Final Fantasy XIV producer and director Yoshida Naoki has told PowerUp! that he is currently in talks to bring the MMORPG to next-gen consoles. We recently had the chance to sit down with Yoshida and have an extensive chat about the game, Patch 5.3’s new content and get some hints at the future of the title. While Yoshida was unable to share any concrete plans with us he was able to confirm that he is working towards more ports in the future.
“Our philosophy, or the concept, is that we want to deliver the game to as many players as possible in the world. This philosophy is in the blood of the development team and operations team, so we are aspiring to expand our game on different consoles as well.” Yoshida told us toward the end of our chat.
According to Yoshida it’s a question he gets asked frequently and it’s not hard to see why. XIV is showing no signs of slowing down as Square Enix just today announced the game has reached 20 million registered players. It tracks that many of us would be curious to know if it’s going to make the jump to the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X and Yoshida can at least confirm that plans are slowly coming together.
“That’s why we are still continuing our conversation with the platform companies. And that topic also includes the expanding of FF XIV on the new next-gen consoles as well,” Yoshida explains, also noting that “However, we don’t really have any solid answer or solid conclusion that we can provide at this conjuncture. If we have some more development in a conversation, and if we get the right timing, of course, we are happy to share the information to players…so you can be on the lookout for it.”
Square Enix announced a deal with Microsoft last year that sees XIV coming to the Xbox One so an Xbox Series X port will also hopefully happen, along with Playstation 5 and continued PC support. As far as the Nintendo Switch goes, however, Yoshida gracefully sidestepped specifics for future ports but hey, stranger things have happened.
