Author: freeffxiv

These areas were admittedly still a work in progress. While the maps were mostly finished, the enemies in many of the regions were placeholders, and it was clear that the client we were using had a version with these regions in a state that’s not ready for prime time. Still, it was interesting to look at both and see things that had been changed, updated, and in a few cases removed altogether.

Before I proceed, a note: All of the areas under discussion are still being optimized and improved, so some elements such as lighting and geometry may change by the time you get to play with them.

Ul’dah

It’s impossible to play Final Fantasy XIV’s launch version without being intimately familiar with Ul’dah. The city wound up serving as the de facto player hub, especially since it also had the most logical layout of the three capitals and was the most centrally located. I knew that the main cities hadn’t been changed extensively, but even minor changes would stand out like a sore thumb in the city.

The first thing that struck me was the result of removing the market wards: The Flames’ new headquarters are located in an alcove adjacent to the Aetheryte plaza, similar to the alcove that serves as the front of the Platinum Mirage. Most of the guild houses have remained largely unchanged, but a few of the passages within the city have been altered slightly, just enough so that old players will stumble over differences.

On the upper level of the city, the cold stone has been replaced with opulent red carpeting, with many parts of the city benefiting from added details and decoration. While the Wellhead Left was non-functional, a prominent sign indicating the airship landing has been added to both the upper and lower floor, while the avenue between the Gold Court and the Quicksand has been widened slightly and given an impromptu stage in the center.

More than anything, the revamp is made plain by extra NPCs on the streets, notices on storefronts, and bits of interest all over the place. The city is mostly intact but feels quite different from its original incarnation.
Central Thanalan

Here is where the major deviations begin. It’s easy to see points of similarity between the old Thanalan and the new one, but the two regions are immensely different, starting with climate. Where Thanalan was previously nothing but badlands and desert with a handful of oases scattered about, the central area now more closely resembles the Serengeti. Thin grass grows in various places, trees stretch above the landscape with thick trunks and broad boughs, and moles still dart about as they always have.

Some things never change.

Black Brush has gone from being a small camp to being full-featured, with reasonable buildings and plenty of bustling activity. Not too far from the camp, players can find several ruined buildings, ones that appear to be the subject of a new excavation. The mining caves have been refurbished as well; rather than simply having some scaffolding at the gate, the caves now have tracked bridges in place as well as mining carts and a handful of support buildings.

It’s easy to see the source of this new lushness, as water now flows freely though the region, which includes a small waterfall. Certainly Thanalan retains much of its dry and dusty character, but this portion of the area is far more lush and green than before, which brings to mind a region in a state of an unexpected shift.

Also worth noting that new monsters were roaming in the area, although those may simply be placeholders for the moment.

La Noscea

I was informed before the tour of La Noscea that while Limsa is mostly working, the city was not entirely safe to traverse in terms of server stability. Instead, I stayed outside of Limsa, and that was more than journey enough.

Unlike Thanalan, this region has undergone no major climate changes; it’s still white cliffs, thick grass, and cobbled stone. The difference is one of scope. Before, the island was devoid of any human habitation beyond a handful of Aetheryte camps, but now it’s covered in houses, farms, piers, and all manner of fascinating details.

Perhaps most interesting to me was something sitting off the southern coast. At a distance, I could see a crystalline formation there, but as I drew closer, it became clear that it was one of the meteors summoned by Bahamut during the Calamity. The sea itself has reacted in agony, a sign that the king of dragons yet casts a long shadow on Eorzea. It wasn’t far from several docks, ones that I managed to break by jumping over a gate and falling through the sea.

This would be a good time to point out that you still cannot go swimming.

After a bit of laughter, I went back to wandering the region, which is an almost incalculable departure. The fact that buildings dot the landscape help make the area feel more alive, and they also contribute to the sense of difference between the game’s various regions. Here, as you’d expect from Limsan society, settlements are placed wherever they fit and serve a function.

Overall

Even in the places where the fundamental map elements haven’t changed much, the actual character of the maps is worlds different. Far from being the massive expanses of similar ground in the launch game, each region has a distinct character and is overflowing with little touches of detail.

Red Rooster Stead goes from being a farm in name only to a neatly cultivated patch of land with obvious function and the form to back it up. Public notices are posted outside of shops in Ul’dah. Flowers bloom in patches around the water in Thanalan.

The region around Gridania makes the overall zone changes a little more obvious, but from what we’ve seen of these regions, the new Eorzea will be a gorgeous place indeed.

