Babylon's Fall, the upcoming online fantasy RPG from Platinum Games and Square Enix contains a range of gear and emotes 'borrowed' from Final Fantasy 14.
During a recent closed beta for Babylon's Fall, a number of players noticed that the game's armour sported some similar looks to the Final Fantasy MMO. Following speculation, producer Yosuke Saito confirmed the connection in an update post, confirming that not only had Babylon's Fall borrowed a number of assets from FF14 but also that this came following an offer from Final Fantasy 14's director Naoki Yoshida.
"To get straight to the point: yes, Babylon's Fall contains gear and emote data borrowed from Final Fantasy 14," confirms Saito in the post. "When I gave my Babylon's Fall presentation at a company meeting, Final Fantasy 14 Producer & Director Naoki Yoshida was also in attendance and offered his help, to which I replied, “Yes, please!” This is how the plan came to fruition. We then carefully implemented the data while closely coordinating with the Final Fantasy XIV team."
Saito says that by borrowing data from FF14, the team has been able to add a far greater range of gear and emotes to Babylon's Fall than originally planned. That being said, the producer was also keen to point out that the majority of the gear sets that players will be able to obtain in-game are unique to Babylon's Fall itself.
"The data borrowed from Final Fantasy 14 was used for gear from the introduction to mid-level range of the game, which is why they were so prevalent in the Closed Beta Test," concluded Saito before apologising for any concerns that players may have felt following their recent hands-on experience with the game.
Elsewhere in the post, Yoshida gave his thoughts on Babylon's Fall borrowing assets from FF14. After stating that he was "kind of jealous" not to be making a hardcore action-based hack and slash game himself, the FF14 director noted that "preparing all of the gear variations needed for the gameplay [would be] really difficult."
"So, I said, 'Let’s use FFXIV’s assets too. We have so many, it’d be a shame to limit them to FFX14 alone,' and that’s how it all started," explains Yoshida in the post. The director then goes on to confirm that the use of any FF14 assets in Babylon's Fall would be "fully supervised" by the Final Fantasy 14 team while also admitting that at the time, he didn't think it would become such a hot topic.
For more on Babylon's Fall make sure to check out our preview of the game in which we discuss some of the factors which have contributed to its rough start to life. Alternatively, you can watch the interview below to hear more about the game from its development team.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
