Three of Final Fantasy XI production’s most essential characters were close to developing a very special multiplayer for Square Enix.

Those familiar with Square Enix will know that the company relied on three key figures to make Final Fantasy XI a success: Naoki Yoshida, Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro. But what did these experts do before they started work on FFXIV? Well, they were designing a Bloodborne-style game.

Although very similar to Bloodborne, the game was designed for 5-player multiplayer.

So explains Naoki Yoshida, Square Enix’s online role-playing game producer, in a collection of his columns in Famitsu (via ResetEra). Everyone seems to agree that this project, which was so early that it hasn’t even been given a code name yet, is very similar to what we saw with FromSoftware’s title.

Even though the three professionals worked on the project for only a year, they managed to create a very similar basic concept to Miyazaki’s: an action game with a gothic style and some sci-fi touches, such as guns and pistols. As a unique feature, it is worth mentioning that this project is intended as a 5-player multiplayer game. We’ll never know what idea Yoshida, Takai and Maehiro were trying to capture in a video game format, but it’s safe to say that the market would have had a tough time:

“If we’d gone ahead and they’ve released Bloodborne earlier, we probably wouldn’t have been happy,” they laughed.

At the moment, public attention is focused on Square Enix’s most popular franchise, with Yoshida claiming that they are already working on what will happen after the events of Endwalker in Final Fantasy XIV. But he’s not content with just that, and he’s also raising players’ expectations for Final Fantasy XVI, which will soon be followed by more news.

Source: ResetEra