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[Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn] Next Beta This Wednesday July 10 (Lasts Five Days!)
Never played FFXIV, but that video still managed to be pretty awesome, even without a word. I'll have to go watch all the story cutscenes, but that ending sorta stands alone and provides quite the 'hopeless struggle' vibe.
One question - I gather the 'bad' army was Empire, but why were they fighting a battle against the 'good' army right there? Was the dude in the airship basically Kefka II, using his army to achieve a horrible end goal only he knows? The Intro video makes it seem like the Empire is fighting the dragons too, and wouldn't be all that excited about Bahamut popping in to lolfireball everyone.
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There isn't a ton of interaction with the "Empire" in the actual story quests.
They did that extremely poorly (unless it was rectified with later quests); in that there was always the threat of the Empire but you never actually saw them. You couldn't go to their lands, there was never any real presence by them in the world, they were just constantly referenced in quests and such. Occasionally you'd fight a dude or something from the empire, but that's the extent of it.
It'd have been like in WoW, if WotLK had you never actually fighting the Scourge and instead just mentioned them all the time and had cutscenes with them, and then....Arthas; after never having encountered the Scourge.
To be fair though, any plans they had to expand upon those quests, concerning the empire, and provide real end game content would have been scrapped when they started planning the whole 2.0 rebuild.
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XBLive GamerTag - II The Starwind (Playing - Halo 4, Dungeon Defeners) PSN ID - S-Starwind (Playing Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, Gundam Battle Ops) Final Fantasy XIV - Masamune Server (Moving to Sargantanas) - Rykosho Hoshikaze Steam ID - The Starwind
It got a bit more involved as you went on. Basically, the Empire's out there doing what Empires do, and in-game they eventually established more of a presence: Imperial soldiers as mobs in Mor Dhona, one of their outposts as a raid dungeon, that kind of thing. The grand company quests dealt with this, and one of their lieutenants in particular: Nael van Darnus, who was a recurring adversary and the final boss of that storyline.
I'm a little fuzzy on the finer points, but while the Empire had some interest in controlling Dalamud (the meteor, actually an artificial construct), van Darnus went bonkers at some point and wanted to use it to destroy everything (or, as it turns out, probably just to unseal Bahamut... which, as you saw, was also rather destructive). Your party stops him from dropping/opening it right then and there, but it's too late to stop it entirely. Those giant blue seals that attempted to contain Bahamut were sigils of the game's twelve dieties, which you ran around activating as a final contingency. Concentrated at Mor Dhona, presumably the point of impact, the hope was this could stop the collision.
I forgot why the Empire was there - likely to interfere somehow, probably with their own plans for Dalamud/Bahamut, or maybe just being opportunistic - but cue final battle, with the consequences as depicted.
The storyline revealed that the Empire's paranoid about the primals (i.e. summons). One of them was accidentally awakened during the fighting at Ala Migo, and it wrecked the Empire's army. As a result, the Empire's gone from purely "invading to take over" to "invading because we want to wipe out something that we don't really understand but that can hurt us badly".
I'd meant to log on before the end. But then I belatedly discovered that I'd accidentally deleted the game as part of my post-Windows 8 install clean-up.
So they woke up Bahamut by accident and it caused the apocalypse? Pretty cool potential. I was on MMORPG.com yesterday and the hype meter has the game up pretty high these days. Lets hope it pans out.
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
So they woke up Bahamut by accident and it cause the apocalypse?
Not exactly by "accident"...
The Empire attempted to control Dalamud (the red moon) a while back before the game started, but accidentally blew up the control facility as a result of their tests. That's what caused Cid to defect to the city-states. There are elements within the Empire that know messing with Dalamud is a bad idea as a result of the previous disaster. But van Darnus was the one responsible for recent attempts to use it, and he was clearly being influenced by outside sources - almost certainly Bahamut (player theory at the time was that Odin was the one responsible). What's not clear is whether the Empire's second attempt was started before or after van Darnus fell under the sway of Bahamut. So the whole thing may very well have been engineered by Bahamut from start to finish.
