Yoshida: Final Fantasy XIV Online Team Working To 'Regain Trust'

Naoki Yoshida, newly-appointed director and producer of troubled MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV Online has said that the key for the new team is "regaining customer trust" through UI fixes, better tutorials and clear in-game terminology. Speaking with Japanese gaming site 4Gamer (translated by MMORPG.com), Yoshida explained how the newly restructured team is keen to win back the game's alienated user-base saying: "Square Enix, as a whole, will work vigorously, now more than ever, to deliver a satisfying experience for all our customers." To help achieve this, Yoshida has employed the talents of Tactics Ogre director Hiroshi Minagawa as a UI and Web Content artist, a designer "second to none" in his view, while key team members from Final Fantasy XII have been enlisted to aid work on the user interface, one of the weakest aspects to the current game in his view. In the interview Yoshida characterizes the game as being in disarray, a situation not helped by users' high expectations coming from rival MMOs such as World of Warcraft. "People want loads of content right off the bat, and third-party add-ons are a given now," he said. "It’s a tough situation for new games." Yoshida lists end-game content, the UI, tutorials, in-game terminology and interface lag as issues the team is currently addressing, saying the the delay of the PlayStation 3 version of the game was in order to allow the team to focus on one format at a time. Yoshida said that the lack of a PS3 release date for the game was in order to save him from making promises that the team cannot keep, before assuring readers that the one promise he can make is that "they will never give up on it."