Apparently this week is E3, the huge video game media convention thing. I originally found this out when a streamer I was watching was complaining about how Twitch was all unstable because of the extra load from people watching streams from E3. Anyway, Square had a stream announcing various things as would be expected for an event like this and part of it involved a Q&A session with Naoki Yoshida (the director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV). One of the questions had to do with the new marriage system they're implementing for an upcoming patch. I was linked to a Kotaku article about it, but the question was just asking for more details and here's what Yoshida had to say post translation:
"We discussed it and we realized: within Eorzea, why
should there be restrictions on who pledges their love or friendship to
each other?"
Back in 2012 when they were talking about features to be added later to the relaunched Final Fantasy XIV (the original game was so terrible they had to bring in a new team and redo it) and marriage was one of the things they had planned. But initially they said they would only do straight marriage to start. I guess a lot has changed in two years!
One can't help but wonder if the concern around Tomodachi Life woke someone up inside Square Enix and made them take notice. As my friend Humbabella pointed out it's not like it's actually easier to implement just straight marriage in an existing video game. You do have to go in and make an explicit point while implementing any sort of pair bonding system to restrict it to one male and one female. It wouldn't be easier to 'test out' only straight marriage and I'm glad to see they walked away from that particular stance.
The guy in the video asking the questions didn't even seem terribly concerned about the potential for gay marriage, or for a cat person marrying a rock person. He only really perked up when Yoshida mentioned potential rewards for getting married. Gotta get an exclusive 'married' mount!
I haven't played FFXIV in a while, but it was fun when it relaunched. Maybe I should patch it up and give it another spin at some point...
No comments:
Post a Comment