and remake the game from the ground up. A few members of the staff were skeptical, but most of them were excited to be working on something so audacious and unprecedented.

Really, "audacious" doesn't begin to cover it. The End of an Era trailer cost about $3 million to produce, and the cinematic team started working on it in April of 2011. Even then, it was down to the wire to see whether it would be ready on time. It's been an immense undertaking for Yoshida, made all the more stressful by his taking on the role of both producer and director for the title. Even though all of the decisions wind up being his, the two sides are often in conflict, and he claims to not naturally findhimself in the public figure role that being a producer entails.

Some of those are unsurprising; playing with the FATE system invites comparisons to RIFT's eponymous rifts and the public quests of Warhammer Online. It's the latter that Yoshida claims inspired the system, but they're not something that he considers to be a special feature of the game. As he sees it, these mechanics and ideas are a good way to make the game more fun. They shouldn't be a marketing point; they should be a central feature in every game, another option for players to enjoy.

He also believes that Guild Wars 2 did a good job with the same basic system, something that was inspiring for the FATE mechanics. Apparently he quite enjoyed GW2, feeling it was very