Final Fantasy XI team working on new next-gen MMORPG

In an interview published in the latest issue of Famitsu magazine, Final Fantasy XI producer Hiromichi Tanaka disclosed that his development team is currently working on a new massively multiplayer role-playing game for next-generation consoles.

Tanaka declined to comment on whether the MMORPG in development will be a successor to FFXI or a new product. He did confirm that the technical demonstration shown for the Xbox 360 during E3 was one of the experiments his development team had created to see what kind of graphics a next-generation console could achieve.

Tanaka also disclosed that the Xbox 360 edition of FFXI will sport graphics of a quality similar to the currently available PC version of FFXI. However, he added that the development team is seeing if the Xbox 360 can display graphics for about twice the distance than the Windows version.

The game's beta test is slated to begin simultaneously with the launch of the Xbox 360 later this year. Similarly to the Windows beta, the Xbox 360's beta test will be conducted on servers separate from the rest of the FFXI world. One of the main objectives for the Xbox 360 version's beta testing is to see if there are any problems with the game's network environment, since this will be the first time Xbox Live will be allowing a connection from an external system.