Interview With Dragon Quest X: Version 2 Director and Producer

Posted 20:37 EST on 29DEC2013 by: indie navi news staff in news » chikara saitou, dragon quest X version 2, yousuke saitou

In the upgrade to version 2.0, the role of director was passed from Jin Fujisawa (longtime assistant to series producer Yuji Horii) to Chikara Saitou. 4Gamer sat down for an interview with Mr. Saitou and Dragon Quest X producer Yousuke Saitou (no relation to Chikara) to discuss changes in the upgrade and what fans can expect for Dragon Quest X going forward. Some of the highlights of this interview are below.

4Gamer: When the role of director was passed from Mr. Fujisawa to you, Mr. Saitou, was there anything you were told you couldn’t change?

C. Saitou: No, just the opposite. Mr. Fujisawa was clear that I didn’t need to worry about making changes on his account. He told me I had to make something I could enjoy be proud of. [...] For that reason, when we were working on Version 1, the project moved forward with Mr. Fujisawa at its center, but when we moved to planning for Version Two, he stopped appearing in meetings. Personally, I wanted to continue to work with Mr. Fujisawa, so I would make a point of calling him to the meetings, but there were times when he was clearly upset about being brought into the meeting and left.

---

4Gamer: Incidentally, Mr. (C.) Saitou, can you tell us a little about your history? What kind of titles have you previously been involved with?

Saitou: If you mean prior to Dragon Quest X, I was involved in making the action RPG Cross Treasures for the DS. Before that, I worked at a development company on products for learning institutions.

---

4Gamer: When deciding on the specs for version 2, are there any areas you really want to focus on, or any parts you feel need extra attention?

[...]

C. Saitou: [...] during quests, when you receive EXP, or when you get get an item from a coin boss, there are times when, instead of, say, Magic Water, you get a “fragment”.

4Gamer: Yeah, that’s not exactly thrilling for players.

Y. Saitou: Of the specs for Version 2, the thing that led to the biggest arguments, so much so that even Mr. Horii got wrapped up in it, was how to treat the Angel Slime Cap.

4Gamer: The one that doubles EXP for the entire party for characters whose level is under 40, right?

Y. Saitou: Yes. The Cap was designed as a special item to help people who were new to Dragon Quest X and people who’d not gotten around to playing the game in a while to be able to get back up to speed. However, during development, people started arguing over whether it wasn’t a bit much.

[...]

C. Saitou: Longtime players felt like it was unfair and complained. Even Mr. Horii instructed us to be careful it didn’t make players feel like they’d wasted their time.

Y. Saitou: We went back and forth over whether we should make the level max for the cap level 40 or 50. If we went with level 40, the player won’t yet be strong enough to beat the final boss, but that’s the level range where players have earned access to most of the passive skills. (trans. note: passive skills are the skills player characters earn permanently, even when changing job classes.) If players can get access to all of those passive skills, they can join in with other players.

4Gamer: The levels where you get all of those skills are pretty crucial.

Y. Saitou: Exactly. However, if levelling up is made too easy, players won’t become as attached to their characters. For that reason, if you take into consideration leaving enough left for players to have to strive for and work toward, level 40 seemed like a good compromise. If it just feels to players like they hopped on an escalator to reach the peak of the mountain, there’s no joy in it.

[...]

C. Saitou: The result was that there weren’t too many players that got angry. Instead, longtime players seemed glad to have more levelled-up players to join up with. We’re really glad for that.

---

4Gamer, asking about items that expedite EXP acquisition: We like that even if the support characters fall in battle, with the Angel Slime Cap you still get double the EXP. Before, there was a campaign for players who got their friends to join that gave them a Tomburero Cap, which gave double EXP if two characters in the party wore it, which really encouraged players to play together. However, the Tomburero Cap didn’t give double EXP if it was worn by support characters. Meanwhile, the Angel Slime Cap gives twice the EXP even if worn by support characters. What was the thinking behind this?

