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

As we talked about last time, the concept of creating content is summarised in one or two lines. I checked the proposal just now, and this time, too, it says “We will use amazing thunderstorms and amazing charges” in just one line. What a vocabulary there if I say so myself… (laughs).

All the mechanics do indeed have either lightning or charges throughout the battle.

I decided to use a charge because of the way it looks. Initially I was looking at him as a Centaur from the beginning so I thought he’d have the tendency to charge on his enemies.

When I come up with an idea, I ask people for help, often asking Sudo for advice (Kenji Sudo, the famous content designer who bears the reputation of destroying many Warriors of Light with his designs). Sudo, too, would immediately answer “Charging it is!”.

I was slightly worried that having to charge at players with that kind of outlook would be a little too plain and simple, but since Sudo said the same thing so I thought, “Well that’s fine then” (laughs).

To tell you the truth, there’s one more thing. When we formulated Eden’s Verse bosses, I told everyone that I wanted to insert “good old-fashioned raid mechanics” into this tier.

While I hold the thought of trying to change the play feel from Eden’s Gate, the concept also includes arranging the mechanics from A Realm Reborn that hasn’t seen much use and try implement them with today’s style/context.

This would be “Chain Lightning”, as well as the “Raiden” (bird) mechanic where everyone has to do their best to escape it. Initially I was reluctant to have that mechanic to be included in a battle as early as the first floor, but in the end I decided to have it included. I hold that thought to avoid boring players with the same style of mechanics all the time.

Yes. Takahashi managed to grasp my intention very well, didn’t he?

By the way, “Stand Firm” was not originally included in Nakagawa’s written proposal.

The “Stand Firm” Duty Action that was used during the Fury’s Fourteen phase would require you to break the 7 stratospears as the solution of that mechanic.

When it was first implemented, the Main Tank (abbreviated as MT) was the only one that was left without a role to play and that turned out to be a huge problem. I felt that as a player, it would feel a lot better to create a situation where everyone worked together to solve a mechanic, which in this case is what is known as “jump rope”. So I wanted everyone to experience the whole situation where all 8 would go through that situation.

With that thought in mind, comes the process in adding the “Stand Firm” duty action.

Yes. Considering that the role of tanks these days is all about tank swaps, I felt it was dull compared to other job roles.

With that in mind, my intention was to have tanks experience something different by role-playing a situation where they stand firm for themselves in order to protect everyone.

Yes, that’s right. The idea of Fury’s Fourteen was mine. In the proposal I had written about the layout of the 14 stratospears and how the 7 party members would stand up and break the spears, then passed it on to Takahashi.

Takahashi took it and proceeded to explain the process to the programmers assigned and went through the implementation process. That’s when he noticed the problem where only one played had nothing to do, and from there, he suggested “Stand Firm” as a solution.

Since he managed to properly convey the interesting aspect of having 8 players somehow going through Ramuh’s most powerful killing blow, Fury’s Fourteen, so I approved the idea.

I was surprised actually (laughs).

I think it was due to defensive cooldowns that the OT became the more suitable candidate for this mechanic. Since it was an all out charge attack that Ramuh did with all his might, the potency for that attack was adjusted to be extremely powerful because of it.

To be honest, I wanted the MT to be the one to stand in the front end of the line, but I admit that did not think through the MT’s defensive cooldowns, which is something I regret.

I wanted the players to get past them while having a sense of unity, like with healers putting up barriers for you.

That’s right. I purposely had the mechanic included as a reason to give the OTs something to do.

On the topic of OTs, I had the impression that they have much less to handle compared to the MT, and I received a lot of feedback about it.

So in order to address that feedback, I designed it so that OTs will have a job they need to do well, and to ensure that the OT players felt a sense a accomplishment of “I cleared by contributing something to my team”.

However, for the part where only OTs couldn’t handle the mechanic and comfortably continue to maintain uptime, I thought there might have been a better way.

I’m going to reflect on this and make the most of it in the future.

Actually… it was much harder initially.

Raiden was initially conceived as a bird who likes to consume lightning aether and during the beginning of the development phase, Raiden would actually consume the thunder orbs around the arena.

