Final Fantasy XI: Developer Roundtable Q&A, Part Two
MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh presents this first part of a developer roundtable interview that she conducted while attending the recent Fan Festival. Today, we present Part Two, she tackles Job Specific Questions and Items, Spells and the like.
This Developer Roundtable Q&A report combines a group session as well as exchanges I had with members of the media from other groups and a public Q&A session. Developers in attendance:
- Final Fantasy Team – Producer
- Kouichi Ogawa – Director
- Akihiko Matsui – Battle Director
- Yoji Fujito – Planner
- Mizuki Ito – Planner
- Mitsutoshi Gondai – Planner
- Sage Sundi – Global Onine Producer (Community)
Items, Spells, Abilities, Effects Questions
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MMORPG.com: |
Were Mythic weapons made to rival Relic weapons? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
The weapons were designed differently and for different purposes. The Mythic weapons are focused where as the Relic weapons were design for the big damage. |
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MMORPG.com: |
What does the physical potency merit do for a Blue Mage? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
The same it does for all. It increases the accuracy of physical magic attacks. |
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MMORPG.com: |
What is “critical magic” on the Witch sash? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
Magic crits. Your magic hits harder. No, there isn’t a message, just once in a while, you see your magic do more damage. At this time, it is the only item in game with this effect, but it will go on more items soon. |
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Job Specific Questions
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MMORPG.com: |
Are you pleased with where the Dancer and Scholar jobs are at this point in time? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
The Dance and Scholar were originally planned to be valuable sub-jobs. We are very pleased to see that they are going according to plan, but now, with merit abilities and relic armor being introduced, we hope that they will also become viable main jobs. |
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MMORPG.com: |
What are you doing about balance among the various jobs? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
There’s actually a lot of job adjustments in the works and will begin to be introduced beginning in the spring. In particular, we are looking at Red and White Mage adjustments. |
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MMORPG.com: |
Are there any jobs that the team sees that FFXI still needs? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
We will add jobs if opportunity allows it. We started with the base six then started to add flavors. There’s a lot of care that has to be taken. We have to make sure that there is no overlap or minimal overlap in jobs, and make sure that one job won’t make another obsolete. Then once we do add the new jobs, we will make adjustments as we watch the trends and how players play them. If we find that players are not playing a particular job, we look at it to see if it is underpowered somewhere and make adjustments. |
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MMORPG.com: |
Are there any plans to expand Merits or allow for the re-application of them? |
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Final Fantasy Team: |
The game accommodates a lot of versatility players can change their character’s jobs, but Merit points provides the variation between characters as it provides the specialization within a job. So there will be no consideration of re-application of Merit points. However, caps will be looked at and raised if necessary. |
