After more than a decade since its release, Final Fantasy XIV keeps players coming back with regularly released expansions and updates. With the latest expansion, Dawntrail, the ongoing epic sends players across the sea to a new continent inspired by Latin America.
Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Final Fantasy XIV’s Lead UI Designer, Kei Odagiri. We learned a lot about his future goals for the game, the UI feature of his dreams, and how UI changes and adapts over the course of a decade.
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BUT WHY THO: Final Fantasy XIV is known for having great accessibility UI features, such as a heavily customizable UI, and full gamepad support. Players on multiple platforms can even transfer their settings from one platform to another, like from one PC to another or even to console versions of the game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to transfer your settings from an existing character to a new one; are there any plans to implement this feature?
KEI ODAGIRI: We’re aware of the issue, and we’re actually in the middle of experimenting with a system that could potentially alleviate those issues. We’re hoping to share more information in the near future. There is a workaround on PC where you can copy your local settings information and transfer it over, but with the console the player side is unable to overwrite the local files and things like that. We are trying to consider what would be a good feature to address that, and we’re trying to see- because in order to achieve the solution that we want, we’d probably have to create a system that would allow for that sort of overwriting. We are experimenting, and we’re hopeful that we can find some kind of way to address it, hopefully in the near future.
BUT WHY THO: UI Design is an iterative and ongoing process. What is your next big project or goal you’d like to achieve in Final Fantasy XIV?
KEI ODAGIRI: It’s kind of a long-term goal of sorts, so we don’t know when it will actually come into effect, but we realize that onboarding players with handling the amount of UIs that are available for the game is a little tricky. We kind of throw the players into the game and expect them to be able to manage their HUDS and their UI elements. We’re hoping that perhaps we can make it more intuitive, if not allow for more tutorial type of settings to allow for players to understand the different UI elements that are available to them so that we can support them in trying to figure out the best configuration for themselves. So that’s the current exploration that we’re doing in terms of UI systems.
BUT WHY THO: If you could implement any feature you wanted without any limit, what would it be?
KEI ODAGIRI: We’re trying to figure out, you mentioned “without any sort of limit”. So do we want to focus on UI elements or are we talking like ‘pie in the sky’ like, say ‘I want it to be playable in VR’
BUT WHY THO: Haha, a focus on UI.
KEI ODAGIRI: If we want to narrow it down to UI-related things – and apologies, this is not necessarily a new function – but because we have so many functions available right now, we would love to have some kind of intuitive system where players could say – and this kind of relates to what we were saying about the tutorial – like “I want to do this” and a UI Wizard will suggest “Okay let’s use this configuration” or something like that to make it more accessible for players to utilize the UI to its full capacity and make it easier to understand for those who may not have a good handle on the different elements that are available.
Kind of like an Alexa or Siri, we’d have a knowledge base or a manual that’s set, and players could intuitively ask the game and it would recommend to you the proper function that would help alleviate their pain points.
BUT WHY THO: What UI feature do you wish more players were aware of, that already exists?
KEI ODAGIRI: Yes, haha. We understand there’s a lot of UI elements that go unnoticed so we work with The Lodestone web team to create a UI guide outside of the game but of course we would love to let players know in-game also. Some specific examples include the movement mode, you can change between legacy mode [and standard mode].
And in addition to that, the camera settings that are associated with switching to Legacy Mode have also been expanded over the years, including having your camera stationed away from the character. Or, say, if your character had changed directions, the camera would kind of follow you. Some of those functions have been added afterwards but I’m afraid we didn’t announce it enough in-game so players might not be familiar with those things. So I think that’s one of the things that we want to bring to players’ attention. We would love for players to look into character configuration to see what you can tweak in terms of some of these subtle details.
Some additional examples would be the character nameplate. You can set the color coding so it’s easier to see the different roles the party members are in. We even added the feature of having a job icon available in front of the player’s name. So those are some of the little details that are in there.
BUT WHY THO: With the recent graphics overhaul, has there been any discussion about undertaking a similar update for UI?
KEI ODAGIRI: Unfortunately, we don’t have any large-scale plans for UI updates at this time, like what you’ve seen with the graphical updates for 7.0. That said, there had been a relatively large update in terms of UI textures as of 5.5. We kind of up-ressed some of the UI textures when we released the PS5 version so we’ve already undergone one major update, so I don’t think we have much planned in terms of accommodating for that updated high resolution in the graphical updates. As we mentioned it’s a very iterative process so with every patch there’s always something to update and we receive a lot of feedback and we try to listen to those, so we’ve been pushing hard every time.
BUT WHY THO: After 10 years, Final Fantasy XIV has changed substantially, eventually dropping support for the PlayStation 3 client. Do you feel like your work on UI Design is held back at all by continuing support on PlayStation 4?
KEI ODAGIRI: There’s always going to be limitations, and you’re right when we mention consoles and especially like the PlayStation 4. It might be considered lower on the spectrum, but at the same time we have our PC players, and they might be using an older machine. There’s always a matter of accommodating for the lower-spec machines, so I don’t think there’s a limitation just because it’s on a console. If we didn’t have to think about lower-spec machines, yeah, it would be amazing to do some kind of super texture update, but I think we are used to working in that sort of “Okay, what can we do and what can we accommodate in the scope of what’s available” so I think that’s where we want to focus on. There’s no real thinking about “Because it’s on a console, we have limitations.”
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is available now.
