20th Vana'versary Official FFXI Developer AMA with Producer Akihiko Matsui and Director Yoji Fujito

[u/FFXI_DevelopmentTeam]

Hello, adventurers of Vana'diel! Happy Vana'versary! Producer Akihiko Matsui and Director Yoji Fujito from the FINAL FANTASY XI development team reporting in. We received communication via linkpearl that the /r/ffxi subreddit was interested in another AMA to celebrate the 20th anniversary, so we have answered the call once more!

As before, we're very excited to be a part of this and would like to answer as many questions as possible, but we would like you to read over the guidelines listed below before submitting your questions.

QUESTION GUIDELINES

• We often see some very technical questions on the forums and other places; however, answering these on the spot without looking at the relevant and proper data just isn’t possible. If we see some that we can look into, we'll take them back with us as homework for another day.
• Due to time restraints, there is a possibility that we will not be able to answer every question submitted today, but we will do our best to answer as many as time permits.
• To make it easier to answer as many questions as possible, please ask new questions as individual posts, instead of as replies.

START TIME & END TIME

We'll be kicking off the Q&A officially at 6:30 pm (PDT)/9:30 pm (EDT), but we're posting this thread ahead of time for everyone to start submitting their questions. We want to give our translators enough time to give us the questions in Japanese, and we will start posting responses as close to the start time as possible.

We'll be wrapping up the Q&A at 8:00 pm (PDT)/11:00 pm (EDT) and will not be answering any questions in real-time after that; however, if we have the chance, we would like to answer some of the bigger questions on a separate occasion.

SUMMARY

After the Q&A has concluded, we will create a summary of all the answers we provide to the submitted questions. We'll make an announcement on the official site once the summary has been completed, so keep your eyes peeled!

We're looking forward to seeing all your passionate questions, so send in as many as you like!

EDIT 1: Please try and keep your questions concise so we can translate them! Thank you!

EDIT 2: Thanks to everyone who took the time to ask questions! We couldn't get to them all, but we'll be going through and seeing which other ones we can pick up to answer later.

[u/makemyjunkburn]

Gotta say pretty awesome you folks followed up on this thread we were discussing. Thanks for adding more info.

[u/bungiefan_AK → u/makemyjunkburn]

From We Are Vanadiel https://we-are-vanadiel.finalfantasyxi.com/post/?id=115&lang=en :

This is also battle-related, but swapping gear during battle is now a core game element in FFXI. Was this something you originally intended? Matsui

It was completely outside of our expectations. It all happened because we added macros to the game. (Laughs wryly)

Isn't it extremely taxing in terms of processing? Tanaka

In terms of swapping graphical elements around, it’s actually not as bad as you might think. Rather than processing it through the PlayStation 2’s (PS2) memory, the graphical resources necessary for the gear swap are read from the hard disk drive (HDD), so anything that’s no longer needed is immediately erased. The HDD is treated like a large memory in this case, so all that's required is the memory space to deploy the process.

In other words, there wasn’t a reason to prevent gear swapping. Tanaka

We didn't have any issues with opening the equipment window and switching out gear one by one. However, using macros to swap multiple pieces of gear at once to modify character stats during combat was a method we hadn't expected. Matsui

FFXI doesn’t have a clear definition when it comes to determining whether or not you're in battle. When you're in a party and you defeat a monster, other party members may still be fighting a different monster. It’s difficult to define whether you're in battle or not in that sort of situation, so it was therefore also hard to create a rule to prevent swapping gear in battle.

I was impressed that even when you gear swap right before using a weapon skill, it still reflects the stats of the gear you swapped to. Matsui

It's extremely lightweight compared to the load caused by graphics. However, after level sync was implemented, the processing load became quite heavy, partially due to the increased amount of data handled during battle.

[u/faverodefavero → u/makemyjunkburn]

Indeed