In other words, the thunder orb that was meant for self protection was consumed by that creature when touched, so you had to actually lure the creature around the arena and not have it consume the thunder orbs at the same time…

Furthermore, in case the player touches Raiden, the Surge Protection status you got from touching the orbs will be consumed by the creature as well.

Therefore, it was a really fearsome mechanic, not to mention the thunder orbs while guiding him neatly to avoid hitting other players. (laughs bitterly).

As expected, the first specification was too much of a killjoy.

Fury’s Bolt was a mechanic where I designed it using my own preferred method when I was thinking about mechanics: when the boss’ status changes, so will the content of the mechanic and how to solve it. Therefore, I didn’t deliberately include that mechanic with the intention of completely wiping the party.

Inevitably, it becomes routine and we’re aware that players going through it each week will definitely get bored of the mechanics eventually.

I think Fury’s Bolt, with its meaning to bring tension to the situation every week, indeed served its purpose well in this case. Fighting without paying any attention nor thinking about anything and you have to pay your full attention to the boss or you’ll fail. With this mechanic, I feel that we managed to achieve a firm design for the first floor.

That’s right. It was a good old raid mechanic with a modern twist.

On a certain level it was indeed set that way but I didn’t expect them to have their strategy polished so well. The players are really great when it comes to this.

The method where ranged DPS and healers being the one passing the debuffs around to solve the mechanics really surprised me since I didn’t create the mechanic with that in mind.

During the play test phase, we had the players split into 2 groups of 4, and normally had the players pass the debuffs one by one. That was how we did it.

But Tamaki here had tried the strategy of only moving the healer. We didn’t want to move the caster, so we came up with a method like “maybe this spot would be the best place to deal with”, along with several other ideas.

We did try the method where only the healer needed to move around. Wouldn’t that be easier? Whenever I thought about it, I knew I had to try it right away (laughs).

I thought having multiple methods devised and submitted on social media in order to flare things up is a nice trend.

Players discussing and debating is one way to get things going in a game. By the way, the initial setup for Chain Lightning was actually much more complicated…

The current form that is implemented sees Chain Lighting and AoE attacks coming right at the same time, but initially the mechanic required you to solve Thunderstorm while passing the debuffs, confirm the effects surrounding and dodging Stepped Ladder, all of them at the same time.

However, I thought this was not a very clearable difficulty…

When I first looked at it, I wondered if this was the 4th floor? (laughs)

However, this was also how I intended it to be. It was really hard to adjust on the balance while stacking on the difficulty.

It is not possible to create new motions nor effects in a given period of time. That’s why we make the content very difficult in the planning stage and then shave it off little by little during implementation and adjustment.

As for Raiden, wasn’t there quite a bit of discussion during the proposal meeting?

As I recall, it was the case.

I understand that it is a traditional mechanic, but “traditional” is a fine line between unreasonable and inexcusable, and I wondered if I could actually pull it off and make it workable in today’s context.

Then there’s the problem of being too much of a burden on the OT.

I did hold a strong spirit and thirst to take on the challenge despite knowing the fear that comes with it; I wanted to create something new because it’s the end of the world in an MMORPG when you get bored.

Can I say a few words before we touch on the concept?

To all Dragoons, I really want to apologise for having created certain scenarios where you couldn’t Jump!

I received a lot of feedback that melee DPS had a hard time landing hits.

In case you’re wondering, I checked on that stage using Samurai myself and created the stage based on the calculation of True North’s cooldown time.

If you’re having issues over not being able to do positionals, I would appreciate it if you can do your best with True North…

The concept for the 2nd floor is simply “wind and fire combined”.

When I reviewed the proposal, I wrote the concept while at the same time including terms like “Kinniku Buster + Kinniku Driver = Muscle Docking” (laughs).

In other words, the mechanics for both Garuda and Ifrit stand alone, and when combined they create different effects. Thus following that the mechanics are created and that was the concept.

For example, the lines connected by Ifrit will be severed off by Garuda, or the orbs generated by Garuda gets kicked away by Ifrit which creates a movable area of effect attack.

At the time of ordering the art, it hadn’t been decided.

When it was handed to me there were only two figures: Ifrit and Garuda. If it were me I thought I could take up the task of creating 2 boss battles though, but… it was a tough one…(laughs).

