Here’s a translation of the Eureka excerpt from the recent Dengeki Playstation magazine (vol. 659) interview. The interview was a discussion about game development, FFXIV, and Ni No Kuni 2 with Yoshida and Akihiro Hino (from Level-5), Eureka was just touched on in passing.
Talking a bit about FFXIV, the "Forbidden Land Eureka" was implemented which added a different flavor from before. It was a blend of traditional MMO elements with modern elements, can you give us an idea behind the implementation of this content?
Yoshida: I had hoped that it would go over well, but we are performing trial and error in FFXIV. It's like "laboratory" content. The Sea of Clouds Diadem exploration was part of that. Hino said earlier that you need "pretty butterfly" elements to keep going long term. We're making things at a very fast pace. Because of real life changes the percentage of players that will stay with the service for 10 years or more isn't very high. Keeping in mind that the player turnover is about a year and a half to three years, we need to continue changing enough to satisfy those who are getting started, otherwise it will become a barrier to new players and the current model will fade away.
As a MMORPG, there's always a sense that eventually it's going to end. So even if a project fails once, we need to keep challenging ourselves while maintaining the stability. This is true for both the players and our development team. If the nature of the game is "well, the number of people playing the game is falling so we're going to switch to microtransactions because the people who really enjoy it will stick around anyway," that will only accelerate the problem.
That said, some day you will get tired of it. If we're getting bored in development, we plan challenges like this one. The Forbidden Land Eureka is literally like a "forbidden land" for FFXIV. Like a newly started first generation MMORPG, it's all about hunting monsters and leveling up.
Hino: After hearing you say that, I'll have to check it out!
Yoshida: Things may happen there that we haven't seen since MMORPGs from a long time ago. Someone might be running along with a train of monsters and as a healer you might think you should help and heal them... then all the monsters are coming your way and your whole party is incapacitated and levels down. You might think "why would you bring that kind of craziness into this era?" But that's the reason we built it only into one piece of content. Since it's not affecting the whole game, it allows us to create challenges like this.
Hino: I think that's good. With the cycle of high difficulty content, it's often said that people leave and new users come in. Having new content like this is a challenge to see whether players can accept new things in the middle of that.
Yoshida: I don't think there's any content that everyone plays in a MMORPG. Looking at the data, even the main scenario isn't completed by 100%. Some people just enjoy taking pictures of the world's scenery. When we think about this, "Forbidden Land Eureka" is just one new play element, like a new type of roller coaster that may give you a bit of a thrill. I think there will be some people for whom this content doesn't fit.
Hino: You think it's about the scale of a roller coaster? I thought it was a bit bigger than that....
Yoshida: It will continue to expand. As I said earlier, we just launched the content. New play elements will be added to the leveling foundation after the first "Anemos" version. If we added all that from the beginning, it would just look like FFXIV. We didn't want that, we want to test the boundaries.
In a system like that, there should be a lot more communication among users. Engaging in communication like that might make the content more fun than ever before.
Yoshida: I agree. Now that people are accustomed to the convenient ways to recruit parties, I want to pay attention to how they communicate.
Hino: MMOs are exciting when there are elements you don't understand. You'll have conversations like "what does this do?" so the more things are figured out, the less conversation there tends to be. If there a lot of hidden elements to the content, conversation should increase a lot.