Matsui and Fujito chimed in together in response to this. "Truth be told, creating an offline, single-player version of FF11 is something that is very appealing to us on the development staff as well! Just like the players, the development team feels it would be a shame that the creations we poured our hearts and souls into for so long would eventually disappear and not be accessible at all."
"Unfortunately, when we think about it from a logistical standpoint, it’s not as simple as just running our current FF11 data and program source through a conversion tool to create this experience. I’m confident it would likely require a development team big enough for a single, large-scale project of the current generation. As a single player experience, there would be parts of the game that simply could not be recreated faithfully from the original, and even for parts we can recreate, there would be debate on whether we should faithfully recreate it, or whether we should change it up into something more current. More than anything, when thinking about the 'FF11 experience,' [we] believe the existence of other players and a community plays a much bigger role than we may think."
"When we are working on content updates, we utilize a limited, single-player environment for debugging," Fujito said. "But we all agree that there is this feeling that something is 'off' when we’re using that version of the game, and it almost feels like a lifeless world where time has stopped. How to fill that emptiness will be a difficult task.”
Fortunately, this doesn't mean a singleplayer version is out of the question. "As you can see, there are various issues that we would need to overcome," Fujito said. "However, an offline singleplayer version of the game is definitely an appealing proposal. If we can find a happy medium that is not only satisfactory and meaningful for us as creators, but more importantly something that would be appealing to the players, then we would like to take on that challenge.”