Alt + Tab Crash being abolished....

Sonomaa (BG): Will the graphics engine support Direct X10/11 and additional features, such as a full screen windowed mode without the limitations of ALT-TAB killing your game. DirectX 9.0c was a great API for Windows XP, but we're not on that anymore. We have very powerful graphics cards. We want the game to play like we know it should. Will the new engine will be a DirectX 10/11 engine or will it be an older, legacy engine.

Square-Enix: First thing, we're going to make sure ALT-TAB does not kill your game! [laughs] We're sorry it still happens!

The first thing, with this current graphics engine, is that you can't do things such as display more than 40 characters at the same time. That, to him (Yoshida), was nonsense. First, we wanted to start off by having an engine that covers that, and get rid old problems like that. We're making the new graphics engine such that if you have a high-end PC, we want you to be able to display tons of different characters and not have it tax your CPU. But we're also making it to where low-end PCs can also play it and have a similar experience without losing too much, without having to have that high-end PC. We hope to have that by 2.0. After the release of 2.0, getting it ready for DirectX 11 is the next step. We had the option of having DirectX 11 ready at release, but it would have made release later. So we wanted to get the new engine out and have this type of high quality for high-end/low-end. Then our next step is DirectX 11. And again, it was a priority thing. We had this schedule of how we wanted to remake the game in an unprecedented time of 2 years and to make that, we chose to do that first and then go to DirectX 11. But we do promise that we will do it. It's not one of those things where, "But well, yeah, 11, yeah, whatever blah blah..."

BG: That's important for a lot of our community. They don't want to play an old game. They want to play a new game, and if they upgrade, they don't want their new hardware to not have compatibility. That's the problem our FFXI users are running into. They buy a new graphics card - Oh, we have a list of graphics cards not to buy because they cannot play FFXI on those graphics cards!

SE: That's one of the main things we have in our head when we're planning for our new engine. We want those high-end users to take advantage of their high-end platform and get the best out of it as they can. To make sure we have an engine that can support that.