Over the weekend, during Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival in London, the MMO's director Naoki Yoshida said he'd like to make an MMO as chaotic as Ultima Online, but it would have to be outside of FFXIV.
During an interview at Fan Festival London, Yoshida was asked about MMOs he looked to for inspiration when building Final Fantasy XIV, which has arguably become the best MMO on the stage right now over the years. While Yoshi-P didn't specifically name influences, according to Rock Paper Shotgun, he did bring up one of the most influential MMOs around as something that would not work in FFXIV: Ultima Online.
After saying that each MMO had its own "focus of appeal," Yoshida goes on to explain that simply implementing that in Final Fantasy XIV just wouldn't work. Instead, his team would need to "tune it to 14" for it to work in his game. However, he brought up Ultima Online as an MMO whose appeal would not work with Final Fantasy XIV.
Touching on the "chaos" and "freedom" of the older MMO, Yoshida says that early days of Ultima "shocked" him.
Via Rock Paper Shotgun:
“If I was to answer about something that I think wouldn't work out if implemented in 14, I look back on the early days of Ultima Online. That was something [that] when I played, it kind of really shocked me. Back in the early stages of Ultima Online, there was a sense of chaos but also a sense of freedom.”
However, Yoshida does state that he would like to create an MMO with those elements, but that simply implementing them in Final Fantasy XIV would "break the community." Naoki Yoshida also seems to believe that PvP-focused, chaotic MMOs that evoke the feeling of Ultima and its contemporaries wouldn't work in today's market.
"I think if you create that kind of MMO now, it probably wouldn't sell."
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is the next expansion for the storied MMO, with the new expansion slated to release sometime in the Summer of 2024. Over the weekend, we learned about one of the two DPS job coming with FF14, the Viper, which is a melee DPS job that uses dual blades to deal damage. The second DPS job, which is still to be revealed, will be magic-based.
