Babylon's Fall "borrowed" assets from Final Fantasy XIV
FFXIV director Yoshi-P suggested it
Earlier this month, Platinum Games held a closed beta for their upcoming action RPG, Babylon's Fall. For the most part, feedback from the test looked pretty good, though some players noticed something a familiar - the game reused armour and emotes from Final Fantasy XIV. Producer Yosuke Saito says that's because Square Enix let Platinum borrow them, letting the devs add lots more gear than they had originally planned.
"To get straight to the point: yes, Babylon's Fall contains gear and emote data borrowed from Final Fantasy XIV," he says in a blog post.
"When I gave my Babylon's Fall presentation at a company meeting, Final Fantasy XIV producer and director Naoki Yoshida was also in attendance and offered his help, to which I replied, 'Yes, please!' This is how the plan came to fruition. We then carefully implemented the data while closely coordinating with the Final Fantasy XIV team."
Ultimately, Saito says this has allowed Platinum to add a wider variety of gear and emotes. He also notes that the reason it was so obvious in the beta was because a lot of the borrowed FFXIV stuff has been turned into mid-level gear (the sort of level folks would've been playing at). Babylon's Fall will supposedly have lots of its own "unique" stuff as well.
Yoshi-P chimes in with his own statement about all this as well, saying:
"I myself am a huge fan of online games, a gamer, and a developer. That’s why I couldn’t be happier if Babylon's Fall succeeds and reinvigorates Japanese online games while boosting the number of players in the genre. So, I said, 'Let’s use FFXIV’s assets too. We have so many, it’d be a shame to limit them to FFXIV alone,' and that’s how it all started. Back then, I didn’t realize that it would become such a hot topic…"
As far as explanations go, this is a pretty good one. If you have nice assets, why not share them? I'm sure it takes ages to put so many different outfits and emotes together, it seems like efficient game design to let other devs borrow stuff like this.
"We apologize for any concerns this caused," Saito adds. "We are working hard on the development of the game so as not to disappoint our players and appreciate your continued support."
Babylon's Fall is set to arrive on PC and the PlayStations some time next year. Ed and Katharine have already gone hands on, and while they enjoyed the combat, they had a few concerns about grind.
"Questions remain around progression and whether there will be plentiful ways to grind out levels," they wrote. "But overall, I'd say we had a fairly good time. A tentative thumbs up from us, then, and fingers crossed the devs successfully spin this crunchy combat core into a moreish dungeon crawler."