Battles in “FFXIV” are related to the targetting system, but I think FFXIV battles aren’t actually suitable for fighting multiple enemies.

For example, when we have 2 bosses appear, there are many cases where the group splits into 2 and 4 players attacking on one boss at the time. If you consider fighting the battle with 2 bosses that ends up a length of 10 minutes and above, the plan will start becoming a mess and even if it’s done, you can’t really gauge on whether the battle would be fun or not.

During that time I inquired opinions from Daisuke (refers to Daisuke Nakagawa, the designer of The Bend of Time: Omega Alphascape 4th floor) as well and he thought that it’d be better if we can limit the boss number to just 1, so with the completion of model where both of them combine and the result was Raktapaksa.

So Raktapaksa was actually an additional request. But I am glad I got it right.

I thought it was a really well thought out proposal.

The art and model for Raktapaksa was created in a very short time, and you won’t even expect the quality to be rushed when you actually look at it.

With that into consideration, I think it was a job really well done.

The name, like Garuda, is an alias for Garuda, which exists in mythology and means “bird with wings of crimson”. I’m sure you’ve seen Suparna and Chirada appear in trial against Garuda before, and both of them are alternative names for Garuda as well, so Raktapaksa is one of them.

Basically the enemy names are decided by Oda (Banri Oda, the World Lore Designer and Main Scenario Writer of Final Fantasy XIV), and I also have a strong fondness for the lore setting as well, so when I was assigned to work on the 2nd floor, I took my time to do some research on Garuda.

From there I found just the right name for it, and wrote an annotation at the end of the proposal. However, I wasn’t sure if Oda coincidentally shared the same idea I had when he looked and thought about it, and the name officially became Raktapaksa.

I wasn’t paying any specific attention to Conflag Strike but I did consider that for Air Bump.

I believe Takahashi mentioned something about liking “jump rope” type mechanics, but I personally dislike that kind of mechanics so…(laughs).

Even so, since this is a high difficulty raid, I did indeed try to insert elements that create a chain of one person after another getting knocked out if the party fails it, in order to stay true to its name.

Actually, I did have another mechanic planned as an alternative for it.

There was the part where Ifrit would launch the player high up but during the initial development stage, Ifrit was meant to launch the player high up while Garuda generates a skewer from below and pierces the player… Although that didn’t come to reality, Air Bump is the remainder of that idea.

Well it wasn’t really done deliberately to be that bad, it was simply just to ensure the flow where Meteor Strike that comes right after can be established.

In other words, I wanted to create a flow where some form of damage will appear and the tanks get attacked twice, and in order to do so I need to get the players to receive some form of debuffs, so I had to make it this way.

The Strike Spark mechanic comes from the idea where I wanted to create a combination of attack between Garuda’s orbs and Ifrit.

Garuda would “slice apart everything with the wind blades she generated”, with Ifrit acting like a martial artist. This was how the concept came to mind.

So, with the concept, what comes after having the idea pops up where Ifrit who acts like a martial artist kicking something and making it a mechanic, resulting in Strike Spark.

During the planning stage, Strike Spark didn’t really impress me. This would continue during its implementation stage where Ifrit would just kick the orbs around casually and I thought “are you sure this is really fine?”.

While it was the atmosphere at that time, the final result that came was a completely unique mechanics and it was really well done.

To tell the truth, the initial length was actually one second shorter.

When I created that mechanic and tried gathering feedback to see how well it went, the staff who sat behind me on the right side told me “1 more second”. So I got that remark and with the heart of hospitality I have in me, I added 1 more second into it.

It’s a huge factor to have the feeling of wanting the players to feel comfortable in solving the issues presented to them.

While this creates some time for hesitation on judging Strike Spark, Eruptions will also appear during that time so the players have to be right on the center of the arena, as tight as they can be.

I didn’t want to just create a mechanic where the players can just follow the movements of other players, so I’ve created it to ensure they have determined their movements or they’ll never make it.

Actually, I didn’t realise it at all during play testing…

Once it went public and I tried playing it once again, I did find out that it was really hard to see. So I needed to reflect on myself for that. I don’t know if this serves as a solution for the players but if you are unsure of the direction of the mechanic, you can always assume and judge that it’ll always face you…!

The concept for the 3rd floor is “The separation and combination of an assembled entity”.

