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

I joined the team back during June, 2018. It was right after Patch 4.3’s (Under the Moonlight) release.

Previously I worked as a planner for a certain smartphone app, but as time goes on I thought it would be time for me to delve into game creation and I’ve been wanting to create various games, at the same time being a long time ongoing player of FFXIV, so I thought I’d apply for the position as the member of FFXIV development team.

The rest was history and I got accepted into the team…

Sure he may say that, but he was really passionate during the interview. (laughs)

Everyone laughs

Initially I worked on The Forbidden Land of Eureka, specifically the Notorious Monsters on Pyros.

The most memorable one would have to be The Cinder Drift. Since that content was my first involvement in Trial related content, I thought I’d go all out by creating an image that I’ve never thought possible before, like including the scene where the Dalamud falls and so on.

He’s the type of person who is capable of handling anything skillfully. As the conversation about Eureka was mentioned earlier, Hata was also involved in Hydatos as well, and he was in charge of creating Art & Owain, the first boss players face in “Baldesion Arsenal”.

Art & Owain is a special boss that requires players to split into two groups and defeat both at the same time. During the development process, we had to write up some complicated specifications for it, but Hata proved to be more than capable in handling it.

Other than that, he was also in charge of the quest battle against Sapphire Weapon, a special quest where you fight while boarding a robot.

Even though he had no prior knowledge and had to deal with various issues, he was able to provide a highly polished and complete work. Because of this, I felt that Hata is a highly skilled game designer.

Since it’s a completely different field, it feels more like I had to learn everything from scratch.

Though I wouldn’t say the experience I gained from my previous job wasn’t useful…

That’s right.

While he indeed worked on various content, raid design is a completely new horizon for him.

I thought, “So it has finally come to this”.

Since I am a FFXIV player myself, I played almost every raid content that’s released in the game so far, but the excitement of having solved mechanics that came from the raid, as well as the satisfaction of successfully overcoming hardships that comes from raiding really left a lasting impression in my game experience.

So when it was confirmed that I’ll be the one to design raids, I questioned myself whether I could deliver the same impact I experienced myself as a player to other players here, and it made me a little uneasy at first. But, if I am to be in charge, I thought I might as well face it and work on the plan with the spirit of leaving a mark behind.

When the plan to work on the last 4 floors was still a blank slate, Kawamoto raised his hand and said, “I would like to work on the 4th floor.”. I’m a big fan of people who are passionate about their work, and seeing him volunteer made me really pleased.

Even so, Kawamoto only had experience working on the first floor of Eden’s Gate and he doesn’t have any experience working on the 2nd and 3rd floors, allowing him to work on the 4th floor might be a little bit too much for him to bear, so I had him work on the 3rd floor for Eden’s Promise.

In fact, considering the positive remarks left by the players after the 3rd floor became publicly available, I would say he really delivered and his passion is genuine.

I thought, since we’re here already, I’d like to try and challenge myself with content I’d never done before.

I also thought of wanting to volunteer myself early and take charge, so that I can work properly on a task rather than getting caught up last minute with an urgent schedule. (laughs)

Well that, too. That’s why I thought of volunteering myself early. (laughs)

The reason why I volunteered for the fourth floor is because, well, if I were to bring my hands up, I might as well go big. That’s what I thought.

I was glad actually. I actually thought I was going to work on either the first or second floor here, so it surprised me to learn that I’d be handling the 3rd floor.

As a project, I do think it’s important for junior members of the Monster Team to accumulate more experience and under such circumstances and context, I was surprised to know such a veteran like me would be given the task here.

Since Takahashi-san worked on the first floor during Eden’s Verse, while Yoshihashi-san worked on the 3rd floor, at that point it was already decided that they will work on Eden’s Promise as well.

I wanted them to utilise the experience they got from working on Eden’s Verse and put it to use on Eden’s Promise.

I’ve since received a lot of feedback for the raid battles as well as the quest battles I’ve worked up to that point.

So on Eden’s Promise 2nd floor, I utilised all of this as references for the second floor of Eden’s Promise, and eagerly moved forward with the project.

As mentioned in our previous interviews before, I think the the most interesting thing about FFXIV is the aspect of party members facing hardships together and experiencing the sense of accomplishment that comes with using their combined strength to overcome those challenges.

