on player demand, and further modify our overall direction and structure in order to improve on the content before releasing them to the public.

This is how we proceed with our development, with our direction further adjusted with the method mentioned above.

It is my job to order the designs from the art team. The assigned members will think of how to work on the battle specifics itself with the design as its base.

Since I’ll be working on the integration and supervision, there may be “must include” elements where I’ll order them to insert into the content.

For example, in the fourth floor of Alphascape, I had the designers incorporate the elements of “Omega being a humanoid enemy that can melt into liquid and mold itself to change their gender and form”, and have them design the battle gameplay based on the element in mind.

First let’s touch on the first floor…eh? Why was Kawamoto the one who handled this? (laughs)

Well, all battle content designers had their hands full, and there wasn’t anyone to pass the task to, which was why. (laughs)

Basically the tasks related to Shadowbringers I’ve done here are mostly the ones that no one worked on due to being occupied with other priorities. (laughs)

Also, the fact that Kawamoto is very knowledgeable in FFVIII also helped.

Yeah indeed. Since I was a fan of FFVIII, it got me really motivated when I heard that the boss is Eden Prime.

On the 4th floor, there can be no other but Daisuke.

Since Daisuke, being a member of the Battle Content team that has been creating high difficulty content with a consistent manner, the 4th floor was assigned to him because of that.

Of course, while we’ve managed to mentor other members in the team, considering the timing where the raid is to be released with the expansion, we had to assign Daisuke to bear this major responsibility.

Nabeshima used to work on Bend of Time: Omega - Alphascape 3rd floor so we had him work on a 3rd floor of a different raid once again. This was the decision made to ensure the stability of the lineup.

We received many positive opinions on the 3rd floor of Alphascape, so we thought of creating another fight that maintains the same quality, which contributed to the reason behind having Nabeshima to work on this stage.

The overall direction has largely remained since the changes we made during Alexander: Creator, so we do make sure that the 3rd floor remains the wall of the raid tier. However, that’s not to say the third or fourth floor are a lot more difficult when creating content, the first and second floor have its own difficulty to deal with as well.

The allocated resources (people and time required for development) for the first and second floor is actually much restricted compared to the third and fourth floor, and there is another issue to consider as well, where creating a content that give players the feeling of toughness in difficulty while at the same time able to clear easily actually requires more thought invested compared to creating difficult content.

That’s right. I do pay quite an amount of attention to that part.

I mainly try to initiate discussions verbally myself. Whenever I thought of new ideas I would frequently share them with the members around me. Then I’ll pay attention to their responses and if it’s positive, the idea will then be approved and used.

It’s not really just amongst our members here, but other team members would do the same by asking around whenever they come up with new ideas.

As for me, I mainly worked alone and thought up various ideas when working on the Omega raids but I did have trouble coming up with ideas for Eden raids, so I discussed frequently with different members.

In my case, I was assigned to work on the third floor which the players would go against Leviathan, but since Leviathan first appeared on “A Realm Reborn” and was an extraordinary trial battle of its time.

Since Nakagawa was the one who created the battle, I then worked on the battle mainly with hints given by him. However, I ended up receiving a lot of NGs during the presentation of my idea… (laughs bitterly)

I would usually compile everything that’s needed and then bring them to Nakagawa for discussion.

When facing things that are concerning, I’d approach Yokozawa who sits near me for discussion.

That’s right. There’s always someone who would be around my work desk.

We really do have discussions all the time, and we generally always talk to someone.

I do have discussions with Yokozawa. I usually summarise how I want to present my concept and my thoughts and explain it to him within 60 seconds.

That’s right. When thinking of an idea, I tend to write what I thought of and put it on the memo, and review them later on. All ideas tend to start from the writing noted over there.

No. First I’ll be the one they’ll approach for a presentation.

Once I gave an okay, the battle system team and battle content team will all gather to proceed with the next presentation.

Once everything is clear without issues, the artists and programmers will be approached to be given a presentation, in that order.

Finally, Yoshida will be approached to confirm the proposal based on the information given, only then he’ll give his final approval.

When it comes to Yoshida making major changes, the cases of that happening is close to zero. Even if there are, it usually happens during play testing (in other words, the Producer/Director check), where Yoshida would go “since this happened during the scenario, then this should be that”, and that’s the extent of it. This would show how much Yoshida trusts the battle content team.

