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Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida has addressed harassment levelled at development staff and players.
Last week, game director and producer Yoshida appeared on a Radio Mog Station broadcast, Square Enix’s online show dedicated to all things Final Fantasy 14. During the segment (which you can see in full over on YouTube (opens in new tab), and as translated on Reddit (opens in new tab)), Yoshida directly addressed feedback from players, saying that although he’s “thankful and grateful for players to tell us that ‘we should do this,’ or ‘we should be that,'” but he wishes “verbal abuses” from players would simply stop.
“I mean, I can take it, even though it doesn’t make it less bad,” Yoshida said of the harassment from players towards developers, surrounding issues like Endwalker being delayed. “But staff members will feel really down after getting those words when they gave their absolute best into trying to create something where everyone can enjoy, and this may end up making them no longer create things that are fun from there on.”
Yoshida continued to ask players for one thing: to imagine they’re speaking to a developer face to face whenever they post a comment online. Although Yoshida said he’ll be “happy” if players can leave comments politely, hurtful comments will “completely drain away their motivation and worse, they’ll end up quitting because of it.” The director ended by once again requesting everyone give careful consideration to their comments before sending them to the development team.
It’s hard to say why the Final Fantasy 14 development team is receiving hateful comments from the player base. Yoshida points to Endwalker’s initial delay late last year as one source of contention, but it could also be that Final Fantasy 14’s ongoing server queues are the source of hateful comments, as players around the world have been struggling to get into the game for weeks on end. Yoshida is throwing his weight behind addressing hateful comments though, so it’ll be interesting to see if the director ever provides an update on comments received further down the line.
Head over to our Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker review to see what we made of the MMO’s latest expansion.