So what is Bahamuts backstory in XIV then? Was that delved into at all in 1.0? I only made it to level uh...30? and did most of the missions up to that point.
As awesome as that video was, it didn't really make sense that Bahamut just woke up and wrecked everythings shit, and he clearly wasn't under anyone elses control.
I suppose not; but he was already apparently imprisoned once, just curious about why, and what in particular made him so angry that he felt the need to do it again.
Usually in FF games when bahamut wrecks everything it's because he's under someone elses control. Bahamut has never really been represented as having his own motives except for uh...FF1? IV kinda but not really. XI I suppose to but his intent wasn't to just destroy everything.
I don't think they get teleported to the future, really; just out of harms way. The trailer we saw before that shows them in the future I think was just time passing and things rebuilding; not necessarily them getting sent there.
Either way, there seems to be a pretty big gap between how the end of 1.0 trailer ended and the realm reborn one; in that uh...god-world-destroyer Bahamut was never taken care of but things seem to be somewhat cheerier in 2.0.
I don't think they get teleported to the future, really; just out of harms way. The trailer we saw before that shows them in the future I think was just time passing and things rebuilding; not necessarily them getting sent there.
Either way, there seems to be a pretty big gap between how the end of 1.0 trailer ended and the realm reborn one; in that uh...god-world-destroyer Bahamut was never taken care of but things seem to be somewhat cheerier in 2.0.
Bahamut was just cranky. He helped fix everything afterwards as an apology, and you can build things pretty quick with a big doomsday dragon helping out!
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As is often the case in Final Fantasy, there appears to have been an ancient civilization. For some as yet unknown reason, they turned Dalamud into a prison.
The following bits of information is technically all spoilers... but you can't play the content anymore, so most people probably won't care. On the remote chance that someone does, I'm hiding it anyway.
The climactic fight of the Grand Company storyline involved the death of van Darnus. It was hoped that this would keep Dalamud from finishing its plunge. As a final precaution, you were tasked with running around to symbols of the twelve gods scattered around the land in an attempt to invoke their help to stop Dalamud. Obviously, that didn't work.
I suppose not; but he was already apparently imprisoned once, just curious about why, and what in particular made him so angry that he felt the need to do it again.
Usually in FF games when bahamut wrecks everything it's because he's under someone elses control. Bahamut has never really been represented as having his own motives except for uh...FF1? IV kinda but not really. XI I suppose to but his intent wasn't to just destroy everything.
In-game, primals are somewhere between sentient beings and raw destructive forces. In each case you fight them, they're basically wrecking people's shit for no clear reason. Ifrit had some relationship with one of the beastman tribes, but that was about the extent of their intelligent behavior; I think the implication was they're being twisted by something. Given the scale Bahamut is working on, it's possible he was that something, and he was sealed for precisely that reason.
As for where you got sent, it's probably not too far in the future. Concept art showed a destroyed Limsa Lominsa, and some of the gameplay footage showed Gridania with a largely similar layout. Might just be for demo purposes, but I'm inclined to agree that you were just sent out of harm's way rather than far into the future. It's possible he didn't even know where he was sending you, but it was the best he could do given the circumstances.
Just guessing, frankly. Can't say I'm not curious, though. Taken as an extended (albeit unintentional) prologue, it's one hell of a setup.
So I hadn't really seen a reference to it, but is a Realm Reborn an expansion or a re-release? Will people who bought the original game be required to pay beyond a re-sub?
You shouldn't? be required to rebuy the game if you had previously been a subscriber. It should just be the sub.
How they'll distribute the client remains to be seen; since its a new engine they can't just have people install the old one and there doesn't seem to be any indication they expect people to rebuy the game. It'll probably just be straight digital distribution via their horrid torrent system, but we shall see.
They've shown some combat from 2.0 in past videos.
