We have reasons for that. The first was due to the surprise factor, and we do have another reason here, but we can’t say a word yet… until the whole scenario ends at Patch 5.4.

I believe the mystery behind this will be cleared once all players complete the entire tier. Since it’ll take some time before that reason is answered, so I’d like all of you to look forward to it.

That’s right.

On balancing difficulty, I believed we’ve touched on how the answer lies on Alexander Creator for numerous times now, so it’s a given that we took the same approach when it comes to the Eden series.

However, the next will require some detailed explanation but if we are to compare Eden’s Gate Savage with The Bend of Time: Omega Alphascape Savage, it is certain that Eden’s Gate being designed to be easier to clear was a deliberate choice.

The reason is due to how we saw a huge increase of new players joining during the release of the new expansion (Shadowbringers), so even if it’s high difficulty content, we need to ensure the content is easily approachable and that was the direction we took for this tier. We do however plan to gradually increase the difficulty coming Patch 5.2 and Patch 5.4, when the tier progresses further.

As you can see clearly, the 4th floor seen on the Bend of Time: Omega Savage has the battle split into 2 parts, and that was the style we took back then. For this, we’ve made the latter half of the Savage-only battle an extra element, and this was done with the intention of providing players some form of surprise. However, making it a staple element will diminish the surprise factor, don’t you think?

In addition to that, we also received feedback on how the total time required to battle the 4th floor was really long, so we wanted to stop using this format for Eden’s Gate for the time being. Even so, we don’t promise that we’ll stop utilising the 2 part format forever so we’ll keep looking into feedback and adjust accordingly.

That’s right. We often talk about this.

Actually, when we tried Creator on a public world, we found that the balance we did for that tier was by far the most fun we had.

That’s right. When we worked on Creator, we discussed and found out that if we want to proceed in that direction, we’ll definitely have players who would ask for a much tougher fight. So we brought that discussion to Yoshida and in the end that was how the Ultimate series was born.

I was involved in the creation and reenactment of the summon animation for Eden, the Guardian Force that first appeared in FFVIII, into FFXIV. Given that the boss was set to appear in the first high difficulty raid tier for Shadowbringers, as well as the first boss you’ll encounter, I thought it’d be nice to create something that’s impactful.

As for the rest, since this is the 1st floor, I made sure to create a difficulty that is challenging that befits the raid and at the same time, made it mild so that it’s not overly difficult.

The Eden you see in this game is full of mysteries so I wasn’t actually clear on what was the lore behind the boss when I learnt that I’ll be the one assigned to work on this. Therefore, I created Eden’s skills with the impression that it feels natural without being out of place, yet not overly restricted by its lore setting.

We did indeed manage it without much cost involved.

It seemed as if we had to squeeze everything else to the limit in order to create that.

Since the designers worked hard on this one, you would think it cost a lot to create the animation, but it actually wasn’t the case. Considering the knowledge and experience we’ve had up till now, we ended up allocating our cost properly for the other parts of the battle as well.

Considering it’s the identity of Eden Prime, I definitely can’t bring myself to remove it. If it were the third and 4th floor, I’d be willing to trim it off considering the frequency of wipes that would come with the progression, but this is the 1st floor you see.

For the 1st floor, I planned to have the difficulty tuned to the level where players who love raiding can complete the challenge once in 2 to 3 weeks. So the feeling is something like “Just you see, I’ll make it once per week or something…”. (laughs)

The 1st floor is meant to be cleared in a short time, so when you play the 1st floor again after the raid was opened to the public for 2 or 3 weeks, I think you’ll find it surprising at how little you remember.

You may not have wiped a lot to it, and conversely, there are times where you don’t really remember the mechanics. So when that happens, you would usually go “Eh, what’s the effect of this action again?” if the action names ended up the same as the others. (laughs)

I think you’ll understand once you pay attention to this, but there are cases where you would unexpectedly forget about things here, so I felt that there is a need to create a mechanic that takes advantage of that gap in your mind.

It is slightly related, but more than that it’s the presentation more than anything.