By utilising the specialty of the multiple assembled entities of small Sin Eaters, they get to repeat the process of separating around and gathering together and at the same time attack in waves.

In other words, it’s a mechanic that revolves around commands, and that’s the main concept for this boss. Aside from that the proposal also states on how the Sin Eaters are Light aspected while the core of the boss is Darkness aspected, the boss would conduct both light and dark aspected attacks.

Regarding the 3rd floor, Yoshihashi was involved in the art order, and it was done with him explaining what he wanted to be done and what he would expect from design so the art was then ordered and created.

To begin on the story behind it, when I received the early plot after being assigned to work on this, the plot only wrote something about “going against the Sin Eaters”. With the end of Patch 5.0, where the base of Shadowbringers content ends, we saw the players defeat several bosses called the Lightwardens, and then furthermore we get to fight more Sin Eaters…was the impression I had when I first saw it.

I wondered what exactly is this amazing boss when those distinctive entities have already been defeated? So I thought of several Sin Eaters, however, with many mock-Primals lying around, plus having to compete with other Sin Eaters made creating the boss to be far more unique for a raid was quite a hard task to complete.

So I thought it would be more visually impressive if I released a large number of tiny, small fry-like creatures.

That’s right. I was involved in the thought process and placed the order.

Yes, it’s rare. It’s unusual.

The so-called “early progression groups” would scratch their head over this, and after several amounts of trial and error throughout their quest to find the most optimised way of dealing with it, comes with the simplest way of dealing with the mechanics. Those are parts I paid attention the most during the development.

Furthermore, players who would continuously watch walkthrough videos that are extremely patternised and remember the way it works and compare each other to find a comparatively easier way. Those aspects are the things I deliberately weaved in as well.

No…I didn’t expect the players to completely make Words of Motion and Words of Night to be so trivialised. This was due to several reasons that happened during the adjustments…

We barely made it during the last half of the adjustments and the mechanic patterns were narrowed down.

Originally there were more variations and it required a lot of factors to judge during the mechanic.

The current “Words of Night” and “Words of Motion” are mechanics where portals (in Japanese, it’s called “Jigen ana”, which roughly translates to “Dimension Hole”) would appear and the exit portal’s position is fixed on the east side of the arena.

During the adjustment period, it was a complex mechanic, with the location on whether it’s east or west would be completely randomised, which would require the players to move the camera around, and furthermore determine the colours that come up next since it was to be swapped randomly.

What’s more, the players will have to deal with other attacks that come during the swapping, which made the mechanic really difficult.

It was a mechanic that greatly required a lot of thinking, and I thought it indeed was too hard.

From there, I deleted some patterns off and the result is the specifics we have right now.

That’s right. This is the part where I really have to reflect on, and I do think I need to be careful about it.

I agree.

There are times where you can’t let your guard down even if it’s just Normal mode, so originally I have wanted Savage mode to work the same as well.

It’s indeed more fun to have players find the most optimised and the easiest walkthrough to a stage, and I think it’s completely fine to have it that way. However, we almost never seriously take in mechanics that touches on what we’d call “brain training” for high difficulty content.

Mechanics that involve brain training greatly vary from player to player and to some the mechanic can be really hard to get through, while others may think of it as a piece of cake. This actually applies the same for the development team as well.

Therefore to perform adjustments on mechanics that touch on brain training is really difficult work.

The huge difference in experience between using keyboard + mouse and Controller is also a thing we realised during development.

We have several members try out the mechanic with keyboard + mouse while another group of members try out the mechanics with controllers, we found out that it’s important to look at the debuff segment and refine their standing positions and their positions after getting teleported away.

When it comes to the difference in control feel, we concluded that the players would have been at that point already comfortable with their playing environment and therefore it shouldn’t be a problem.

It’s a peculiar mechanic where the boss would utilise the power of darkness to allow the Sin Eaters to enter and exit the wormholes. My initial idea was that it would be very interesting to use this ability against the player as well.

The mechanic itself was originally based on the forced movement debuff that forces the players to move in the direction indicated, which was found and used by Halicarnassus from The Bend of Time Omega: Deltascape’s 3rd floor. By using it as the focus point and having the player’s destination strictly set up and pinpointed, I thought it’d create a new experience here.