It's faster paced than 1.0 combat in that you have 3 resources instead of 2, (time is the third, makes sense with how they divvied up abilities in 2.0) so that you're not going into fights auto-attacking till you get enough TP to do an ability. You have some abilities that still require TP, thus time, and those will only really come into play in longer fights or in chains. What you'll be using mainly solo are MP abilities and time abilities. MP abilities are still resource intensive as you can run out; but the time abilities will be ones that you can use off the bat that require nothing banked for it, just for it to not be on cooldown.
The little bit of combat they showed was just going into fights and unleashing the initial barrage of timed abilities and finishing quickly; no clue about level disparities or whatever; but the main idea seems to be to bring combat into more of a modern MMO style instead of the old slower FFXI style.
But anyway, yeah, not even alpha yet so give it some time.
The main issue I've noticed with combat as shown so far is that the GCD is 2 or 3 seconds and either way that is a relatively long time compared to other games.
I'm really digging the music so far. It's got that Skyrim "made for the atmosphere" feel. The areas themselves look top notch too, and hopefully will look even better as it moves from Alpha to Beta to Final.
But they're so empty...I don't just want players and enemies running around, I want more wild life too. Again, Alpha state, so hopefully these areas will feel more "lived in" as it nears the final stages.
Yoshi-P also recently confirmed what most of us already knew: the original FFXIV team didn't research WoW in any way, shape, or form. Slow clap for those folks there, that's going to sit among the all-time boneheaded decisions from devs.
He also goes on to say that Square Enix is essentially "doomed" if they ever pull off another failure like FFXIV. He may be stating the obvious, but he's also probably the only person in that company who realizes this.
XI doesn't really have any 'wildlife' to speak of (in the sense of WoW's critters and such anyway) and feels very lived in; but that is mainly due to very detailed and intricate zone design. Every nook and cranny of the main world zones in XI have fauna and other things that make sense for where they're at and go a long way to making every zone feel real. Whereas FFXIV has cut and paste masses of land that couldn't really have care taken to customize or anything.
Also, enemies tended to be in areas that made sense. When you got closer to a beach or a lake you'd start seeing crabs, fliers out in the open, creepy things and wild beasts in forested areas. Beastmen set up camps in semi-logical places and would mill around them, with campfires that lit up at night and the crowded in, and went out during the day as they expanded a bit. My point being that obvious care was taken as to choices for enemy locations and spawns (not counting Abyssea, but those zones serve a different purpose entirely) to make every area feel 'right' and alive. EDIT: So in that sense, yeah, it's got a ton of wildlife to make it feel real. In XIV zero care was taken, shit just spawns everywhere, even where there are specific monster 'camps' there's no real reason for them, and just kind of exist. How they did the personal instancing for leves was a good idea but just really poorly (for setting an atmosphere) implemented; but I'll grant that the completely generic zone 'design' (if you can even call it that) didn't really leave many options there.
For my money XI still has the best zone design and feel of any MMO I've played, though GW2 looks like it could give it a run for its money; I just am not willing to shell out for that one yet.
Anyway, hopefully the shift back to the XI type of zone will allow the designers to really get detailed with stuff and make every zone feel unique and personal again.
I'm sure it's technical limitations to a point, but watching that video, seriously they could jsut make that place look a lot more alive by simply increasing the spawn density of non-aggroing enemies in well traveled areas, in a sensible way, to make it feel lived in. And, for instance, going up into that bridge section that is raised; just toss an NPC here and there along the path, it would go a long way to making it feel like a world where these npc's actually live in.
Either way though, that single video looks 1000% better than anything in 1.0. EDIT: it's got a very Sanctuary if Zi'tah feel to it, if the fog dispersed. A very excellent zone indeed.
Well, they did mention that their priority for the Alpha was to cram in as many PCs in one area as possible in order to stress test the server load. There's going to be almost four times as many players on screen then in the original FFXIV, so I can understand that they want to hard-lock that down first.
I'm sure there will be more...stuff...once they get that part sorted.