When it comes to gravity related magic in FF series, it’s about how it does HP percent damage, and that’s the standard. We have previous examples seen in FFXIV as well, where we see Exdeath using Black Hole on the 4th floor of Omega: Deltascape. That too is actually HP percent damage due to the gravity effect it emitted.

In the same way, Eden’s Gravity and Dimensional Shift were made as HP percent damage. So the reason behind those moves having high damage is to ensure players at the 1st floor will not let their guard down and ensure they take this point in mind. (laughs)

When I was playing the 1st floor after the stage was opened to the public, the cast times made me think “Ah, looks like I’m gonna die if this goes on…”, and that gave me a realisation. Even an emergency Addle won’t help things. (laughs)

For the Battle System team, their aim was to make the healers aware about it. Since healer potency in Shadowbringers has been kept under control overall, we intentionally made the fractional damage to be really high in potency, and that was what we aimed for.

There are many cases where I started writing and summarised the concept in just one or two lines when I wrote the plan. From there, “A mysterious girl who is well versed in sword and magic. She controls the power of Darkness freely.” was what I wrote when I looked back at the proposal for the 2nd floor.

Nope, I think it’s fine. (laughs)

It’s just a concept full of imagination.

Everyone laughs

It feels as if it’s somewhat complicated though. (laughs)

Basically, I don’t usually take charge of content, but considering we faced some schedule risks when working on the 2nd floor, I took charge of working on this floor.

Even so, I only had about a week to work on the plan, so I decided on this concept since the start and had the Lore Setting and Scenario team to work on the priestess setting, and from there we imagined that the battle would be something like that, which we managed to flesh out the details and shaped the battle to what we see today.

Yes, that’s right.

The specifics itself were created based on what’s already there, the presentation however was new. Since the Priestess of Darkness is the key character for this scenario and beyond, the skills she uses, in other words the content of the mechanics, were intended to be made unique here, so the result was the Delayed Spell.

I have the impression that it was made according to how I wanted it exactly.

Actually, when I started working on the planning for 2nd floor, the plan for 3rd floor and 4th floor were not done at that time, so there was a need to think of mechanics where the difficulty can be easily adjusted when needed.

The specifics of the Delayed Spell mechanic was made to be easily ramped up or toned down in difficulty. That was the objective we aimed for with this mechanic. We did not insert any random elements for the 2nd floor this time, but I do think if this was made the third or 4th floor we would have made the timeline completely randomised.

Since the concept behind this boss is about a mysterious girl who is well versed in both sword skills and magic, it connects to the void setting where she would use her sword to slice open a dimension, and the void demons would appear from the dimension that was sliced open.

This setting was already decided upon since the beginning. Basically, she uses sword techniques, and she utilises that basic sword technique at a continuous, rapid rate, which flares up the last part of the battle. This resulted in the Cycle mechanics that you see today.

I still get nervous when playing that battle in the public world. (laughs)

Initially, touching those devils would inflict 100 thousand damage to your character… (laughs)

Furthermore, the devils wouldn’t disappear after reaching the center of the arena, but would instead continue moving forward to the edge of the area while intersecting each other.

The amount of devils shown on screen would have been more than what is available currently. You would even think that it’s a danmaku (tl note: bullet hell) shooting game instead. (laughs)

That’s right. (laughs)

While there are comments about how Cycle of Chaos was a much harder mechanic to resolve compared to Cycle of Retribution, I still had it pushed through.

It’s why you created a grace period before entering the Cycles phase to revive the players who were knocked down earlier so that everyone could try together.

Initially it was really difficult back then. (laughs)

Each phase was made to be especially quick in tempo, to the point there wasn’t any time for players to even resurrect. (laughs)

For the Omega raids, there were many instances where mechanics tend to repeat after a rotation, and players especially the foreign ones would send us feedback pointing out that they wanted new mechanics instead of repeating the same thing again, therefore the Cycle mechanics were created to answer that feedback we received.

The concept for Leviathan here was to “Create a dynamic battle that utilises the most of its massive physique”.

As a sub-concept, I also thought of “How it would inundate like a Leviathan would”.

