Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn 's director and producer Naoki Yoshida was put in charge of overhauling Final Fantasy XIV in 2010, eventually transforming what had been described as a "monstrous failure" into an incredibly successful MMO.

We recently got the chance to sit down in front of Yoshida-san and ask him your questions on A Realm Reborn's past, present and future; here's what he had to say.Please note that due to time constraints Yoshida-san could not answer every question, although I hope you'll appreciate he gave it his best shot.

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I think many players kind of have an idea what the new classes and jobs are going to be if you’ve played the Patch 2.2 content, so it’s not going to be far away in the future when we bring in these new jobs and classes. However E3 is awaiting us so please look forward to then for more information, because if I reveal it now there isn’t going to be any further news at E3.We will be starting to share more information soon, but with the next patch (2.3) we are planning to implement a large scale PvP called Frontline. In this PvP, a large number of players will be fighting against each other in three different groups so it’s going to be a very large scale PvP.With the next patch (2.3) we are going to add more content to the Crystal Tower you mentioned, and so first of all I would really like you to see how the Crystal Tower is going to evolve and I hope you really enjoy it. Throughout these version updates you’ll be able to go higher and higher within the Tower, so I hope that it’s going to be an exciting experience. But of course once we complete the Crystal Tower updates we have another plan to implement more new content; it’s big news and we’ll hopefully share it with you this year.Previous Final Fantasy titles were more focussed on the single-player experience, but Final Fantasy XIV is an MMO so you’ll be fighting in a four or eight-player party. So when we designed the boss characters it’s not that we neglect the previous Final Fantasy design, but we want to make sure… Because with the previous games, one person controls several characters but this time many people join the party and fight against the same boss. So we wanted to make sure we learn from the… I’m sure people have their own memories of the classical Final Fantasy boss character, so we don’t want to destroy the image of those characters we want to make it at the same time very exciting as a party battle towards those characters.For example with the Leviathan which we introduced with Patch 2.2 we wanted to make sure we’re keeping the player’s memories from the previous Final Fantasy titles so we wanted to make sure that [the Leviathan] is related to the sea, the ocean, and we wanted to make sure that the Leviathan uses a tidal wave, otherwise the players won’t think that it’s an authentic Leviathan. So then we thought we have to have this tidal wave in the battle, but then how is he going to use it? He must be on the ship, but the ship mustn’t be a secured ship so how are we going to unfold the battle? So that’s how we sort of expand the image and design the battle itself.We receive many similar questions. Probably we could bring you the pet Wyvern anytime in the near future if we wanted to, but at the same time if we want that Wyvern to have the ability to attack the enemies along with the Dragoon then that means we need to reduce the strength of the Dragoon itself because we need to make sure there’s a good balance in the party. So I’m sure that’s not what players want – they wouldn’t want us to reduce the strength that the Dragoon class has already. So as long as the Wyvern doesn’t have that kind of special power then I’m sure we could implement it, so sometime in the future maybe you will see the pet Wyvern. We do have some plans and when you see how the story evolves around Reborn it might make sense to you.