In releases following the announcement of FFXIV Mobile, Naoki Yoshida and the Lightspeed Studios teams provided better overviews of what to expect in the tiny-computer MMORPG. Lightspeed Studio’s FFXIV Mobile team put out a letter to Final Fantasy 14 fans, on top of an interview with Naoki Yoshida that outlines the differences more clearly.
Lightspeed Studio calls its core founding members “die-hard FFXIV fans” who traveled to Japan personally to hand lead producer and director Naoki Yoshida a 100-page proposal. According to the letter, Yoshida sat with the team and even started outlining ideas on a blackboard. Apparently, these impassioned collaborative efforts changed Yoshida’s mind about whether a mobile FFXIV could be made.
Despite promises from both the team and Yoshida about being able to casually tackle the game, the game “won’t be your typical fast-paced, bite-sized mobile experience,” with the team promising a more fully fleshed-out world that players can take at their own pace. He later explains that the target audience is not just FFXIV players, but also those who don’t want to commit to a PC or console to tackle the massively popular game.
Combat will be present, as it’s core to the FFXIV experience, and Yoshida says that each job and individual duty has been adjusted with the mobile experience in mind. There’ll also be the bulk of casual content as well, including fishing, Triple Triad and chocobo racing, per the first announcement.
As for the story, Mobile will start with A Realm Reborn, but as Yoshida talks about future content updates, flashes of the renowned Shadowbringers expansion are shown, unsubtly hinting that the team hopes to put expansions on mobile devices.
Plus, monetization was called into question as well, though Yoshida says that the goal won’t be to push gacha systems onto players. Still, the way it’s phrased, this doesn’t entirely exclude the possibility—he more likely references the way gacha has become an integrated part of mobile games’ gameplay systems, especially “banner” systems like “weapons” in Genshin Impact and “operators” in Arknights. Mobile gamers are still largely gambling addicts, if Pokemon Pocket proves anything.
All that said, both parties have stressed that while Square Enix (and Creative Business Unit 3) have a heavy helping hand in the process, the Lightspeed Studios team and CBU3 are separate units with separate development speeds and capacities.
There’s no timeline at the moment for tests and releases, but we do know for the moment that FFXIV Mobile testing will start in China before the game sees a global release.
The team behind this version, Lightspeed Studios, is a Tencent-owned group most notably responsible for PUBG Mobile, with a spin-off studio in LA developing Last Sentinel, a AAA open-world MMORPG.
