One of the largest disasters in recent years in the world of video games was the launch of Final Fantasy 14. The game was the successor of the fairly successful Final Fantasy 11 and looked to be good but then something terrible happened. Everyone hated it. There was suppose to be a PS3 version, but there wasn’t and things just went downhill from there. It had a terrible interface, and was strangled by lag issues, framerate dips, and a nightmarish control scheme.

Final Fantasy XIV producer and director Naoki Yoshida has plans for the coming relaunch and they include fixing every issue that people had with the game. Version 2.0 is currently scheduled for this coming winter (late 2012 or early 2013) and on top of a new UI, it will feature a new graphics engine that’s said to be better optimized and a bunch of new content relaunch.

The PC and PlayStation 3 versions of the game will feature differentUI’s that are tailored to each individuals input method (keyboard, controller). When searching for how the UI should look, they went with what has become the near global standard. “We looked to World of Warcraft. What they have there is pretty much what most players are used to. We’re using that as a base.”

They did this because they want people to just be able to pick up the game and play. “You can go around E3 and see all these different first-person shooters. But when you pick up the controller, whether it be a Call of Duty or a Halo, you pretty much know how it’s going to feel,” said Yoshida to IGN. “You know this is going to be your strafe, this is going to be your fire, this is going to be your aiming. We want it to be the same for MMO players.”

Look for an Alpha test in September, then a beta will roll out next for the PC then the PS3. “We want to make sure this time we take a lot of time to listen to feedback from users during this beta test and implement as much of it as possible before the release,” said Yoshida.