(Trans. note: in Dragon Quest X, characters can make their avatars available for hire as “support characters” in pubs and other designated spots. This way, their characters can earn EXP even when the player is logged off.)

C. Saitou: There are a few moments I had that I really enjoyed when playing Dragon Quest X by myself. One of those was when my character got hired as a support character by another player. [...] At this point, there are a lot of high-level characters, so it’s tough for a low-level character to get hired as a support character. If a low-level character has the Angel Slime Cap equipped, they’ll be a lot more likely to get hired. We did this so even veteran players would be glad to hire lower level characters.

4Gamer: It also seems like lower-level characters with the Angel Slime Cap equipped are more likely to appear at the time of a support character search. Is that the case?

Y. Saitou: Yes, we designed it that way.

C. Saitou: It’s designed so that characters with the Cap equipped will be given preference to appear on the first page of search results. This is another way we tailored the specs to encourage the hiring of lower-level characters.

---

4Gamer: The famous Dragon Quest casino was finally added to Dragon Quest X with the switch to Version 2, but how’s the reaction from players been?

C. Saitou: Man, it’s been really popular. It’s gotten to the point where we want to remind players there is a story that’s pretty interesting, so they’ll stop holing up in the casino. (Laughs.)

4gamer: Have you been keeping tabs on how much Gold has been spent by players at the casino?

Y. Saitou: It’s no small amount, but it’s actually not as much as we’d anticipated. In terms of money spent at the casino, it’s not a large percentage. [...] Looking at it as a whole, there are lot of players who hang on to their coins or who trade them in for items.

4Gamer: There are people we know who are like, “I spent tens of thousands of gold at the casino yesterday!” (Small laugh.)

Y. Saitou: On the flip side of the coin, there are also a lot of people who’ve hit it big. That’s the impression we get, looking at the data.

C. Saitou: There are actually lot of people who have already gotten their hands on some of the nicer prizes. I was shocked when I found out someone had gotten the Good Luck Charm on the casino’s very first day. (Laughs.)

4gamer: That’s, what, 300,000 coins? How on earth are they able to rack up that much?

C. Saitou: In terms of the most time-effective method, I guess they’re probably betting everything all at once when playing roulette.

---

Y. Saitou: [...] There’s something I realized, talking with Mr. Sugiyama. (Trans. note: Mr. Saitou is referring to Koichi Sugiyama, primary composer for the Dragon Quest series.) There’s a tendency to want to change the music that plays in the castles in Country A and Country B, but Mr. Sugiyama says that’s not the way to go.

4Gamer: Now that you mention it, in other games, the music from one town to the next is usually different.

Y. Saitou: Exactly. However, Mr. Sugiyama believes different tunes should have their individual “roles”, so you know immediately, oh, this is a castle, or oh, this is a village.

---

C. Saitou, joking: This is related to the casino, but because we created a “casino bunny” for male characters also, recently there’s been a rumor that I’m “into that kind of thing”. (Everyone laughs.) [...] It’s true I pushed for it to be in the game, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s my thing… (Laughs.)

---

4Gamer: When implementing a casino, we’re sure you paid a lot of considerations to preventing Real Money Trading, and the impact this would have, socially. What kind of discussions did you have?

Y. Saitou: We got the appropriate legal authorities involved and really hashed it out. If the coins used at the casino can be exchanged for gold, it would become a hotbead for RMT activity, or it would foster that kind of activity, so we started to talk about making the transaction a one-way street as being the fastest method.

4Gamer: Is the fact that you can’t buy more than 1,000 coins at a time intended as a method for preventing RMT? (Note: some of the higher-end items cost well over 1,000 coins, the idea being that you have to win in the casino to be able to get them.)

C. Saitou: No, that’s not really there as a way to prevent RMT. We just wanted to make sure the casino wasn’t something that could be “solved” by throwing money at it. We thought it would be a little depressing if the really nice items we put in the casino were just bought up right on the first day. (Laughs.)