I created “Words of Fervor” with the image of the Idol of Darkness getting cornered and with its last strength available, having the Sin Eaters fly around in disarray. In fact, the original concept of the project was written as “Let’s create a Pantokrator 3” (laughs bitterly).

With the cooperation from Nabeshima (Yoshito Nabeshima, the battle content designer who worked on The Bend of Time, Omega: Alphascape 3rd floor and Eden’s Gate: Inundation), we managed to fit in the so called Pantokrator 3 into the phase.

We were going to have a lot of mechanics in the final phase as well, but in the end we settled on using power clashing against power in a struggle for the DPS check, and that’s how we got to where we are now. The rotating attack is a remainder of the initial idea.

It was indeed assumed to be harsh.

Considering we’ve come this far, perhaps we should create a Pantokrator for Eden’s Promise as well? (laughs).

This too would be related to the mechanic adjustments mentioned earlier, but initially the value implemented was much stricter, with mechanics that contain complicated brain training mechanics, furthermore, the DPS check was much higher, thus requiring players to fulfill both of the requirements.

As expected, it was too hard to meet the DPS check while performing brain training mechanics, so we adjusted the DPS check to a milder level, but many people said that the mechanics were too difficult to begin with, so we decided to tone down the mechanics.

When that happens, we managed to have the required DPS value adjusted back to what it should be initially, the range of the values restored were slightly insufficient.

This is something I need to reflect myself on, and if I managed to restore the values to its original expected requirement during the early development phase, I think the battle would have been much tougher and more challenging.

If players were stressed out by the brain training mechanic and also by the DPS check, there was a chance that the stress would win out before they found the encounter interesting. That’s why I deliberately softened the requirements than what is usual for 3rd floors.

But, as Yoshihashi had mentioned, maybe it would be better to make it slightly tougher and I did feel the same when playing the stage privately.

However, considering the 4th floor was quite tough, we consider the overall difficulty for Eden’s Verse to be on the nice spot. If we made the 3rd floor to be suffering and subsequently the 4th floor to be the same then…(laughs).

I never really thought of summarising my sentence in easy-to-read format, or in one line like what Nakagawa did for the concept, so what came to my mind at the start was to make it “a 4th floor that befits a 4th floor”, I suppose.

That was my concept for the 4th floor.

When I took over, I had decided on the part where Ryne, possessed by Shiva, would switch between 3 stances during battle, as well as the 3rd “Dragon Stance” would be exclusive for the Savage difficulty and would transition with a spectacular performance.

Based on that, I started to review the direction of the difficulty and mechanics.

We decided on this at the time of ordering the artwork.

With the concept of a dress change, Daisuke Nakagawa and I decided to create 3 characteristics which are the ice stance for Shiva, the light stance for Ryne and one relating to the most memorable character associated with Shiva in the Source: Hraesvelgr.

Those are the ideas behind it.

Shiva’s dress change concept was conceived and ordered with the intention to let the players enjoy the design and the transformation scene.

I think the artists did their best to answer that intention we had. The animations, design and model, all of it was really very, very well made.

That’s right. Since there was a theme where Ryne being the Priestess of Light, I thought that we should definitely put in Hydaelyn’s Kick as that was my first thought at the time.

With Diamond Frost, the aim was to ensure we make the impression to be as close as Shiva from the Source. To me, when you talk about Shiva from the Source, the impression of her summoning a number of icicle pillars, which the mechanic is called “Icicle Impact”, as well as the the combination of other mechanics are strong, which Diamond Frost in this case is constructed based on this reason in mind.

During Diamond Frost, you see many symbols like indicators and markers popping out and presented to the players, and the mechanic also happens during the climax of the beginning so I wanted the players to feel the battle as a battle you can see in FFXIV.

These are the points I take in mind when creating it.

As with any other mechanic, the rule is that there are usually no more than two things that you have to do per role.

Since this isn’t Ultimate, we need to make it tough we need to ensure that it’s a difficulty that players will have a way to clear them. In any case, we prepared 2 kinds of dealing methods for each role, and they just have to remember them and they’ll be able to solve it.

On the development team side we used the inner dump method to deal with that area of effect attack, but we created the mechanic to allow players to use either inner or outer dump method. We wanted this point to be attacked by player preference.

