ffxiv Live Letter LXVIII: Yoshida's Endwalker Q&A Recap

[Alhena 221]

In the recent Live Letter, Final Fantasy XIV Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida hosted an Endwalker Q&A with questions from players!

In addition to providing us with details about what’s in store for the future of Final Fantasy XIV, the recent Live Letter presented an Endwalker Q&A with questions from players! This post serves as a recap of some of the discussions, starting with questions about 6.0’s story and lore.

Note: There are major spoilers for Endwalker within this post. Please proceed with caution!

Fan Question: How did the unsundered Ascian Emet-Selch avoid being kicked into 14 pieces by Hydaelyn? [3:41:21]

Yoshida: If you think back to the text towards the end, Emet-Selch did imply that Venat let him live on purpose. In fact, she did leave a tiny flaw in her sundering attack—a crack that Emet-Selch could find a way to wiggle through. Yes, it was a very powerful attack, but she intentionally chose to do it in this fashion. [3:41:54]

Yoshida also mentioned that the attack was the limit of her power, meaning she couldn’t specifically fine-tune its use. She also couldn’t guarantee that Emet was live and was making a gamble in her abilities.

Yoshida: At the time Hydaelyn performed the sundering, Emet-Selch was with Lahabrea and the Elidibus that had come out of Zodiark, and he joined forces with them to escape into the rift without being sundered. [3:43:47]

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Fan Question: How much time has passed during the story spanning from 1.0 through Endwalker? I want to know how many years older the Warrior of Light is now. [3:47:37]

Yoshida: To be honest, that’s really hard, and I don’t have a particular figure in mind. When we’re making the trailers and coming up with the storyboards, we think about how the Warrior of Light has done these different adventures and how they would look now, imagining it with a time frame of two or two and a half years each time. However, the trailers aren’t really reflecting the length of the story itself, so I would appreciate it if you could think of them as separate things. [3:48:31]

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Fan Question: Will Zenos come back to life again? [3:55:10]

Yoshida: As we saw, his body currently remains in a dimension that is separate from our universe and all of its laws. We depicted his ultimate fate at length in a cutscene, so I think your answer is to watch that and see how you feel. We did show him stop breathing, and his heart stopped beating, right? [3:55:32]

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Fan Question: The ruins beneath the bounty treasure islands and fabled golden cities mentioned by Emet-Selch haunt my daydreams. Can we expect to loot them someday? [3:59:20]

Yoshida: Someday, you say? As you know, we’ve had a lot of different place names pop up in FFXIV during the past, and we’ve been able to go to a lot of those places. The gates of Ishgard opened. We went to Ala Mhigo, the Far East, and Old Sharlayan. We’ve tried really hard to make sure you could visit the places we’ve mentioned so far, and I want to keep doing that. [4:00:04]

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Fan Question: Now that Hydaelyn is gone, will the Warrior of Light no longer have the Blessing of Life? [4:18:02]

Yoshida: I really don’t think that the Blessing of Light will disappear, and I wouldn’t want it to disappear. Perhaps she re-granted the blessing at the very end, but either way, I want to think it will always protect the Warrior of Light. Just like she said, “My love be with you forever, my dearest children,” I think those words will be the blessing you carry forward. [4:18:35]

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Fan Question: In concluding this story, were there any threads you found difficult to wrap up or bits of lore that you secretly changed or disregarded? [4:23:26]

Yoshida: This is a question I had to ask the lore team about. The initial setting and background lore are only plans that we draw from, so it’s not unusual for details to change or disappear as we write the story further. That’s not only true of Endwalker. If you played 1.0, you’ll remember that there were a lot of changes between 1.0 and A Realm Reborn. Some of them we couldn’t really retcon properly. [4:23:57]

Yoshida explained that sometimes they must ignore small things while moving forward with the story, but the team tries their best to wrap up any loose ends they can.

After answering many questions about Endwalker’s lore, the team moved on to discuss the development process of the recent expansion.

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Fan Question: During the development process, what part of Endwalker were you a perfectionist about? [4:38:48]

Yoshida: This time, I would say in every cutscene, I was concerned in the direction the characters were looking. I was also interested in the time between dialogues and conversations, especially at the beginning of each character’s speech. Personally, I think the direction of the gaze and how your gaze works are really important. [4:39:39]

To Yoshida, it was important to naturally convey the feelings that each character felt while they spoke throughout the story.

Yoshida: Usually, we like to have XIV as a game you can play at whatever pace you want, but this time we had a lot of scenes that would go on to autoplay through the text. When a character talked in these scenes, I really wanted the other characters to take a little bit of time to process those words before responding because that’s important for all of you as well. [4:41:40]

Some other aspects Yoshida wanted to be perfect about in 6.0 included the expansion’s epic solo battle quests, Endwalker’s art direction, the Trust System's dialogue, and subquest unlock timings, particularly during the Final Days.

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Fan Question: Healers are currently putting out too much healing compared to damage taken and have few damage-dealing options and limited flexibility in battle. People are even clearing Pandaemonium with tank-only parties. Are there plans to make healers more vital to parties? [4:50:40]

Yoshida: I want to emphasize that we’ve done the same as we did in every previous expansion here. At the start of the expansion, we hold back on the difficulty of the raid in terms of damage taken and damage dealt. We make it a little bit easier so as many people as possible can clear. [4:51:44]

Because of this, Yoshida asks players to not compare the current raid’s difficulty to what was available in 5.4. The team wants to give players a chance to clear if they possibly can, and they plan on raising the challenge in parts two and three of the raid tier. For those wanting a better healing challenge, he encourages players to try the Ultimate encounters and suffer.

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Fan Question: Dark Knight’s Living Dead and Blood Weapon are more difficult to use compared to other tank skills. Are there plans to adjust this? [4:52:29]

Yoshida: Not just Dark Knight, but a bunch of jobs will be adjusted in Patch 6.1. We’re looking closely at all of your feedback and will fulfill as many of your requests as we can in 6.1. We are definitely adjusting Living Dead, so please wait and see how it goes. [4:53:59]

The team also plans on adjusting Machinist and White Mage, in addition to Dragoon’s jump timings.

Yoshida also noted seeing many requests about the game’s glamour system, stating changes must be addressed slowly in a systematic way. Players can expect the number to be increased in 6.1.

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Fan Question: Do you have any updates regarding female Hrothgar? [5:04:14]

Yoshida: We are working on a graphic update, but we have not forgotten about female Hrothgar. We had the art team draw a variety of styles for possible female Hrothgar designs. We’ve picked two of them, and we’re currently thinking about how those would look and what adjustments we would have to make in putting those into character creation. It’s going to be some time before we can actually implement them as a race, but we are working and making progress. [5:04:42]

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That’s all for our Endwalker Q&A recap! Did you find any of the discussions intriguing? Those looking for the Q&A in its entirety can find the beginning of it here.

If you’re interested in learning more about what was discussed in the Live Letter, you can find our post detailing the future of FFXIV here.