4Gamer: You wanted people to approach the casino like a casino, basically.

C. Saitou: Exactly. We wanted to make it so that only people who played at the casino and earned coins that way — in other words, people who “chased the dream” — to be able to get their hands on the prizes.

Y. Saitou: Basically, there are veteran players who’ve been playing for over a year now, and players just starting out, and we wanted them to be able to approach the casino as a shared space that’s a level playing field. Since it’s not just something determined by having a lot of in-game money, beginning players can hit it big, and have boasting rights to more seasoned players. We thought having that possibility would be more interesting for players.

[...]

C. Saitou: For that reason, the 1,000 coin limit was purely a game design decision. As methods for preventing RMT, we’ve made it so casino items can’t be traded.

4Gamer: That makes sense. Also, while on the subject of RMT, what ended up happening with the sudden increase of “worker bots”, with the release of the PC version? Everybody was pretty concerned about that.

Y. Saitou: Thanks to cooperation on the part of players (who report bot activity), the number of bots hasn’t grown significantly. On the other hand, the number doesn’t feel like it’s decreasing, either, so that’s an area we need to keep working at. [...] It used to be that if you went to an important hunting grounds, sure enough, there’d be a bot camping. Thanks to implementing functions for players to report this activity, we’ve been able to prevent this kind of activity in places where it really stands out. [...] Also, in places where people working the system were gathering, we put Zombie Dragons with levels exceeding 80. This has also been really effective.

C. Saitou, the Monster Tamer class added in Version 2: There are different takes on the Monster Tamer in Dragon Quest games, right? For example, there’s the one in Dragon Quest V, which is a bit different from the one in Dragon Quest Monsters, where you make the monsters your friends and build a party. So when deciding how to approach the class in Version 2, we just went straight to Mr. Horii.

4Gamer: And what was Mr. Horii’s take on it?

C. Saitou: He felt that if you could just tame any monster, it would turn the game into another Dragon Quest Monsters, so we should take a different approach. I felt the same way, so we made it so that only certain monsters can be tamed, and so that you have to put a lot of time and love into training just one monster.

4Gamer: What’s the most popular monster to tame right now?

Y. Saitou Sure enough, it’s been the Slime. Number two is Battle Rex, brushing all of the other monsters we’d lined up right aside.

---

4Gamer: When you compare it to what was involved with some of the other job classes, the quest to become a Monster Tamer is pretty simple. What was the reasoning behind that?

C. Saitou: We wanted it to be so that people new to Dragon Quest X and people who hadn’t picked up the game in a while could pick the class up quickly. We also thought it wouldn’t be good if people who bought Version 2 specifically for the new job class were unable to actually attain that class. At first we made it so that you had to tame 100 different types of monsters to get the class, but when we calculated the amount of time that would take, we realized it would be pretty rough, and lowered the number to 30. [...] Also, in the sense that we conferred with Mr. Horii quite a bit, the other new job class is the same way, but I can’t talk about that yet.

4Gamer: The new job class that will be available in ver. 2.1? Is that going to be a completely new job class?

Y. Saitou: That’s right. It’s going to be completely new to the Dragon Quest series.

C. Saitou: When Mr. Horii said this class would be good to run with, my immediate reaction was, “We can do this?!” (Laughs.)

Y. Saitou: It’s still really Dragon Quest-esque, though. (Laughs.)

C. Saitou: Yeah, exactly. It’s a class I haven’t heard of any other game using, but for some reason it doesn’t feel at all out of place.

---

4Gamer: [...] Incidentally, with Version 2, is there anything that you, as developers, really want players to see?

C. Saitou: Well, considering all the effort we put into it, it would have to be the contents in [the new world area] Lendashia. Also, the main story is really interesting.

Y. Saitou: This time around, we went for a really human story. [...] During development, we went over each line of dialogue with Mr. Horii, where he would say “Let’s go with this”, or “We should do this to really draw players in, I think.”