Since the job balance is usually done by the battle system team, as long as the battle content team pay attention to the job roles, there is nothing to concern in regards to that aspect.

I was told that “there is nothing to worry about” as well. If any, the addition of the “Interrupt” (※) system is the only one that requires attention, and that’s about it.

※ A new system added to Shadowbringers. A feature where a specific skill launched by an enemy would require players to interrupt. “

Of course all the assigned team members are aware of the new and additional actions added to each job.

While we are aware of the actions here, it doesn’t largely affect the difficulty of our raid design here.

The real issue here is how we develop our expansion content concurrently with our proposal here, so there are cases where we had extremely short time and sometimes couldn’t even make it due to forming content proposals after waiting for the final job adjustments.

That would be the high hurdle that comes with the demand starting from the planning phase.

Content like Savage requires really high precision in planning compared to other contents. Any slight loophole in that aspect will compromise the mechanic design and the content will be broken. In order to avoid that, we need to pay extra attention and ensure there are no loopholes created during the proposal stage.

If we did discover such loopholes that exist during the production stage then of course we’ll have to redo it, and this especially affects the designer and programmers assigned for Savage, and this will end up bloating our cost in the process.

Actually, we had this slight issue during the production of Ultimate Alexander raid, so to have complete control to ensure no unexpected issues occur is a difficult thing.

There are certain parts that are created with excellent solving methods by the players in mind. Although it would be nice if it’s not through obvious bugs or majorly broken methods.

If the content contains critical loopholes then all of our efforts will go to waste, so we don’t feel relieved until I’m sure it has been cleared after release. Those are the ones that worry us non-stop. (laughs)

I do watch it, of course.

Everyone would gather and watch right after the implementation, yeah.

The scariest thing is having the raid progression seep into weekends.

It keeps me wondering if there are bugs, and the anxiety that comes with it. (laughs)

The more difficult it is, the pressure of having loopholes occur that even the slightest bit of it equals unacceptable” becomes stronger throughout, and the pinnacle of that anxiety can be seen in our “Ultimate” series.

You can see that Daisuke really felt that pressure after releasing the Ultimate Alexander raid to the public.

I was so afraid that I couldn’t even bring myself to read the feedback.

I had every single info shut out of my knowledge. (laughs)

Even if he shuts it out, since he sits near to Yokozawa, he would watch the stream and at the same time update Daisuke on the progression, and the two of them would then discuss it. I think he is well aware and heard of what happened. (laughs)

I could hear it perfectly (laughs).

It really put the feeling of my anxiety to its extreme. Even though I had quite a lot of unease feelings since then, it can’t be compared against the anxiety I felt back then.

Looks like it. But I don’t think I’m there yet… one of the things required to create ideas and proposals for high difficulty content would be experience. Although Nakagawa (Masaki) did mention how “it wasn’t really difficult”.

I’ve been doing this for 8 years, so in terms of creating content by myself, it definitely doesn’t feel difficult.

However, the new staff members that I spend time trying to grow will have problems trying to convey what they are trying to achieve here…

Although I’ve been creating manuals here and there, that doesn’t mean whoever read the manual of how to create Savage content will automatically know how to create one. It really is difficult when it comes to training someone.

For example, I don’t think I am able to provide you a proper answer if you are to ask “How do I come up with this mechanic in 1 week?”. But it’s also wrong to just say “I don’t know, think through it yourself” and leave it be, so I want to ensure a proper support is given when it comes to this.

Having said that, to conclude this question with the answer of sense is also not the right way about it, I think. There are many aspects to consider, such as, how they should change their perspective to reach an answer when the junior staff members couldn’t think up an interesting mechanic, and similarly, what kind of methods should they employ to create a mechanic in order to finish up their proposals for Savage in such a limited time.

There is no way we can raise people without providing proper advice to our juniors in order to tackle each and every issue they face.

That’s right. I do want to create content sometimes, of course. Creating content is fun, that’s why.

If Nakagawa-san is to work on it, the operational side will have issues. The tasks will not proceed smoothly (laughs).

“You must absolutely not touch it”, I was told… (laughs)

Although I do want to give it a try.

We thought that we couldn’t have the same people doing the thinking all the time.

Additionally with the release of Shadowbringers, we felt the need to increase our members who can create battle content in our department. This resulted in our collaboration with the NieR series (YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse) that is scheduled to be released for patch 5.1, and the raids will be handled by our new staff members. With them getting involved, it also provides some ample challenge for them to try out new things.