Yeah, in that little village at the end of the video, it really feels pretty empty, NPC wise. They could be relying on PC's to fill that space, but I hope they toss in a few more NPC's to mill about either way.
I wonder how limiting the PS3 is to their design. Currently the PS2 is the major limiting factor for XI, but even despite it, it still has very detailed zones. I will grant though that they're very low poly zones with low res textures to compensate. I wonder how scale-able it is, so maybe PC players could see just visual details like a mess of butterflies or something, and PS3 players would just not display it to save precious resources.
But...I imagine the PC version will be heavily limited by the PS3 version and they won't go much above what the PS3 can do on the PC version, if XI is any indication..
Well, they did mention that their priority for the Alpha was to cram in as many PCs in one area as possible in order to stress test the server load. There's going to be almost four times as many players on screen then in the original FFXIV, so I can understand that they want to hard-lock that down first.
I'm sure there will be more...stuff...once they get that part sorted.
That report. Its in line with the plans and timeline that were laid out prior to the shutdown in one of YoshiP's blogs, but it made me wonder how 'full' the world of 2.0 will be at launch.
They're still only showing Gridania, and I haven't read anywhere that the Alpha is anywhere but. It says there will be 40 zones though, so that must include ul'dah and Limsa regions. I know, I know, Alpha, but I'm starting to wonder if 1)2.0 will launch without major sections of the world or 2)2.0's launch is gonna be a lot further out that I was expecting.
I don't think PS3 limitations has been an issue, from what they've talked about so far: they said PC development was the biggest priority, and that their goal was to create a super-optimized engine that can be run on virtually any computer. Supposedly this engine also makes it easier to port for PS3 as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they're also considering other platforms too (I think they said "maybe" for 360, but I'm sure they're eye-balling the Wii U, which in truth would be great for that game thanks to the gamepad).
Square has been really solid with their optimization skills lately, if Sleeping Dogs and Hitman are any indication. I'm certain they'll do right with Realm Reborn, where they had failed miserably in every single aspect of FFXIV.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when they say PS3, they actually mean PS4.
Nah, I'm certain they mean PS3. Not to say PS4 won't get a version, I'm sure it will; but the specific gripes I've heard from YoshiP and other 2.0 Devs have been explicitly about difficulties getting things to be smooth on the PS3, even with the revamped engine.
Actually, I'm really hoping their need for this to be successful makes them a little more open to a 360 or whatever the next Xbox is going to be, version. I mean, the one thing they can't give in to is having closed servers on Live; but they got Microsoft to capitulate with XI, and another SE MMO, while not as vital at this point for Microsoft, would be a nice bullet point for the launch of the new system, which might not be too far off from 2.0's launch.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when they say PS3, they actually mean PS4.
This is Square, the slowest game developer on the known solar system. I'll be surprised if it even hits the PS3 in 2013, but even a year ahead with the PS4 in stores, it would still be released as a PS3 game.
Pro: You get the long-winded quest exposition after you agree to do the quest, not before.
Con: Clicking on the key item in order to have it interact with the thing in the environment. I hated this shit in WoW, just let me double click the mound of dirt and have the game auto-fill the jar.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
That actually looks really good. It has the Dragon Age 2 "every time you press a button awesome happens" stylings going for it, and the longer GCD makes it look less smashy and more tactical.
Yeah that's looking good. I think the more deliberate combat is going to turn some folks off though who are used to WoW, or GW or TERA.
But it looks more, as you said, tactical; to me more like FFXI and less button mashy like WoW.
Which is great.
But not for everyone.
Which is fine.
:rotate:
Also there seems to be some weirdness with the mouse in that video. I wonder if they're playing on the PS3 and it has some mouse emulation? Or something?
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One question - I gather the 'bad' army was Empire, but why were they fighting a battle against the 'good' army right there? Was the dude in the airship basically Kefka II, using his army to achieve a horrible end goal only he knows? The Intro video makes it seem like the Empire is fighting the dragons too, and wouldn't be all that excited about Bahamut popping in to lolfireball everyone.
