Today, another wave of new players joins the online world of Final Fantasy XI. The long-awaited PlayStation 2 version, complete with Sony's 40-gigabyte hard drive, is on its way to North American retailers, and from there into the hands of PS2 gamers ready to try out their first massively-multiplayer online RPG.

Last night, Square Enix and Sony Computer Entertainment America held a launch event at Sony's Metreon entertainment center in San Francisco to commemorate the game's release. In attendance were two of the key Square Enix staff responsible for the game: North American producer Yasu Kurosawa and Online Service Manager Keiki Usui, known as "Sage Sundi" in FFXI's online world. The two were willing to speak briefly about the present and future of their game as it makes its way to the North American console market, especially regarding some key future upgrades to its gameplay -- to learn more, read on.

1UP: So, to start with, what have you worked on before?

Yasu Kurosawa: My first job was monster and creature scripting for Parasite Eve, and then I was the battle director for Final Fantasy IX, and now I'm the North American online producer for Final Fantasy XI.

Keiki Usui: This is my first title for Square Enix -- before that, I was working for a different company. Another large online game.

1UP: How did you wind up in the position of administering an online game that's still published by Sony? We were curious about just how that arrangement works out as far as the American release.

Yasu Kurosawa: We actually handle pretty much everything as far as the online portion. SCEA handles the packaging and promotional side. He [Usui] is in charge of the online operation, for global markets including Japan, the U.S., and wherever else it comes out -- the game masters and other community features. I'm more in charge of the U.S. side.

1UP: So it's mostly Square's show, then...[nervous laughter all around]...It's not to knock Sony's involvement -- we just found it interesting that either you have Square Enix running things, or even odder is you have two halves of Sony administering two different online games, since Sony Online has Everquest Online Adventures. Is it unusual at all for you to be working with a company that's sort of a competitor?

Yasu Kurosawa: Actually, Sony Online Entertainment is a good partner of ours. The handle the U.S. side as far as game masters and the call center, so we work together. They're highly professional on that end.

Kyoko Yamashita: If I can say one thing about the SCEA-Square Enix relationship, though, it's largely due to the game being also pre-installed on the HDD. Without one another, we couldn't launch -- we couldn't go out by ourselves without Sony, and they couldn't launch the HDD without us because there's no other games available.

1UP: Now that the PS2 version is launching, what are you looking forward to as far as upgrading the game in the future? We just had the big push in the PC version that introduced the new Dynamis area and other changes, and we're also looking forward to the new player-versus-player system. What kind of changes can we expect in the next few months?

Yasu Kurosawa: The platform launch is mostly separate from the expansion schedule. We're expanding almost monthly with patches and new items and, if not new areas, then new quests and rebalancing things. We're constantly updating. As far as expansions that we're planning, we can put major things in there, like additions to the storyline -- each addition is a chapter to the main storyline, where you work for your nation and follow the storyline through cutscenes. When the new expansion pack comes out, another set of storylines opens up.

We keep the game fresh by providing small updates through downloadable patches. Larger updates are done through expansion packs - the first expansion pack was "Rise of the Zilart," which comes included in the retail US version of the game for both PS2 and PC. We are currently looking into the possibility of the next expansion pack.

1UP: Do you know what you plan to add in the next expansion pack? We haven't heard much about it yet?

Yasu Kurosawa: We are currently looking into the possibility of the next expansion pack.

1UP: Do you know anything more about the PVP system that was mentioned at the Tokyo Game Show, or is that still in the design stages?

Keiki Usui: We will start the public testing...not just like a test server, but a test event at one of the Internet cafes in Japan. 20 or so people will try the PVP next month, and it should be a patch to the game in the following month, April or May.

1UP: We saw how you used a net cafe to test the Dynamis area for the first time in Japan -- have you thought about similar events in the North America market?

Yasu Kurosawa: We were just discussing about that.

Keiki Usui: Maybe I should stop by some of the major net cafes here and check it out.

Yasu Kurosawa: One of the reasons we did that in Japan for Dynamis is because we had users who played with their own characters. Dynamis is such a high-level area, and it's having a whole alliance with so many high-level characters is hard to put together in the U.S. at this point. We've been looking at possibilities to have U.S. players participate in testing, though. The PVP details will be coming shortly, though.

Keiki Usui: It's going to be a series of features, the PVP system, not just one feature, so the system will work in several ways.

1UP: How have you thought about trying to make that different from traditional ways of looking at that kind of gameplay? At TGS, the message was that it wasn't going to be like what we're used to in other online games.