Since this is Shadowbringer’s final raid tier, we had to be very well aware of that fact when trying to express that aspect well.

Considering that I worked all the way from the planning stage of the raid battle for Eden’s Verse 3rd floor to its release, I was surprised by that decision and thought by working on the fourth floor it would allow me to accumulate further experience.

Since that floor concludes the entire Eden raid series, in addition to receiving such wonderful design from Tetsuya Nomura on the boss, Eden’s Promise during the planning stage really made me feel pressured, and that was what I remembered during that time.

As for the rest, since countermeasures against COVID-19 were implemented the moment the task is proceeding well under way, it made me feel uneasy when I work at home, or rather I worked on the task while thinking “Will I be fine…”, so I was anxious.

Since I have a lot of staff members in the Monster Team, starting from our leader Nakagawa, that I can discuss things with, whenever I start worrying on whether I can create interesting ideas I would make the use of the chat tools and voice out to initiate discussions with other members.

I know, right.

In the case of the Monster Team, we allocated 30 minutes of free talk for our remote meeting once every week. During that time, we refrain ourselves from talking about work and really just chat leisurely. The purpose of doing this for our meeting is to reduce our stress and foster creativity through conversations.

Oh, is that so!

Our team uses company-wide communication tools to chat with each other. Like we usually chat about when the game will be on sale, or “there is something like this on the news*, and many others.

The major reason our team doesn’t set up sessions like this may be due to how we don’t have many people in our team.

This time, we paid close attention to what the scenario team wanted to do with the tier, and thought of how to make it happen.

That’s right.

First of all we had the scenario to awaken the Darkness aspects of the land. When it comes to Darkness we thought of The Cloud of Darkness, so the decision to use her as the first boss was made, as for the decision to use Shadowkeeper, it was decided at the request from the Scenario team.

Initially, we had that fear of having difficulties trying to differentiate The Cloud of Darkness and Shadowkeeper since both of them share the same Darkness elemental in terms of its theme, so we advised them to give that idea a review before proceeding.

Of course that can happen. If we proceed with any lingering concerns, it becomes difficult to work on the battle and will result in major negative impact to the overall quality of the battle content.

Though this wasn’t actually the case, but to put it in extreme that seems to be the case. (laughs bitterly)

However, there was a strong request to let the Shadowkeeper appear on the 2nd floor, and so we had to work and think of how to differentiate the image of Darkness.

In the end, among all the ideas we presented, we thought if we can attach some specifications on the aspect of “Shadow” on the 2nd floor, we could create a change out of it.

Nope, this is the first time I’ve heard of this. (laughs)

But I know well that Nakagawa can adjust the battle according to what we think it’s easier for us to create, so we have full confidence and faith in his ability.

The 3rd floor too was created with the request from the Scenario Team, and the concept proposed to us was “the being that would most strongly come to mind for Ryne”. So we thought, it has to be Thancred, and we proposed it to the scenario team and no objections were raised on that.

Since we made the 4th floor of Eden’s Verse to revolve around Ryne as the theme, the sense of achievement gained from having that idea work well was important in that decision factor.

By the way, we created the 3rd floor boss, Fatebreaker, in a rather extravagant manner than normally when we place our orders to the art team, the person assigned for the job will take over and work on the designs, but since we were able to utilise larger costs for the art side, we had the team conduct competitions amongst themselves.

Artists who were available contributed around 10 to 15 different design ideas and patterns, and had their artwork laid across our meeting room, and had Yoshida and other leads to participate and exchange opinions on the designs.

That’s right.

There were a lot of designs made. Like Thancred riding a white horse, Thancred using Allagan weapons, or even Thancred who sports Griever (one of the bosses in FFVIII) features in design.

The artists had their fun, of course, and we found many inspirations among the designs given. So we are really happy with it.

Purely because it was cool, would be the biggest reason behind the choice. Also, there is that snake-looking familiar flying around that evoked an image of Ranjit, and having elements other than bosses like them made it easier to create mechanics and create battles around that concept.

Yoshida also commented that “Aside from Thancred, Ryne also understood well that Ranjit’s tough love for her is a form of kindness” and he commended the idea of integrating that aspect into the design of Thancred that merged with Ranjit.

