WE DISCUSS VANA’DIEL
#10 Naoki Yoshida Part 3

This year is FFXI’s 20th anniversary and the ninth year since FFXIV relaunched. Is there anything you’d consider a necessity, requirement, or secret formula when it comes to long-term MMORPG operations?

It's extremely crucial for the developers to be intrinsically motivated in their work, like being able to measure their personal improvement, for example. An MMORPG isn’t something you can consider finished after developing up to a certain extent, and you must make a continual commitment to the people playing your game.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with Mr. Matsui. I don’t mean to be rude to our customers, but development on a game is doomed if the developers lose their motivation. On one hand, customers are absolutely right when they say, “But we’re still paying, you have to continue development!” and I believe it's an inevitable fact. But we're also only human, so if someone were to say, "I don't care if I'm getting paid, I don't want to work on the game anymore," then that'd be out of our hands.

The key is how you go about maintaining their motivation to prevent that from happening.

Ambitious developers tend to have a desire to compete with the rest of the world by creating state-of-the-art games with cutting-edge technology. However, when it comes to developing MMORPGs, upgrading the base systems and graphics engine is no easy feat. As professionals, sometimes we can't help but compare our day-to-day work with what’s feasible with the latest technology and feel that the grass is greener on the other side.

It sounds like a unique burden of developing MMORPGs that have been around for a while.

But that’s also why we need a motivator that surpasses those kinds of feelings. For example, it might be a substantial salary, a work environment that enables you to try new things, or noticeable improvements in your personal growth. Another one might be fostering an environment where you can receive positive feedback directly from players who enjoy your game.

At the end of the day, I believe the aspects of content quality affected by the developers’ motivation are conveyed to the people playing the game. As such, we're always conscious of nurturing a work environment where the team can tackle their work with a challenging spirit. The same goes for the FFXIV development team, I believe.

That's right. We keep our team invigorated by rotating roles within the development team or Creative Business Unit III’s other titles, such as assigning long-time level designers to content planning, for instance. Like any other form of entertainment, games come to an end when the providing party loses interest, so I believe it's very valuable that our division offers those kinds of initiatives.

Working on the same project for 20 years must require an enormous level of commitment.

Within the FFXI team, there are people who’ve put their career plan on hold until FFXI celebrates its 20th anniversary and finds a clear trajectory forward, which I truly admire. Given their careers as game developers, it’s a highly critical decision. Perhaps their choice is something I could keep to myself, but at the same time, I feel that it wouldn’t hurt for more people to know that there are members who’ve made that sort of commitment to work on FFXI.

As for how you interact with your player community, do you feel that it’s changed over the course of long-term operations?

Nowadays, there are systems in place which allow the development team to listen to player feedback and also convey their intentions. On the other hand, back in the early days of development, we still had the same mindset from when we were making conventional console games, which was to capitalize on the developers’ uniqueness and only think about the players who would find that sort of game interesting. In that sense, our mindset during the early days may have been unfit for creating MMORPGs.

It sounds like you really had to learn as you went during the early days.

This goes back to what I mentioned about motivation, but as a developer, the important idea is to make a game you’d personally enjoy, rather than just simply creating “what the customers want.” I don’t mean that we ignore the players’ opinions, but what we try to do is to reconcile those opinions with the development team's ideas. After all, if we didn't do that, then it wouldn’t really matter who’s making the game. However, FFXI players are very kind, and there are many who also believe both sides need to work together and liven things up. In that sense as well, I am very grateful to our customers, and thankful for their continual support.

Mr. Yoshida started the Letter from the Producer LIVE broadcasts with the relaunched FFXIV, which have made a significant difference in the distance between players and developers. In the same sort of way, when would you say the sense of distance between the players and developers changed in FFXI?

I’d say it happened at different timings for the overall development team and for me personally. From the team's point of view, I’d say the first fan event was when we and the customers became clearly aware of each other's presence. Becoming more aware of the humans on the other side of the screen was a turning point for us.

As for me personally, it was when I was harshly criticized by the players regarding job adjustments. While I always take their claims with a grain of salt, there’s no denying that their pointed remarks have some truth to them in terms of our shortcomings. Becoming aware of that and feeling I should be more proactive in listening to their opinions was a turning point for me.

That said, there wasn't really a moment of dramatic change; I think it’s more accurate to say that we gradually became more in tune with things during these past 20 years. Not to mention, my gratitude towards the people who've been playing the game for so long has only continued to grow.

Like a relationship of mutual trust that’s been built up over the years.

Nowadays, with the large number of long-term games, including mobile games, there’s kind of like a guideline for how companies should interact with their customers. But there wasn’t anything like that when we launched FFXI, so we kind of accumulated experience over a long period of time.

As for FFXIV, the Letter from the Producer LIVE broadcasts have been a thing ever since Mr. Yoshida first took over. Was there a particular level of closeness you had in mind when those began?

