The August issue of Famitsu PSP + PS3 has been released and inside is an interivew with Mizuki Ito and Daisuke Sase. These are the people behind the creation of such monsters as Pandemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue. Suteki, a member of the editorial team for Vanatsuu (A Final Fantasy XI mook) sat down with these members of the development team to talk about the creation of their more recent monster: Pandemonium Warden.
One of the more interesting parts of the interview is the mention that Pandemonium Warden was originally intended to be Asura. There is also discussion about how they expected players to fight the final boss of the ZNM system as well as how they test monsters like Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden before they’re introduced into the game.
During the interview, Sase states that he anticipated that 36-54 people would be needed in order to successfully take down Pandemonium Warden. That’s 2-3 full alliances.
The recently released Vana’diel Census shows us that 3.46% of all linkshells in Final Fantasy XI have 30 or more people. Then we can see that 15.60% of all adventurers have a level 75 job (which would be needed to attempt a fight with one of these monsters). The chance is small that there are large enough linkshells with enough level 75 players with the necessary jobs to meet the expected requirements to defeat a monster such as Pandemonium Warden.
It was also revealed that there was a reason for the spawning point of Pandemonium Warden to be close to the exit of the Aydeewa Subterrane. The developers original thoughts were that people could run back to town during the fight in order to make any necessary changes. This doesn’t seem to make sense for the current fight now that it has been adjusted to last a maximum of two hours. However we can see that originally it was intended to be quite a long fight. But exactly how long did they originally intend the fight to last?
They then discuss how a monster is tested before it’s released in an update. Mizuki Ito says that when testing new monsters, they use equipment that is appropriate for the task. In the case of Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden (the hardest monsters in the game), they use the best equipment possible. A paladin would have an Aegis etc. (the census states there are currently 612 completed relic shields in the game). One has to wonder just exactly how these testers are geared. There are a small number of linkshells that will have amazing equipment and multiple relic shields. On the other hand, there are also linkshells that have good gear as opposed to “the best”.
Should monsters like Pandemonium Warden have these high requirements in order to defeat it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have it defeatable by an average sized endgame linkshell instead of the less than 4% that match the numbers ancitipated by its creators? Are the challenges presented by monsters like Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden a welcome addition? Or a dissapointing annoyance?
It’s not even the fact that they are close to impossible to beat. It’s the fact that it takes forever to just spawn the monster.