Kawamoto also thought it would be easier for him to have both elements of the gunblade and the familiar to work with.

I am greatly thankful for your consideration here. Thank you. (laughs)

For the 4th floor, we’d already decided that Tetsuya Nomura-san would be the one to draw the boss artwork for the final floor of the Eden series even before the release of Shadowbringers. Yoshida was the one who made the request, and it was in a relatively early stage that we obtained the design for both Gaia and Eden’s Promise.

So the development team got to look at the character designs for the both of them, while the scenario and battle team worked on to build up and retrofit the details into both the scenario and the battle.

That’s right.

We had Eden Prime appear right at the beginning, and then the boss who is deeply related to Eden to appear at the final battle of the series. With that, we relayed to Yoshida that this is how we want it to be done.

However, the appearance of Oracle of Darkness who appeared during the latter half of the fourth floor wasn’t decided on that point.

To begin with, we weren’t fully decided on whether or not to split the battle into 2 parts during the development phase for 5.0.

As a result of various considerations through looking at all the player’s feedback for Eden’s Gate and Eden’s Verse, we’ve decided to utilise the 2-part battle structure for Eden’s Promise.

Among the feedback given for Eden’s Gate and Eden’s Verse, we heard people say, “I want to fight FFVIII’s Ultimecia!”.

The good thing about FFXIV is that we listen to our player’s voice even after everything is decided, and then make detailed adjustments from there.

Since we had voices asking for that, we proceeded to debate with Yoshida about whether it was possible to have Ultimecia as the boss for the 4th floor.

The conclusion we ended up with was that Gaia and Ryne, as well as Eden, are the characters of focus for the scenario in the Eden series. So having Ultimecia to suddenly appear as the boss may not necessarily provide any value in terms of presentation.

To release something that we didn’t agree with for the sake of fulfilling the player’s request definitely doesn’t mean it’ll turn out well, and doing so will end up being really disrespectful to the developers who created FFVIII.

That’s why we decided to utilise and make use of the original character aspect, and went with the Oracle of Darkness in the end.

The usage of the hammer itself was reflected in the scene where Gaia rescued Ryne from being trapped within the ice in Eden’s Verse 4th floor. But for the 4th floor of Eden’s Promise, we actually wanted the Oracle of Darkness to use a staff and not a hammer when the initial draft of Oracle of Darkness’ design was created.

However, since we found out from the estimates that the modeling for Oracle of Darkness will end up really cost intensive to begin with, the time frame required to create a staff weapon as well as new animations to accompany that would have been too tight for us to realise it.

Considering the initially released artwork had Gaia wield the hammer, and the hammer animation was already created for Eden’s Verse 4th floor, we thought we can just use that instead.

As we mentioned just now, we’ve created the 4th floor Savage as a 2-part battle out of clear direction of what we were trying to aim for, and had quite a debate with all the related members before settling with our decision.

In terms of the overall raid, since our overall direction is to have the difficulty gradually go up as players progress on the raid series, we made the adjustments with that in mind so that players will feel that Eden’s Promise will be the most challenging tier in that series.

As I mentioned this before in our previous interviews, we consider it important to not make the raid battles difficult right after releasing a new expansion, making the barrier to entry as low as it can be, as well as fostering the interest of raiding amongst the players. From there, players can experience the essence of “FFXIV battles” - By spending time progressing gradually in high difficulty content, players can achieve that sense of accomplishment after overcoming it.

Therefore we adjusted the difficulty level aiming to set it to its limit for Savage content. The lion mechanic players experience in the fourth floor of Savage is a stepping stone into what can be considered as the Ultimate difficulty…

With the large amount of feedback we obtained from Eden’s Gate and Eden’s Verse, as well as the expanded feature implemented on the target cycle and its sise, we did everything we could to make sure that each job could progress without issues, such as expanding the target circle sise to be bigger than before, and make it possible to attack from the edge of the safe zone when handling mechanics.

We also consulted members that are not in charge of the development of this raid and had them provide their opinions during play testing and balance adjustments, much more frequently than before, and we reflected their opinions into our content as much as the time allowed.

These efforts, I believe, have led to the result where many of our players enjoyed Eden’s Promise.