Final Fantasy XI Developers Talk Next MMO, WoW

Author: by Staff

As part of an in-depth Fanfest report debuting on Gamasutra today, the creators of the Final Fantasy XI series have been discussing both the development team's next MMO and whether the worldwide success of World Of Warcraft has affected their game. Speaking to Square Enix vice president and producer of Final Fantasy XI Hiromichi Tanaka, Sage Sundi, and other members of the Square Enix development team, in an interview conducted at the recent Anaheim event, Gamasutra asked if the team planned on a whole new Final Fantasy MMO, aside from the regular expansions. According to Tanaka: "As you might already know, members from the current FFXI team are working on a next generation MMO, but it still hasn't been decided whether that's going to be a game in the FF series, a continuation, or a totally new game. We are working on it, but it hasn't been decided that far yet." In addition, when asked whether games like World of Warcraft impinge on their market, or if they feel like it's a completely different player base, the team noted: "Actually, we haven't been affected that much by WoW. When FFXI hit its peak users was about the time that WoW was released, and when it was released we didn't see a big reduction in the players. It's pretty much been about the same." They added: "We feel that with a lot of MMORPGs on the market, players have the choice of the one they want to go to and they'll try them out and then they'll stick with one -- and we see that people who chose FFXI have stuck with it." You can now read the full feature, which contains the complete interview as well as an in-depth report from Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival 2007 (no reg. required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).