FFXIV Updates

For a game so earnest on claiming that it wont be a replacement to FFXI, its newly added information seems to contradict that. Here I’ll sum up the info and give you a little speculation. Click to enlarge.

Worlds, City-states, Races:

Ul’dah, Gridania, Limsa Lominsa. Currently there is only information on Limsa. Limsa is a chain of islands, over time sailors and pirates have crashed their ships on the surrounding rocks and ended up making their home there. This made Limsa into a port town, and eventually they created their own navy. However the out skirting islands are still run rampant by pirates and pillagers, the Knights of the Barracuda suspect that their own people may be involved.

Yay pirates! I always liked the concept of that when I went to Norg. I wonder how much they are going to expand on that? In FFXI we didn’t see much of pirates even though they had an existence in game. Then came TOAU and we got Corsair, rather than hawking them as true pirates, they were outcasts of the Empire. Opposition to the Imperial Blue Mages. It sounds like an interesting concept though and I bet we can see some promising cut scenes.

Races are comprised of Elezen (Elvaan), Lalafell (Tarutaru), Hyur (Hume), Roegadyn (Galka), Miqo’te (Mithra). Similar to FFXI, Elezen are a proud race, Lalafell are intelligent and agile, Hyur are comprised of highlanders and mid-landers with a background in cultivation and due to migration tend to be multi-lingual, Roegadyn because of their size posses great strength but have also been said to master the art of magic, Miqo’te are great hunters and scavengers with a fierce nature.

Sounds like the original traits of Elvaan, Taru, Hume, Galka, and Mithra. From the site previews it looks like there are only Roegadyn M, and Miqo’te F, but I think that will probably change. That or they will add something similar of a completely new race. At the least I think we can say they have not revealed all the races yet.

Game Play:

“The Armory” & “Disciple” system. Basically your job is defined by your weapon. There are 4 Disciple classes; Disciple of War, Disciple of Magic, Disciple of Land, Disciple of Hand (lol… I’m not making a dirty joke-). War is obviously melee weapons while magic is well… magic weapons. Land is basically crafting and hand is gatherers. You will be able to choose between learning a single job and specializing in it, or taking up multiple ones.

From what it says, it’s sort of hinting that you can freely change jobs when you want. That’s something we have wanted in FFXI for quite some time. I remember when people use to use hacks to bring a portable mog house with them in a sense, and change job whenever they liked. S-E was on top of banning hackers eventually though, so you didn’t see that very often. I’m glad to see a return of crafting, I always liked turning my materials into something, I think it’s one of the best things you can do for an MMO’s economy.

Guildleves is another system, basically set up for questing. You can choose what kind of quest you want, and what suits your level. The duration and difficulty will vary. It will cater with those who have endless amounts of time and those with very little time to play. Some quests will combine other quests for a large sized campaign.

It looks like this system is focused on coordinating party members, which is something I always really liked about FFXI. It was one of the best ways to make friends… erm as well as enemies. At least it provided a little social action either way. The description of this was a little vague but it seems like they’ve learned that assault, campaign, and fields of valor was rather successful in FFXI and it was also a good way to kill time. While this system sounds much more interesting, it will probably be very addicting for completionists like me.

Aetheryte is basically a new crystal teleportation system. They are based in different city-states for fast travel. It will also have a penalty for using it by way of being weakened after teleporting (because it’s taxing to have your body broken up into little tiny particles!)

Well… this reminds me of Linage II haha. It’s kind of weird they added a penalty like that, you’d think they figured out we didn’t like weakness after dying so much in XI. Hopefully there will be other ways of quick transportation as well.

So that’s about it! They added some new screen shots, and have updated the release date to officially be 2010 (gosh that seems so far away but it’s only next year! I feel old.) Little tidbits I can give you is that the battle system will be in real-time, S-E states that it will not be simply target based and you will need to consider the area around you as well. How that works in specific they have not disclosed.

Be sure to sign up for the news letter if you have interest in XIV because they will send you an e-mail whenever there are new updates, it’s located on their website. (Don’t forget CLgamer’s news letter too!)