Yes. it was especially difficult to create a difference between Leviathan from the Source and the one on the First. Furthermore it was necessary to bring out the same impact as the one seen on the Source, so I struggled a lot with it.

After several twists and turns, we ended up with the current form seen today, but the point is that there are some mechanisms that bear similarities to the Leviathan from the Source.

For example, the aspect where Leviathan would disappear from the player’s sight and charge in from the outer field. The “Tidal Wave” is also created based on the Leviathan’s intermission move seen in the Source, and we’ve incorporated and applied them in a way it causes various water phenomena to the player.

By the way, there was also a story where we attempted to have Leviathan’s water area of effect attack fall from above the player’s head at the same time as Leviathan performed its charge attack, just like how Leviathan from the Source would do but we were told “I don’t think this can be resolved”, so we stopped using the idea. (laughs)

That would be Yokozawa. (tl note: Aka Mr Atma who designed UWU and much more)

I know this sounds like Yokozawa is taking the blame for this, but everyone was saying it. (laughs)

That it was too difficult.

That one didn’t just inflict Heavy but also DoT (Damage Over Time) as well, so that phase was initially really dangerous.

When we worked on the direction, I suggested that we would want to insert elements that differentiate the Leviathan seen on the First and the Leviathan that exists on the Source, and we summarise our discussion as having Leviathan designed with two heads, and from there we proceeded to let Nabeshima work on the battle.

That’s right. There were times where the artists worked on the gimmick we wanted to incorporate.

For example, if you look closely at Leviathan’s body, you can see its eyes shine yellow, and it was supposed to shoot lasers initially. The idea was ultimately scrapped, the yellow eyes, however, remained.

Actually, the idea was thought up during the final phase of the planning.

At first I was having trouble trying to characterize Leviathan, so I talked to people around me hoping to get some ideas.

From there, one of them gave me a hint: “How about breaking the field with one big bite from the mouth as if it’s trying to gouge it out?”, and from there I proceeded to combine that hint with the mechanic I had originally thought of, and it ended up a seemingly good match.

I thought this would create a fresh picture here so I ended up incorporating it.

Thinking from a situational context, I thought it would be interesting to have the players on one side of the field get overwhelmed when the both extreme sides of the field remain.

I don’t think there has ever been a situation where the field changes like that in the game before, so I thought maybe this content would be fun just by the picture itself.

I do think it came together quite well.

Actually, the indicators weren’t meant to appear at first, but during the balance phase, there was a comment on “Where should the players go then”, and from there I made it so that the indicators will appear for only a short while.

There is a thing on the field we call “Sincerity Lines”, where you can base your safe spot base on the floor patterns, since the arena on the 3rd floor consists of several blocks forming a huge field, there were times where it was hard to place the markers.

There we go! Stormy Horizon! It was a funny story for sure…

Everyone laughs

Like how the Warrior of Light had his own memories about the Leviathan on the Source, I too have my own memories about it.

I’m going slightly off topic here but when I was assigned to work on Alphascape’s 3rd floor, I thought up of a mechanic called “Pantokrator’’. Suddenly I realized that the Leviathan seen on the First ended up imbued with that memory…….

In fact, the initial Stormy Horizon was really a little similar to Pantokrator. (laughs)

It wasn’t just “a little” anymore but almost a twin of Pantokrator itself. (laughs)

That’s right.

From there I had everyone attempt it…

Everyone was commenting “This is Pantokrator 2, you know”, and in unison! (laughs)

Yes, yes. (laughs)

Furthermore, this phase actually appeared twice throughout the battle initially.

When Yoshida saw that he too thought, and told me “This isn’t Stormy Horizon, this is just Pantokrator”… (laughs)

Initially, Stormy Horizon would have 2 phases and it would be split into phase 1 and phase 2 of that mechanic, we ended up combining them into one, and this resulted in the Stormy Horizon phase that you see today.

Even “Black Smokers” was actually part of Stormy Horizon mechanic but we ended up separating Black Smokers away from Stormy Horizon and made it separate so that it looked less identical to Pantokrator.

The adjustment team for 3rd floor initially worked on how to throw the Pantokrator impression away and this actually took quite an amount of time.