I like mechanics that allow me to solve them cleanly and result in a good feeling.

I thought having a clear standard setup can still display a certain amount of toughness on the content instead of relying on a difficulty that contains vague standards. That is why I had the Sincerity Line prepared for this stage.

As for the rest, since Ryne looks cute and I have the desire of making the mechanics look stylish, I made myself severely aware that I wanted the completed form of the mechanic to look beautiful when resolved.

On the developer’s side, our supposed way of thinking and method of doing the mechanic was basically the same as the Ayatori style strategy.

However, during the development phase, the healer was fixed to the northeast and the other 3 players had to move to adjust for the channeling (chains).

If the shape when the players are channelled is a square then they will have to move clockwise, and if the shape is an hourglass then they will have to move counterclockwise, which ultimately results in a ribbon shape.

This was how we dealt with the mechanic.

I felt that it was reckless…especially on the way the light orbs were resolved…

On the side of the development team, they’d stand close to the orbs they’re tethered to and from there get close to Shiva to bait the fan shaped area of effect attack, and everyone would move 90 degrees to the left after baiting.

This method was easy to execute rule wise, and also focuses on stability, and that was how we did it.

For “Icelit Dragonsong”, I thought of creating a mechanic that contains both elements of Ice and Light. By combining the elements of Diamond Frost with the elements seen in Light Rampant, the result would become the most difficult mechanic of all.

At the beginning of the development phase, the shape of the channelled (chained) players was to be arranged by the players, and that was the supposed plan but taking into consideration that having the most difficult mechanic after fighting the battle over 10 minutes would be going too far, we settled on 1 pattern in the end.

During the initial plan, there was the idea of having to deal with the light orbs at the same time, but I gave it a second thought and decided to make it the way we see it today.

However, I do think the riddle that comes with the mechanic was the one that took the world first team the most time to solve.

We wanted to give it at least 24 hours before the world-first clear, so it would be difficult until a way was found to solve it, and once a solution was found, we wanted it to be a relatively simple mechanic, so that’s what we did.

Of course, this was taken into consideration.

When I created this phase, I thought that there may be multiple strategies and methods to resolve this method.

On the development side, we tried the method of fixing the standing position based on the direction, but community wise the method where fixing the standing position based on the colours of the mirrors was the popular method.

That’s right.

However, if we made using Arms Length or Surecast the main method required, then the dps will also be deferred. The DPS requirement would gradually be stricter as a result so we adjusted it so that it will require only the DPS values when getting knocked back.

The value was a deliberate choice here.

Although this applies to people who did this stage during the early progression or mid progression, it was assumed that the groups who clear this stage will do so just right before the enrage skill gets fully executed. Therefore in this tight battle, having an extra firepower gap between 1 to 2% was extremely important.

If possible, I wanted to put some elements where groups can aim to clear the stage more comfortably, so I set on a value that makes them not want to skip through. In addition to that, if it comes to the point where they skipped the buff and ended up absolutely not being able to clear this, it’ll result in a complete wipe on the party.

Furthermore, with the party splitting into 2 groups with 4 people in one group, the other side of the world will not be able to interfere. With all that taken into consideration, the party will definitely feel annoyed if they commit any mistakes and have to end up wiping to restart the battle, which is why the buff value is set that way.

I think it depends on the job composition and party split for East and West, but it may indeed be that the east side is harder in comparison.

I wanted various jobs and role actions to play their part during that phase, so having Stun or Interrupt works on the mob was designed deliberately for that reason.

For example, Paladin’s Shield Bash was not really utilised anywhere else but on this phase alone it could be a very useful skill in this phase, depending on how you use it.

I wasn’t really aware of the past content.

Since there are 3 stances for Shiva, and each of them has their own theme, the result after finding ways on how to express each stances beautifully is the current one we settled upon.

For example, the ice stance sees the boss wielding swords on both hands, the light stance sees the boss having swords attached onto her legs, and the dragon stance has wings, which each of the stances had their own distinctive weapons that would be used, which we incorporated them into.