4Gamer: What sort of thing are you referring to, when you say “draw players in”?

Y. Saitou: For example, when having characters repeat their lines, they might tell you specifically, “next you have to go here”. Things like that. This time around, we also put a lot of attention into making it so after clearing quests, the screen would go dark and the player would automatically be returned to the appropriate location.

4gamer: It’s pretty uncommon in an online game for an in-game event to automatically move the player’s character to some location, isn’t it?

Y. Saitou: Yes, it is. To be honest, with an online game, it’s usually not something you want to do. However, Mr. Horii asked us, “Once you clear that goal, every player’s just going to have to return to this location anyway, so why not just make them warp there?” We really went back and forth about whether or not to implement this feature right up to the eleventh hour of development.

C. Saitou: It was also Mr. Horii’s idea to put save spots in places that weren’t really main areas. [...] Mr. Horii thought players would really appreciate that convenience, and in the end his thinking was spot-on.

---

C. Saitou, discussing his approach to directing game development: Unlike Mr. Fujisawa, I haven’t been involved with developing Dragon Quest throughout the series’ existence, so when it comes to determining how things should be to fit a Dragon Quest title, I make it a point to consult with the rest of the staff. For that reason, Mr. Horii was willing to meet with me to discuss fairly often. Then Mr. Horii would tell me, “Well, this probably isn’t the approach we should take.”

[...]

Y. Saitou: [...] Under Mr. Fujisawa’s firm leadership, we had a plan with a specific prioritization and an order in which things were to be implemented. However, Mr. (C.) Saitou’s ability to improve on what was put in place by incorporating everyone’s input will make a strong contribution to Dragon Quest X going forward.

---

4Gamer: Incidentally, what portion of players have made the switch over to Version 2?

Y. Saitou: There’s a pretty standard switch-over ratio for expansion packs, right? We’re already well past that. And I think that’s only going to keep improving as we enter the new year and more new players join. However, there’s still a pretty good number of people who’ve bought Version 2 but haven’t upgraded, and are still logging in that way, so it’s going to be a bit more time before we get the true figures.

C. Saitou: Right before Version 2 went on sale, there was a huge number of people who suddenly raced to beat the last boss.

Y. Saitou: Like they had been resisting the urge up until then. (Laughs.)

C. Saitou: We hadn’t really anticipated there’d be so many people saving one last thing so there would be something left to do. (Laughs.) You get the Ruler Stone for beating the last boss, so I feel like people who can clear the game ought to, but…

---

Y. Saitou, beginning to wrap up the interview: I remember in my last interview with 4Gamer, I said something to the effect that Dragon Quest X wouldn’t make players feel like anything had been left out. This time, I’d like to stress that Dragon Quest X will be fun, even for hardcore fans. There’s all kinds of different ways to enjoy the game with this expansion, and even heavy players will be able to find things to enjoy. So people who’ve been thinking “it’s just a beginner’s MMORPG”, please, by all means, give Version 2 a try.

4Gamer: The game’s systems have also really been polished, in comparison to Version 1.

Y. Saitou: Yes, so for that reason, we’d love for people who felt like Dragon Quest X didn’t meet their expectations to give Version 2 a try.

C. Saitou: [...] Also , the new elements we’re going to be adding, like cooking and fishing — particularly fishing — are new to Dragon Quest, to the best of my knowledge, so we’re really striving to make them so as soon as you try them, you think, “Yeah, this really has that Dragon Quest feel.”

4Gamer, wrapping up the interview: Dragon Quest X really is, in a variety of ways, an MMORPG we feel like we could recommend to anyone. Players can get a feel for what makes MMORPGs fun, but there’s also elements in place to keep people from going overboard, and lots of little touches that make it easy to play, so that even beginners will be able to have a good time. [..] We’re looking forward to future developments.

Interview and images source: 4Gamer