As a result, Stormy Horizon was made that it only appeared once throughout, and there the Black Smokers phase was born.

Personally, it’s a shameful story that I want to bring it to the grave with me… (laughs bitterly)

The concept for “Tsunami” was to use various water mechanics to have the players be like seaweed. In the beginning, the shapes and combinations were different from what they are now.

No, since there was a loophole in the solution, so I had to remake it, to be exact. (laughs)

I’m going to expose this here… When it comes to Tsunami, I remember very well during our test play where Nabeshima couldn’t say the name of the debuff at all. (laughs)

Yes, yes.

Even if I had a cue card with me.

Nabeshima is that character everybody loves. (laughs)

I planned on this battle based on the simple concept of “A being that is well versed in controlling the aspects of the great Earth”. Also, he is a boss that has the overall impression of being powerful, so I tried to avoid mechanics that would make him look too clever.

Although not an official setting, I personally think of the Titan character seen in the First as someone lives by surrounding his body with rocks that he can manipulate freely in order to fight at any place he wants.

When having a rematch with the Titan of the First, I thought it would be a really bad idea to have similar play experience with fighting Titan of the Source, so I was very conscious of preventing that from happening.

However, since the battle was reenacted from the memories of the Warriors of Light, it wouldn’t be Titan at all if I end up creating something completely different, so I tried to balance it by inserting elements that would bring out the essence of Titan from the Source.

We polished them so that the elements that are old and new can both coexist without issues.

The design concept was already decided upon making orders on the characters. However, what was ordered up to that point was “the armor made of rock surrounding his body will crumble into pieces and attach onto his hands and feet”, but his ability to transform into a car wasn’t actually decided at that stage yet.

From there the art team thought of what other forms he could take, and presented several ideas to us. One of the ideas among the lot was the mentioned car form. Ultimately the decision on which idea to pick was given to the Planner side, and their decision was to pick the car form. That was the flow of what happened.

Even so, the one who decided ultimately wasn’t actually me, but Nakagawa (Masaki). He was really laughing over it while telling me “Because I’ve decided that his alternate form should be a car!” (laughs)

There really were lots and lots of ideas back then, within it was the idea that says “How about a Titank?”. (laughs)

I knew that it wasn’t a joke, but I really held my head over the actual fact that it’s a car. Like, “What should I do with this!”. (laughs)

As a result it really delivered an impactful outlook and a surprise factor, so the decision was a correct one.

When I was test playing with the Monster team at first, I laughed so hard at the sight of seeing the boss transform into a Titank. To have the situation flared up so high and how it was amazingly done was thanks to the artist who worked on it, so I’d like to thank them for their effort as well.

I actually had a lot of issues working on that.

Even so, the reason why we incorporate the height difference is to create a scene where Titan can showcase himself. I thought by doing so would allow me to convey and display his power to reshape the geographical structure of the arena.

I am really happy to hear that impression from you and how you felt that way. I combined various mechanics into this in order to show that it’s the main highlight of the battle.

In any boss content of FFXIV, battles that have height differences tend to end up causing various issues. Therefore, mechanics that utilise height differences are basically not allowed, even though we sometimes have exceptions.

To tell the truth, undertaking the challenge of designing the content for such a tough content like the 4th floor of the Savage content this time was actually not a wise choice considering the risks involved here. Adding to that, there’s also the fear of creating mechanics that don’t fit the image of how a mechanic that appears in the 4th floor of Savage should be, so it was a hard time for me to decide whether to actually implement this.

However, that mechanic was actually supported by our boss, which is Nakagawa here, and the level designers and programmers who listened to our ideas also willingly built a backup system for us, so I was able to make a swift decision here. While several problems occurred during the implementation, we were helped by many people including the new system specifications. Without their efforts, there is no way this would have been possible, so I am truly grateful.

My basic approach to this plan is to start by inventing mechanics for each part.

In the case of Titan, the blue marker that triggers explosions on the surrounding squares and the attacks coming from other markers were conceived at completely different times.

There is also a mechanic where the floor explodes in a clockwise direction seen in the final phase, but that was also conceived as a stand-alone mechanic. After all ideas were laid out, I then tasked myself to combine all of them.