In the 2nd floor of Eden’s Gate, I believe you get to see Gaia utilising Cycle skills which then comes out various types of Doomvoid attacks in that battle, so the Priestess of Light, as a comparison to the Priestess of Darkness, also hold various mechanics at hand, so having mechanics that can be solved just by judging on the action names and motion is something we deliberately implemented for this reason.

On the aspect of Akh Morn and Morn Afah, since it involves Hraesvelgr, and the name of Shiva’s battlefield back in the Source is named Akh Afah Amphitheatre, the setting behind those moves was implemented with that in mind.

I would like to explain this in order so that we don’t cause any misunderstandings.

As already explained before and to repeat once again, the difficulty for Savage since Alexander: Creator had a drastic change in difficulty, and for all 4th floors in the Omega series, we’ve created completely different boss battles that are different from the first half and included elements seen only in Savage difficulty so that players can be enticed to try out Savage as well as get surprised by the factors we’ve created for them, that was one of our goals.

In order for players to obtain satisfaction from fighting both the first and second half of that one boss once they transformed into a different form after the first half, it was necessary to make the length of the battle to go roughly 19 minutes, including the transition animation.

If we made either one of the battles to be extremely short in length, we risk the fear of having the pace of the battle compromised and thus player’s satisfaction will drop due to this decision.

Moreover, if the party gets wiped out in the 17th minute of the battle over this tensed 19 minutes long battle and then returns back to the very beginning of the battle, the difficulty we envisioned for the tier will not match the direction we have set post Alexander: Creator.

Due to this reason, we’ve decided to set checkpoints for Omega series raids.

This experiment itself worked really well here and the overall quality of the Omega series went very well according to our expectations, and I believe the players are highly satisfied with the tier.

The feedback given by the players was largely positive, but among the feedback, we received comments that the “total length of the battle was too long”, or remarks like how the first half of the battle became stylised.

Indeed, if the structure remains the same throughout, players will get really bored of it. So we need to face the remarks written in the feedback and take them into consideration, which is why we stopped using this structure for the time being and didn’t implement them in Eden’s Gate back then.

Since the amount of the battle conducted gets consolidated into one, we get to respond to the feedback by tightly shortening the total length of the battle to make it roughly 14 minutes. With the total length of the battle shortened, even if we didn’t implement any checkpoints on the second half of the battle, we can definitely make the difficulty to be somewhere around Creator’s level.

In reverse, if we end up implementing a checkpoint on a roughly 14 minute battle, it will make the difficulty of the battle way too easy. This is hence the biggest reason why we did not implement second half checkpoints on Eden’s Gate and Eden’s Verse.

We have received much feedback after the release of Eden’s Verse. So for Eden’s Promise, we held many debates on the structure as well as how it should be planned based on the feedback received.

The play testing phase for Eden’s Promise as well as the adjustment phase for the tier is ongoing, but we did create the battles with the intention of making the game experience to be even better than before, with of course including making the story more exciting.

We always look into player’s feedback properly, conducting many discussions, and work our best to ensure the quality of the content remains as high as it can be. So I’d want players to look forward to it.

For Eden’s Verse, I think the battle content of each floor is unique.

This of course is the result of all the young members who worked really hard to make it happen, and the contribution from the members outside our team - the Battle System team, Monster team, and many others who made the content gradually better after various discussions are also a huge factor. It makes Eden’s Verse content that subverts players’ expectations and is content packed full of surprises.

Of course, while the content is packed full of good things, there are also some parts where we failed or things we need to reflect on, and overall I think we did manage to create a good raid content.

While the development team is obviously involved in the process of development, they also play the game even after its public release as their private character alone, and on top of that think of how to create their next plan. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to resonate with the feeling of the players (laughs).

The journey was rough when I actually gave Eden’s Verse a try until I cleared it, but it was really interesting content.

The feedback we’ve received from the players around the world, be it from Twitter, forums, or any other platforms, are being looked through. We’ve always made sure to gather all the information and develop further with the intention of making sure it gets better than before.

As of this interview we’re currently working on the balance adjustments for Eden’s Promise and conducted play testing on the first and second floor, and you can be assured that there are many unique and interesting mechanics implemented for this tier.

At this stage the toughness of the tier itself can be felt so I’d like all players to be able to play it as soon as possible. Although the actual release of Eden’s Promise is still miles away, we hope you can look forward to its release while imagining how the tier would be.