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.

1UP: A lot of players are level 75. Many even have three or four level 75 jobs. What are you doing to keep these players excited about what's coming up in the years ahead?
HT: Since the last time I talked with you I've come to agree more and more there are many, many high level players across different jobs. I and the dev team understand that we need to make high level player content, and to add a lot more to what we have now, and our first attempt to this on a sort of large-scale area which is already structured for high level characters was Limbus. It actually took a lot longer than we thought in development to get to the point where we could finish that area, and perhaps one reason simply is that the area around it, Tavnazia, wasn't totally accessible from the story. The Tavnazian Archipelago needed to be populated already by enough high level characters that it would seem natural to have another high level place to party at. But that took a little longer than we thought it would take to produce and it's just the first step and we're planning to add more high level content.

1UP: You guys have obviously created new mobs, like Absolute Virtue, who people have recently stumbled upon. It seems like you guys are really good at creating monsters that are impossible to beat for an alliance of 75s, but that doesn't solve the age-old problem of Dragoons seeking in their mid-50s. Are you guys looking to find ways to equalize the desirability of mid-level melee jobs as well?

HT: Limbus was tested to some degree for mid-level players, or something less than what we consider "high level" players at first, but it was considered extremely difficult and just not fun, and that's when we decided to make Limbus what it is now and the level and difficulty it is now. However, what we noticed in developing Limbus as it is now is that lots of players seem to constantly ask, or at least people who are vocal enough to post, seem to ask for something newer without actually having experienced everything there is so far in the content up until then. So perhaps you get people who say "give me more Limbus" without having finished the Zilart missions, or without having done Chocobo Racers, or without having leveled their NPC fellow. And what we're saying is that we'd really like you to enjoy what we've put so much time and effort into making before we overstretch ourselves on making new things as well. So we're also looking for ways to point people back towards the content that's "sleeping" so to speak.

About experimenting with difficulty in game design, I know there's a lot of theories out there. But certainly the thing we don't want to do the most is err on the side of being too easy. What we've found over the years as we've raised the maximum level cap for characters, is that even when there's a monster set too high for a level of player to defeat, they always find a way to defeat him, and that's not necessarily with third-party tools. To know there are people out there makes it hard from a development point of view to find the impetus to make it easier for others who haven't really thought it out yet.

1UP: Please tell me you have no intentions of raising the level cap. I dread the thought of getting back on the treadmill and going from level 75 to 80.

HT: Ha ha, no, relax; there are no plans right now to raise it. As a clarification to that nuance, I mean that the cap is actually permanent, not just for "right now." Setting aside package releases for a moment, just with the version update system, what we'd like is to have people to discover the ways we intended them to play and enjoy playing within the existing system and content. And maybe for a top-end character, there are merit points and some other things to encourage them. Besides that, we don't want the people in the middle, as you say, to lower to mid-levels, to not keep going. Not that there's some gold waiting at the end, but the middle is also interesting.

1UP: Raising the level cap would defeat the point of the Merit system. The last time I spoke with you at TGS you said that perhaps the Black Mages were overpowered and could use some adjustment, which sparked some controversy in the community. Now that there's been a couple months of tweaking and tuning done to the game, what job would you say you are most happy with and what jobs still need the most work?

HT: Regarding "manaburning" parties, I think that sounds pretty cool. [laughs] What I really meant to say at the time is that I think it's a good idea, and if anyone hears those stories about those kinds of parties and feels that Black Mages are too strong, I would like them to be more creative and to give you help in making your jobs strong so you can do more interesting things like that. But I don't think the BLM job itself should be weakened just because of this current trend of a new way to form your party. And this goes for every job. I'd rather adjust things laterally to try to bring a job's strength up or down. The only exception was the Ranger, not just because of the way people play and the amount of money they put into it, but also the job itself had a fundamental attack advantage, and that's what we most recently tried to fix. But in general we don't want to make any job weaker.

1UP: You've recently begun to investigate ways to reduce the frequency of MPKs, which usually happen in the spots of valuable item drops from specific NMs, or at HNM locations where multiple high level Linkshells could be competing for the same God. Have you ever thought of instancing some of these enclosed battles (like Kirin or something), like in a BC?