That’s correct.

From there I managed to find out what’s missing and what was the extra that remained when I combined each element. In this way, my planning process is to repeatedly think, combine, and rethink. Therefore I don’t spend that much time on the parts that look logical.

Now, if you’re asking whether the planning has to be done early in order for that to happen but it’s unfortunately not the case as it took me about 30 days in total to put together the plans for both Normal mode and Savage mode for this Titan battle. A lot of that time was spent coming up with the material that can work. It’s always a challenge whenever I have to come up with ideas.

It differs from person to person, of course.

For my case, I started formulating my plan from Normal mode first.

Of course the reason is due to how it’s important to assure the fun aspect of the content, so starting from Normal makes it easier for me to form an overall image.

Of course there are people who would plan from there, so it really depends from person to person.

I usually start thinking from Normal mode here but depending on how the material goes I sometimes do start from Savage as well.

In fact, I started the previous half of Alphascape 4th floor through Savage first.

I started from the Savage version myself, but I also worked on the Normal version at the same time as well.

While I did mention that creating a Normal version of the raid can be done by removing elements from the Savage raid, doing so will make the battle itself feel lacking. On the other hand, making the Normal version overly packed would make the Savage version feel as if it lacks differences.

In order to avoid that, I would work on both the Normal and Savage version of the raid. Although I started from Savage when writing my proposal, I actually thought about both Normal and Savage at the same time.

I initially thought of starting from Savage mode as well, but ultimately I started working from the normal mode during the Eden series. Once I thought of mechanics that can be fit into Savage while working on the normal mode, I would memo it down…

As mentioned by Daisuke, where I manage to change my thinking method which I’ve learned to think about the elements for Savage while ensuring the normal difficulty stays interesting.

I started from the Normal difficulty as well.

The reason behind it was discussed with the other staff members as well but even if we managed to create mechanics that are interesting for Savage, it’ll pose a risk where we’ll end up removing the core of that fun elements if we are to work on the plan where we remove Savage elements to create Normal version of the raid.

When that happens, by creating the plan starting from normal difficulty, maybe we’ll end up with lesser risks to take when we begin adding elements to form Savage mode. This is something we talked about amongst our team.

Actually, the reason behind me beginning to think from Normal mode onwards is after evaluating it thanks to Nakagawa’s opinion.

I was thinking, “Well he does have a point”, which is why I’ve been adopting that approach recently.

No, it’s been propagated now!

Speaking from the 1st floor of this tier, since the re-enactment of Eden’s Ultimate attack shares the same across both Normal and Savage mode, I didn’t have to think too much about the differences when it comes to the difficulty. That was the biggest difference when compared to the other floors here.

The mindset itself is the same as any Primal battles here.

Never forget to always have the feeling of delivering something new, and never let players get bored from challenging new content as they progress. This is what I hold to heart when creating content.

Certainly commendable on that one…

For Eden’s Gate, I ended up having my memories included in there. (laughs)

As to what kind of memories will be included for the next raid boss, this is something I’d want all players to look forward to.

I’m sure I’ve thought up many mechanics that have provided surprise to our players here but stay tuned to more mechanics that would keep delivering the surprise factor on later patches as well!

Prior to this interview, the ones who would usually appear in the media would be Sudo, Yokozawa, and lastly myself. So there wasn’t much chance to see members from the Battle Content team involved in conversations like this.

In many ways, I am glad that this interview provided a chance for our other 3 members here to share their thoughts. Aside from them, there are many other battle content team members who are working on various content here. With the growth seen in those members, we can expect them to provide new content for everyone to look forward to.

We’re working hard to ensure players will be able to enjoy the content we provide after Patch 5.2 as well, so we hope to hear your support for them. And then, we’d definitely appreciate feedback from the players after playing through the content.

We definitely will read the comments and thoughts left by our players in the forums or social media so we will definitely take those feedback into consideration no matter how positive or negative they are.

For the FFXIV team, tackling the feedback with haste is our priority here, so we welcome players to keep giving us feedback and it’d be nice if players would keep looking forward to what we have to release in the future.