Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu recently interviewed Hiromichi Tanaka and Nobuaki Komoto about FFXIV. You can read English translations of the interview on either ZAM or FFXIcore:

ZAM translation

FFXIVcore translation

I finally got around to redoing the main navigation. The old one was just too cluttered and hard too see, especially on lower resolutions. The new navigation has all the same options plus a couple new ones, and is now layed out in a much cleaner and easier to read format.

Well, it's been an insightful couple of months, and not only have I been able to finally get the new site layout finished, but more importantly we now know quite a bit about FFXIV. There are still a lot of unanswered questions, obviously, but it's gotten to the point where most of the important things have been nailed down and we have a pretty good picture of the game.

I can't say I'm not disappointed in a few ways (for example, the fact that we still won't be able to jump in this new game - that was a real letdown), but overall I think FFXIV looks absolutely incredible. I'm especially happy about the new interface. I know we haven't really been able to see much of it (unless you're one of those lucky bastards who got to attend this year's Gamescom in Germany, and if you are I hate you forever) but from what we've seen so far, the new interface looks to be a huge improvement over the one from FFXI. Being a bit of an interaction designer myself, that sort of thing is very important to me, and I was always thinking up ways that I could improve on FFXI's GUI (and to be honest, I sometimes even got rather frustrated at SE for not doing a better job on FFXI's interface >.>).

But anyway, I'm glad they're putting more thought into it this time around. One thing that still concerns me though is whether or not they'll allow for third-party addons like Blizzard does with World of Warcraft. That would be awesome if they did, as I think addons are one of the best thing in WoW. They allowed me to have complete and total control over the GUI, giving me the power to change absolutely anything I wanted, and even fix things that I felt were unintuitive or poorly designed (something that I was never able to do with FFXI). If SE doesn't include support for addons in FFXIV, I'll be extremely disappointed. Though I'm sure even if that does happen, the community will still make unsanctioned addons anyway, just like they did with FFXI and all those Windower plugins.

But regardless of what happens, FFXIV still looks like an incredible game, and I have no doubt that it will be the next big MMORPG to revolutionize the industry. I'm really looking forward to playing it, and I hope I can get into the beta, whenever it starts. But If I'm not that lucky, you can bet your bottom dollar that I'll be standing there first in line on launch day to pick up my copy, which will have been reserved several months in advance.

With the recent announcement of FFXIV, I've decided to launch a totally new version of the site dedicated to SE's upcoming MMORPG. Content will slowly be added as more info about becomes known about the game. Anyway, hope you like the new layout! :)

Wow, the site is really coming along! Now it actually looks pretty professional. Just six months ago, I knew virtually NOTHING about HTML and... well, okay, I guess I still don't really know anything about it. But look at what I was able to build! Look at this site! There's still a few things here and there that I feel I need to iron out (not to mention getting some actual CONTENT up here), but as far as design and layout is concerned, I'm really pleased with what I was able to produce. It's amazing how much you can learn from taking classes. :)

And speaking of classes, the fall semester just ended a couple weeks ago, which means that I don't have any more classes until January 7th! :D

Hooray for winter break!