I’d always believed that there needed to be more communication between players and MMORPG development teams. As a long-time MMORPG player, that was my conclusion after noticing how many players saw the developers as their enemies. Because I was both a player and a game developer, I could see why developers made certain implementations and understood the difficult decisions they were forced to make, but their intentions weren’t reaching the player communities at large. Of course, there was no way these intentions would have ever reached the players because the developers weren't publicizing them.

Normally, you wouldn't really consider those sorts of things.

Back then, MMORPG operations teams were unaware of how important it was to explain the intentions behind their decisions. So at the receiving end of these decisions, players became increasingly frustrated from not understanding the reason behind them, and eventually would grow to think of the developers as their enemies. And since the developers are only human too, when they were confronted with such negative reactions, they grew angry thinking, “I only have the best intentions for the game! What did I do to deserve this treatment?”

It's a vicious cycle, isn't it?

Why do we end up with this friction when both sides want an enjoyable game? The reason is solely because the direction the developers have in mind for their game isn’t reaching the players. Not understanding the reasoning behind implementations is very frustrating, especially with game designs like FFXI’s, where players spend a lot of time leveling up. So, I thought that if I ever had a chance to lead an MMORPG, I would frequently communicate with the players and share our intentions or future plans for the game.

And that opportunity arose in FFXIV's A Realm Reborn.

Of course, I wasn't expecting to suddenly appear in a live broadcast. However, we felt that the major negativity surrounding FFXIV 1.0 called for no less than the person in charge to appear, and so we decided to respond with that approach.

Mr. Wada* also appeared on the first Letter from the Producer LIVE.

Under normal circumstances, rather than have me appear in the broadcast, I thought it’d be better to have someone who could talk about the overall project, like a lead development manager, and have them make the announcements. That would've been similar to what Dark Age of Camelot* (DAoC) did. Sanya, their PR manager, would gather questions from the players to bring up in interviews with the development team.

Ah, so there was a precedent.

It was a column called "Grab Bag," and even if there were times when we'd be thinking, "That's not what we wanted to know, Sanya!" it made me very happy. (laughs) Everyone would be making light-hearted remarks like, "Someone do something about that Sanya!" but we all looked forward to that column on Fridays. There weren’t many Japanese players who read it because it was only in English, but those of us like me, who kept up with information on the game, would explain to others, “They actually talked about that in Grab Bag. This is what they said.”

So that furthered the mutual understanding between both sides.

That's right. DAoC’s mid-service efforts to bring their team and players closer together left an impression on me, and I felt it could be even more fun if we did it on a larger scale.

But wasn’t it resource-intensive to prepare the materials for the presentation and set aside time for showing up in the broadcasts?

During the process of deciding what to implement into the game, we check with the development team to confirm what features and concepts we have. All of that information is compiled into a document, which the Community team has to go through and narrow down the topics we should publicize, and that’s an extremely taxing process. Compared to that, considering how we don't use a script for our Letter LIVE broadcasts, you might say it’s easier for those of us conducting the actual show. (laughs) On the other hand, I do feel that we spend more resources on following up on each category after a patch is released. In a way, you could say that we’re spending those resources preemptively.

I see.

Besides, explaining things beforehand gives the players something to be excited for while they wait, so I do think there’s more pros than cons.

I agree, a lot of the time it’s better to explain first before players develop their own misconceptions.

But having too much exposure is also an issue... Recently, there's been more cases where excerpts of our broadcasts and interviews have spread on social media. There's also been a considerable increase in our words being taken out of context for clickbait, so it's rough.

I’m always impressed by how carefully Mr. Yoshida speaks to avoid misunderstandings, and how he always includes the reasoning and background information. But I guess that’s all for naught if people are removing the context...

It's not like I'll reduce how much I communicate because of that. But I do make sure to speak up when there's something that made me unhappy, like when I talked about how criticism and abuse are different things.

The ability to spread information in the age of social media can sometimes be a double-edged sword.

I believe that’s precisely why communication is so important. However, I'd also like to follow that up with a warning for my fellow game developers. I don't think you should try to mimic a broadcast half-heartedly without a goal, unless you're going for something more like a variety show. Customers play games more than we do, so trying to run a broadcast based on superficial knowledge is bound to fail. We often get consulted by others in the industry, but our first question to them is, “Do you play games?”

Mr. Matsui’s Freshly Picked Vana’diel broadcasts have become quite a long-standing series as well, since they started about a year after Mr. Yoshida began his Letter from the Producer LIVE broadcasts.

I started Freshly Picked Vana’diel so I could relay what I wanted in a quicker manner. Going through with a professional-looking broadcast would require a lot of preparation and end up delaying my message from its intended timing. Instead, we embraced the cheapness and prioritized delivering information over broadcast quality. Now that we’re seeing the positive effects of the broadcasts, I can even have PowerPoint slides made. (laughs)

You’re broadcasting those in a studio nowadays, but you first started off in a conference room.

With FFXIV, we still try to avoid using the studio as much as we can. Our broadcasts often end up being long, so using the studio would mean we’d make the studio staff stay behind, and it makes me feel guilty when I must ask them for an extension. Thus, we don't use the studio outside of special circumstances.