If you’ve tried out one of the several Babylon’s Fall beta sessions, you may have noticed some of the armor sets look familiar. That’s because they’re from Final Fantasy XIV, and director and producer Naoki Yoshida gave the team at PlatinumGames permission to use those assets. Both Yoshida and Babylon’s Fall producer Yosuke Saito explained how it all happened in a new blog.

Since Babylon’s Fall opened up for its third closed beta test, players have compared striking similarities between the hack-and-slash game’s armor and emotes to those you find in Final Fantasy XIV. Skimming Reddit, Twitter, etc., yields plenty of results with in-game examples from both titles, but Yoshida and Saito clarified that those borrowed assets are intentional, at least for now.

“Yes, Babylon’s Fall contains gear and emote data borrowed from Final Fantasy XIV,” wrote Saito. “When I gave my Babylon’s Fall presentation at a company meeting, Final Fantasy XIV 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 using some of the MMO’s data is helping Babylon’s Fall widen the scope of its gear variety and that those borrowed pieces are quite prevalent in the introduction and mid-game portions of the project. He also notes “most of the gear” should be unique to the PlatinumGames title. Yoshida tacked his own comments onto the post, adding Square Enix “can’t give it an unlimited budget,” since it’s a new title and that’s the key reason you see borrowed Final Fantasy XIV bits.

Yoshida apparently didn’t think borrowing one game’s data for the other would become a hot-button issue, but I’m a little less shocked. Eagled-eyed players routinely get pretty angry over reused assets, and while I understand to some degree, this one is kind of weird to get bent out of shape over. Both Saito and Yoshida sit on Square Enix’s board of directors, they’ve got skin in the game, I reckon making one easier to test based on the success of the other during its developmental phases should be easy dots to connect. These games aren’t from the same series, but these are people working together to shape up new projects they have a vested interest in.

Babylon’s Fall just seems like it has a lot of other, more important issues to be worried about, especially since games routinely reuse assets. I’m not really concerned about where I’ve seen that staff texture before, and more concerned about the directionless empty husk of a service game it’s shaping up to be. There’s no release date for it just yet, but I do hope when that day comes a set of reused assets save the team working on it time and give them the chance to turn it into something better.

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