The game director also revealed Final Fantasy's next expansion, Evercold.
Of course, we know that Final Fantasy was an inspiration for WoW's player housing, so it's nice to see this innovation come back around, as the two games continue to complement and compete with one another. This is exactly the kind of symbiosis that helps drive development, in which designers can see what works, what doesn't, and come up with new ideas from an external community.
Sometimes inspiration is about recognizing what doesn't work, with WoW explicitly avoiding Final Fantasy's lottery system.
Certainly housing is not the only place where this kind of competitive innovation happens, though Final Fantasy has been well known as one of the leaders in player housing systems, thus resulting in a heavy inspiration for WoW's own. As we already know, many more features are still planned, with Patch 12.1 adding pets and blueprints, and has even teased the possibility of adding Final Fantasy-like player weddings in the future.
Gamer Escape
Do you have any plans to modernize the housing system in FFXIV going forward?
Naoki Yoshida: Oh, yes, I think this question has maybe been refined. It’s a little bit vague, a little bit more ambiguous. I get the feeling that you really want to ask is, well, World of Warcraft, has come up with this amazing housing system. How about FFXIV? Who gave this question? I think that must be what you really wanted to ask.
I’m sure for all of those journalists and creators out there who have been with us on this journey for a long time, back from the time of A Realm Reborn. I think you would know that we have an immense respect for the World of Warcraft team. So when we saw that the World of Warcraft team announced the expansion and this new housing system, and they said specifically that they looked to FFXIV and incorporated things which they wanted to surpass us on, I think that in itself is very much a sense of great honor for us to hear.
And, of course, I had some hands on with the WOW housing system myself, and I really do appreciate it. It’s amazing. We always like taking on new challenges, so this time around, when I tried WOW’s housing, I thought it really is amazing. And it’s been a good source of research. So I can’t say exactly when it will happen, but what I can say is that for the Patch 8.x series, we are planning two very big overhauls for housing.