He’s exactly the sort of person who would try something completely insane like remaking a game from the ground up after burning the first version to the ground, for example.

I had the opportunity to sit down for a one-on-one dinner with Yoshida at the Final Fantasy XIV preview event, during which we talked a great deal both about the upcoming relaunch of the game as well as his own experiences in remaking everything. For those of us who play Final Fantasy XIV, it’s obviously an exciting time, but for Yoshida, what’s happening now is the culmination of work that started only a month after he took over control of a game that he had to revitalize after a horrible flop on launch.

As Yoshida remembers it, after he’d been working with the game for a very short time, he knew what he wanted to do with both the story and the game. It needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. So in January of 2011, he sat the team down and showed a full presentation explaining, in his own words, how he wanted to drop a meteor and wipe everything out. Wipe the slate clean completely 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 find himself in the public figure role that being a producer entails.

Not that it’s easy to tell that when confronted with his immense enthusiasm. Yoshida doesn’t just love FFXIV; he loves MMOs in general. His play history reads likea highlight reel of MMOs over the last decade: EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft, RIFT, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2. “You have to be passionate,” he says. “You have to love the field.”

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 polished and a very fun experience. He also noted that the buy-to-play model was interesting from a business perspective and that it that engenders a different set of expectations from players regarding content and updates.

On that note, is FFXIV going to possibly head to free-to-play? It all depends on what happens when the relaunch takes place, but it’s certainly not the first plan. Yoshida definitely feels that the subscription model is the better option, at least initially. “Every game wants to be a subscription game,” he argues.

It’s not that free-to-play is a bad model, but it can be unreliable, prone to wild shifts in revenue over time. It also can be less consistent for the players, with some free-to-play games essentially started as disposable enterprises that players aren’t expected to connect with. Players in general can find the environment less welcoming.

I was especially curious to see what he felt about the North American players. From my perspective, the FFXIV community has always been very contentious and often negative. Imagine my surprise to find that Yoshida feels the NA community is far more positive as a whole than the Japanese community.

It’s not a question of how much criticism he receives; it’s a difference in perspective. North American players have access to a large number of MMOs, and so when a player complains, he’s able to provide points of comparison. By contrast, Yoshida argues, Japanese players as a whole tend to not have the same breadth of experience. He feels that the Japanese community will just tell him that he did something terrible, while American players will provide had feedback on what doesn’t work and why as well as what does work and why.

We discussed briefly what he thought of players who will have lost interest or left by the time the relaunch actually takes place, and it turns out that doesn’t worry him. People have every right to play whatever game they want, he says; it’s been a long wait and it’s understandable to move on. The game will be here when they come back, and he hopes to astonish both new players and old alike with the state of the relaunch.

That level of calm extends to the relaunch as well. When I asked whether anything in the game made him nervous, he replied unambiguously, “No. If I don’t feel something is good enough, I’ll remove it and fix it. There’s no room in this for anything I’m not fully confident about.”

His confidence has kept him fueled through the development process. Catching four hours of sleep a night for two years takes its toll, and Yoshida jokes that he loves red meat because he needs its energy to keep going on the project. Fans have suggested that he take a lengthy vacation after the relaunch goes live, and he says with a grin that he would never attempt something this in-depth or insane ever again.

Then, thinking about it, he laughs. “Not for another five years, at least.”

While players will have access to a sizable chunk of the revamped game when the beta goes live on February 25th, there’s still a lot that’s hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Yoshida’s answers help illuminate more details about what’s going on in Final Fantasy XIV that might not be playable right now but will be in the near future. And even beyond the foundation that’s visible from the beta, the promise of more expansion only adds to the game’s overall quality.

Some of we’ve learned, of course, is merely a matter of filling in details that players might have expected anyway. Vanity pets are in the game already, for example, and the development team is planning on making a surfeit of them in the game available through a variety of methods. The game will also feature a more streamlined title display on a character’s nameplate, as compared to the first version, which showed titles only when you were inspected.

Somewhat less expected is the game’s inclusion of a reputation system akin to Final Fantasy XI’s. Performing quests for a given region improves your reputation and gives you access to new quests, which seems baffling considering the sheer number of quests available even to a new character. No need to worry about the various NPC checks from FFXIV’s predecessor, though, as your reputation will be viewable directly from your user interface.