Through the collaboration this time, completely new things will be created as opposed to things that can’t be created by seniors who kept creating the usual things throughout.

Of course, this couldn’t happen without the support of our veteran staff members here, but in order to create new things, we felt that it’ll definitely help if we get our new staff members to be involved.

Sudo and I used to discuss a lot on “How we should definitely need to raise new blood, because if we continue working on creating things we will end up getting bored of it” during the times where both of us were the main members in content creation.

With that thought in mind, we spent our time raising new bloods bit by bit throughout. The result is what you’ll see in Patch 5.1, or something like that.

We thought of letting our new staff members be in charge of the project so the days where Daisuke will no longer be able to create the 4th floor would be close, I guess.

I do want to play a 4th floor raid that is created by other designers! It’s about time I say! (Laughs)

While he has his own, we here have a huge amount of things we want to convey to our young staff members with the experiences we have accumulated throughout the years.

Although it’s not clear whether there is a day where Daisuke will no longer work on the 4th floor of a raid tier but I do think those days will not be too far ahead now.

I’m sure he gave his all for the Alexander Ultimate raid.

You could say it’s my graduation thesis.

Yokozawa as well. (laughs)

This is especially prevalent in the 4th floor but I would likely insert any mechanics that require players to look and solve.

Such as the Wings of Destruction mechanic seen when fighting Kefka in Sigmascape v4, and if we are talking Alphascape v4 it would be Omega’s Diffuse Wave Cannon. Those are the two prime examples of the ones I’ve mentioned above.

That’s right. But I guess I’m nearly out of new materials here. (laughs)

Next would be mechanics that contain 2 different methods to resolve, another one that I use often. Putting this in the context of Titan seen in Eden’s Gate 4th floor, it’d be the segment where the up-down split is involved.

I like to create situations that don’t require making the same movements every time, and move according to the situation given at hand, so having multiple patterns to deal with a mechanic is something I like to create.

Each of us here has this habit we’d end up using.

In my case, I like creating mechanics that require all players to move in unison, and act things out in unity. (laughs)

I tend to always think of creating situations that require everyone facing strong enemies together regardless of their roles. Though in the case of Eden, it became something of a foe instead… (laughs)

There is indeed much content that Nakagawa (Masaki) made that makes you think “wow this is really Nakagawa-like”. Though it’s hard to say that in detail…

Like how the Warriors of Light should lick their floor here, and so on…

Wait a minute! Language! (laughs)

Everyone Laughs

If anything it doesn’t occur much during the high difficulty content but happens more in the dungeons, I think.

I have my own policy when it comes to dungeons. For example, players who fail mechanics even in dungeons should be defeated and wipe, and that’s something I often tell the members around me.

Since a dungeon is made with the intention for players to farm constantly, it has to be made easy and every player has the ability to solve. Therefore there should be some room allowed for players to continue despite failing mechanics, but I think that should not be the case.

When that happens, it’s possible that any player can just clear the stage without knowing how the mechanics work. I believe I’ve asked “Is this really fine?” to the staff members who work on the damage adjustments countless times due to that.

One of the good examples here would be one of the mechanics used by one of the bosses, namely Mortal Flame, found in the Grand Cosmos dungeon boss that I personally designed myself.

I’ve been told by many that “Wouldn’t that be too harsh? How about making it to ensure they don’t instantly get knocked out instead?”. But it’s definitely not applicable here and they should fall in case they fail. I mean, it’s named Mortal Flame for a reason.

Everyone laughs.

This is why he frequently gets into arguments doing that (laughs).

The Mortal Flame mechanic uses the concept of flames that burn its target until it ceases to exist, and will absolutely not disappear.

By making it just a damaging skill would undermine the foundation of this concept, therefore it’s absolutely not something I’ll do, because having to bend the concept that symbolises the battle mechanic is not something anyone should do.

Hence, if you ignore the Mortal Flame mechanic, there is no way you will avoid getting knocked out.

He sure gives the impression of being able to create beautiful content.

Kawamoto usually has the knack of creating combination mechanics that no other members in our battle content team would think of. And he usually gets it done within 2 to 3 days.

Quite fast I’d say.

In other words, tasks that are assigned to me are always done without hesitation (laughs).

Everyone laughs

Oh well. (laughs)

Putting aside the situation, it’s true that time is money here.