After launching FINAL FANTASY XI new expansion: Wings of the Goddess, Square Enix put on the recent Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival 2007 at the Anaheim Hilton in Southern California. Gamasutra presents a Q&A with Square Enix vice president and producer of Final Fantasy XI Hiromichi Tanaka, Sage Sundi, and other members of the Square Enix development team, conducted at the event.

In the interview, developers said it still hasn't been decided whether that's going to be a game in the FF series, a continuation, or a totally new game.

The details are as below:

Coming up on the fifth anniversary, how does everyone feel? It's got to be a great accomplishment: five years running an MMO.

Hiromichi Tanaka: Actually, you might know that the development for Final Fantasy XI started about eight years ago. And at the time that development began we really only had a plan for about five years, and now it's been eight years. So it kept building, but it's been a very quick eight years. The time has gone by really quickly. But everyone still has a lot of fun making it and we're sure that probably even from now the time will still keep going quickly.

Do games like World of Warcraft impinge on your market, or do you feel like it's a completely different player base?

Square Enix Team Members: Actually we haven't been affected that much by WoW. When FFXI hit its peak users was about the time that WoW was released, and when it was released we didn't see a big reduction in the players. It's pretty much been about the same. We feel that with a lot of MMORPGs on the market, players have the choice of the one they want to go to and they'll try them out and then they'll stick with one and we see that people who chose FFXI have stuck with it.

Do you eventually plan on a whole new Final Fantasy MMO? Or is it going to be eternally XI, the magic online number?

As you might already know, members from the current FFXI team are working on a next generation MMO, but it still hasn't been decided whether that's going to be a game in the FF series, a continuation, or a totally new game. We are working on it, but it hasn't been decided that far yet.

Read More: Event Recap: Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival 2007

News Original From: Gamasutra

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