Legacy players will still have to build their reputations from the ground up, of course, but they’ll be starting at a slightly different point compared to new players. Yoshida impishly hinted that the full cinematic trailer offers a clue as to what Legacy characters will experience. He also told me that Legacy characters will have their home nations determined by their Grand Company affiliations, but this can be changed during the course of the main scenario (going into further details would be spoiling the plot).

Of course, unless you’re starting as a Legacy player with everything at maximum level, you’re going to run into the problem of having several classes to level and potentially not enough quests to see them through. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t already have many forms of content for leveling characters, but the development team is looking into making things even easier via a system allowing you to split your experience gains using the Armoury system. The last thing the developers want is for players to be forced into the same content every time they’re leveling a new class.

Not every new system is up for discussion. When asked about Materia, Yoshida confirmed that it will be implemented for testing in phase 3 and will be very different from the previous system, but he would not comment further. Jobs are also coming in the future, although they will retain much of their prior functionality.

Fishing, however, will not be retaining its previous functionality. I asked Yoshida whether fishing will have more tradeskills using its harvested items in the revamp, and he replied that the team actually went in the opposite direction by making fishing focus on the experience of fishing. If you like to fish, you can enjoy it as a hobby with its own merits rather than simply feeling it’s necessary for a crafting class.

Unfortunately, this does mean that we can give up on the idea of fist weapons made from live sharks.

Of course, the in-game gathering log will provide players with a wealth of information about where to get what they need from the two gathering professions that still focus around crafting classes. Some items will be obtained through other means. And then there’s the Lodestone site and the game’s upcoming mobile app…

What, you didn’t know about the mobile app? Nobody did, so that’s understandable. At launch, it’ll serve as a database more than anything, but there’s the possibility of additional features in the future, including some paid features such as access to auctions and the like. It will also be available for both Apple and Android devices, good news for anyone accustomed to being the also-ran in the mobile device market.

Chocobos are also receiving improved functionality, serving as player companions whenever you need a second person to complete some difficult task. Your personal chocobo takes on a role similar to the companions of Star Wars: The Old Republic — you can customize the bird’s role as well as a basic AI script based off of the Final Fantasy XII Gambit system. Chocobos also take up a party slot, so you could conceivably try to take on a four-person dungeon with two players and two chocobos.

Some of the chocobo’s abilities will be influenced by your choice of chocobo costume, which will be available in several styles right from launch (about 15 to start with). There are also plans for a chocobo vs. chocobo system, so you can pit your stalwart companion and mount against those of another player.

Not that bird fights are all that the revamp will have in terms of PvP. As it stands now, there will be two types of PvP areas. The first is the Coliseum, a structure built by all three Grand Companies to serve as a training ground for their soldiers. Players will join teams and be matched against similarly skilled teams in a classic arena format. The other option is zones designated as free PvP areas, warzones that carry increased risk for players and will make that clear when you’re entering them.

Hoping for more open-world stuff? You’ll be slightly disappointed. Yoshida and the other developers don’t feel that open-world ganking fits the feel of FFXIV, so there will not be free-for-all rules in general.

Needless to say, there will be special armor awarded to players skilled at PvP. But if that’s not your thing, you can also earn yourself rewards through the FATE system, including company seals from most events and special rewards from endgame events. Some of these special rewards could include new mounts for players to enjoy.

Once you’ve gotten all of these rewards, you’ll probably want to put some of them in your house, but you will need to wait a little. Housing will be tested during the beta, but it’s on the schedule to be implemented about three months after the launch. Part of that is simply a matter of figuring out the right price and giving players a chance to save up the money necessary to buy property; having a house is not an automatic thing.

It’s not meant to be ruinous, either. Initial offerings will be expensive, but one of the ideas the developers are toying with is having higher prices for first-run buyers, with the cost of property starting high and shrinking with every 12-hour interval. So if there’s a piece of land you must have, you’ll pay dearly for it… but if you’re less picky, there’s more opportunity to snag something on the cheap.

We also briefly discussed the Arcanist, the newest class being added to the game in the revamp. Arcanists will fulfill the role that Yoshida felt was most sorely missed from the original version: a buff and debuffing role with added crowd control. As the class also makes use of summoned pets, some elements of the role will change based on which pet is active. Veteran players needn’t worry, however, as the designers are trying to ensure that every class needs to be raised to only about 30 for you to have all the important abilities for cross-class skills.

There’s a lot to explore even in the game’s current beta build, but the fact that there’s still more on the near horizon should keep players excited. The original launch left a bad taste in players’ mouths by promising more to come and not delivering, but the new game seems to promise more and then deliver even more than expected.