Yasu Kurosawa: All we can say right now, probably, is that we're not just thinking about one type of PVP, but more than one type of system that people can enjoy.

Keiki Usui: Not just killing other players, to steal something or whatever, but a kind of national or regional conflict.

Yasu Kurosawa: What's important is encouraging players to participate with their friends to aim for something. That concept will remain central to the PVP, which is why we want to do a nation-based, or conquest-based system of different kinds.

1UP: The launch of the North American PC version was the first big influx of new players since the Japanese expansion. How many people do you expect to join with the initial wave of American PS2 players? Do you expect that to change the dynamics of the game significantly?

Yasu Kurosawa: Hopefully we'll have a lot more Final Fantasy fans that are used to console games, playing games in the living room. With the Windows version, we had a lot of people who had played other MMORPGs, and they knew a lot about how MMORPGs work, although they still enjoyed it. We designed this game so that not only those highly-skilled MMORPG players, but also newcomers to the MMO world can feel that it's Final Fantasy, with storylines and cutscenes and so on. Hopefully, now, those people who've never played an MMORPG can get into it. We're expecting a lot of those kind of players to join.

1UP: Do you think it's going to be a greater customer service burden, introducing a lot more people to the concept, or do you think the game is structured so that people will pick it up pretty quickly?

Yasu Kurosawa: Well, we did everything we can, the pre-install and so forth, to make it easier to patch. And as you probably know the very first step in the game is the introduction of each nation, and then the main NPC greets you and explains the world, and presents some easy quests. So hopefully that portion of the design will be helpful to people who haven't played before.

Keiki Usui: Also, a big difference between the Windows launch and the PS2 launch is that PS2 users already have English-speaking Windows players to help them out.

1UP: Speaking of community, there was a strange case in Japan of a romantic dispute between two players -- two people using each other's characters went through a messy breakup, and the dispute escalated to the point where the Japanese police got involved. It was interesting, though, because it was all online, and the authorities obviously had no idea what to do with it. Have you seen any more situations like that developing with the expansion of the game?

Yasu Kurosawa: [laughs] Well, it does happen, but that kind of problem doesn't just happen in online games -- it's anything to do with online communities, password leaks, hacking, it's a common thing. That specific situation happened to be talked about a lot, but it does happen often all over.

1UP: Is the World Pass system [which confines players to random servers until they can buy passage to the server of their preference] still the same as it is in the PC version?

Yasu Kurosawa: Yes, exactly the same.

1UP: Do you expect to have any problems with that when console users join, or do you think people will simply get used to it?

Yasu Kurosawa: A lot of people who participated in the beta wanted to be in the same world as before, but the World Pass isn't that expensive, so it's not hard to have one of their friends come in, earn a few levels, and buy the World Pass to go to another server. It was talked about a lot initially, but it turned out that it wasn't a very big deal -- it went away pretty quickly.

1UP: What's it like looking to the open-ended lifespan of a game like this, after working on single-player games? There, you produce the game, it's done, move on to the next game -- here, you may be looking forward to years of more Final Fantasy XI.

Yasu Kurosawa: Well, it's pretty similar, really. It's like selling a packaged game every month [laughs]. Because if we don't upgrade the game, it becomes obsolete pretty fast, so the planning stage seems to continue forever. We plan things in certain intervals, though, so it's really pretty similar in terms of planning, releasing, and planning the next release.

It's very interesting to see how it will grow, evolve, and affect the world after the PS2 version releases. It's one of the very first places to have this many people meeting together with others who don't speak their language -- it's an interesting experience, and apparently it's working out.

1UP: How has interaction between Japanese and American players gone, since we haven't seen a situation quite like this before?

Yasu Kurosawa: There are conflicts, but there's far more cooperation and participation in cross-cultural interaction, people learning about each other and how they play the game. And we have a canned system for communication in basic phrases, while high-level players tend to have a lot of macros set up to talk to players who speak other languages. People respect each other, which is interesting to see -- even in the real world, there aren't a lot of places where you see two cultures interacting like this.

Keiki Usui: We have several hundred fan sites already started in Japan, which we keep track of through a registration system, and the top three are sites about "How To Learn English" through Final Fantasy XI.

Many thanks to Mr. Kurosawa, Mr. Usui, Kyoko Yamashita of Square Enix USA, and SCEA for the opportunity, and we'll see you in the online world of Vana'diel soon.