HT: It just so happens that for the Notorious Monsters you've mentioned here, we would like to keep these monsters spawning in the field (as opposed to relegating them to an instanced battle) with the possibilty of them being taken by other parties that the first alliance has somehow lost the attack-lock. Maintaining that system as it is now in the field, we balanced it out from the very beginning to have battle circles, or battlefields where you'd use beastmen seals to enter and only your party to attack and get whatever drops. From the beginning we hoped the balance between the NMs and number of NMs and the beasts available in BCNMs would be a balance. MPK is a problem and the reason we can't instantly tweak something for what might seem like an easy fix for MPK, is that it has more to do with some things that need to be adjusted outside of what the dev team has control over. This is also a customer service issue that takes a longer time to coordinate and work out. We would consider even a more systemic or fundamental system-wide change if we knew this would help decrease the MPK problem; this is something the dev team itself could work on. If NM pops become all instanced in the field, I think you'd lose one of those feelings of playing an MMO, and that is why there are constantly people around you and that's unfortunate, so please keep your auto-lock on.

1UP: The reason people fight these sort of monsters is to get the abjurations they need to get their high level armor, like a Paladin would need for his Koenig armor for example. Would you ever also consider adding these items to Kindred Seal battles or something like that?
HT: If the MPK problem can be solved across the board, as you're saying, the situation might get better. So rather than focus on just helping out what high level jobs need to get their top stuff, let's work on something that helps the problem across the board. And if that solution includes shifting where items drop, then so be it; it's something worth considering.

1UP: On the topic of instancing, is there any chance you might turn Dynamis into an instanced battle? For example, if there are 5,000 high level players on Siren, and everyone of them has a Dynamis scheduled, which usually happens on a weekend...if there are 36 people who go into Dynamis, and there's another alliance that wanted to go in at the same time, it could take upwards of three hours of just waiting around, whether they win or lose. With so many high level players on each server now, the traffic jam can be pretty severe.

HT: I can't actually comment on this, but this is one of the parts of the game we're actually giving a lot of consideration to right now internally. But I agree that Dynamis is important for high level characters, and if you have a lot of high level characters what are you going to do? I'm sorry I can't comment further, but we are thinking about it.

1UP: Everyone has been talking about the Blue Mages, since it's the first new job class announced for the Treasures of Aht Urghan expansion. First, what is the abbreviation of the Blue Mages -- will it be "BLU?" Second, are they defensive or offensive mages?

HT: Thanks, the check's in the mail. We're going to borrow your abbreviation. We didn't have one yet. [laughs] Being a mage in FFXI, naturally it seems in the beginning that the Blue Mage would most likely fall into the backline class, not an attacker. More offensive, but in the same way the Black Mage is offensive, and not on the front line perhaps hacking like some Red Mages. This is actually what we were working on today, and I can't say which way it's going to go, but what usually happens with job adjustments in job development is that what we originally thought what the job was going to be turns out different.

1UP: I'm sure you can't be specific, but is Blue Mage the only job you plan to add to Treasures, or do you plan to add others and/or Summons?

HT: I can't say how many new jobs, but Blue Mage is not the only one. And when you say that new summons were not implemented in Chains of Promathia, you're assuming that Chains of Promathia is already finished... [laughs]

1UP: Hmm, now I wonder what the new avatar will be. I only recently got Fenrir, myself. Can you explain a little bit about how the 360 version will work with Xbox Live? You guys recently clarified that gamers will only need to have Xbox Live Silver (and not XBL Gold, which you have to pay for) in order to play FFXI on 360, but what is the interface like? Do you still have to navigate past XBL in order to get to PlayOnline?

HT: For the Xbox 360, it requires the game disc. When you put in the FFXI disc, turn on the power, it starts up and the first thing you see is the PlayOnline viewer. And if you want to switch to Xbox Live, there's a button on the controller that allows you to jump to it, but if you're still at the PlayOnline point you can begin the game. To clarify, you do install the game to the Hard Drive, like every other version of XI, but the Xbox 360 requires that you have the disc actually in the system as part of the certification process, probably for piracy reasons.

1UP: Interesting. Lastly, what do you think of the Xbox 360 hardware? Does it let you do things unique to the 360 version, or will the game always be designed around the lowest common denominator, e.g. the PS2 version?

HT: I love the Xbox 360 because it does what you can only do with a computer for a lot more money, at least on XI. You're getting at whether you have to keep the coding for the lowest common denominator for PS2. What I prefer to think of as more important phrasing is that we are not using the 360 to its full potential, and what we meant to do is add something as completely as powerful as the Windows version but on a different platform...although it is sad to not use the machine to its full potential, with the time it would take to accomplish this, the company would already be on to investing in its next major online game. But I would definitely consider using a machine like the 360 with that power as the base platform for the next online multiplayer game.