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They did that extremely poorly (unless it was rectified with later quests); in that there was always the threat of the Empire but you never actually saw them. You couldn't go to their lands, there was never any real presence by them in the world, they were just constantly referenced in quests and such. Occasionally you'd fight a dude or something from the empire, but that's the extent of it.
It'd have been like in WoW, if WotLK had you never actually fighting the Scourge and instead just mentioned them all the time and had cutscenes with them, and then....Arthas; after never having encountered the Scourge.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
PSN ID - S-Starwind (Playing Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, Gundam Battle Ops)
Final Fantasy XIV - Masamune Server (Moving to Sargantanas) - Rykosho Hoshikaze
Steam ID - The Starwind
I'm a little fuzzy on the finer points, but while the Empire had some interest in controlling Dalamud (the meteor, actually an artificial construct), van Darnus went bonkers at some point and wanted to use it to destroy everything (or, as it turns out, probably just to unseal Bahamut... which, as you saw, was also rather destructive). Your party stops him from dropping/opening it right then and there, but it's too late to stop it entirely. Those giant blue seals that attempted to contain Bahamut were sigils of the game's twelve dieties, which you ran around activating as a final contingency. Concentrated at Mor Dhona, presumably the point of impact, the hope was this could stop the collision.
I forgot why the Empire was there - likely to interfere somehow, probably with their own plans for Dalamud/Bahamut, or maybe just being opportunistic - but cue final battle, with the consequences as depicted.
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I'd meant to log on before the end. But then I belatedly discovered that I'd accidentally deleted the game as part of my post-Windows 8 install clean-up.
Not exactly by "accident"...
The Empire attempted to control Dalamud (the red moon) a while back before the game started, but accidentally blew up the control facility as a result of their tests. That's what caused Cid to defect to the city-states. There are elements within the Empire that know messing with Dalamud is a bad idea as a result of the previous disaster. But van Darnus was the one responsible for recent attempts to use it, and he was clearly being influenced by outside sources - almost certainly Bahamut (player theory at the time was that Odin was the one responsible). What's not clear is whether the Empire's second attempt was started before or after van Darnus fell under the sway of Bahamut. So the whole thing may very well have been engineered by Bahamut from start to finish.
As awesome as that video was, it didn't really make sense that Bahamut just woke up and wrecked everythings shit, and he clearly wasn't under anyone elses control.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Usually in FF games when bahamut wrecks everything it's because he's under someone elses control. Bahamut has never really been represented as having his own motives except for uh...FF1? IV kinda but not really. XI I suppose to but his intent wasn't to just destroy everything.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I don't think they get teleported to the future, really; just out of harms way. The trailer we saw before that shows them in the future I think was just time passing and things rebuilding; not necessarily them getting sent there.
Either way, there seems to be a pretty big gap between how the end of 1.0 trailer ended and the realm reborn one; in that uh...god-world-destroyer Bahamut was never taken care of but things seem to be somewhat cheerier in 2.0.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Bahamut was just cranky. He helped fix everything afterwards as an apology, and you can build things pretty quick with a big doomsday dragon helping out!
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Coming Next: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones/X-Com Classic
The following bits of information is technically all spoilers... but you can't play the content anymore, so most people probably won't care. On the remote chance that someone does, I'm hiding it anyway.
"That's no moon....that's an egg."
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In-game, primals are somewhere between sentient beings and raw destructive forces. In each case you fight them, they're basically wrecking people's shit for no clear reason. Ifrit had some relationship with one of the beastman tribes, but that was about the extent of their intelligent behavior; I think the implication was they're being twisted by something. Given the scale Bahamut is working on, it's possible he was that something, and he was sealed for precisely that reason.
As for where you got sent, it's probably not too far in the future. Concept art showed a destroyed Limsa Lominsa, and some of the gameplay footage showed Gridania with a largely similar layout. Might just be for demo purposes, but I'm inclined to agree that you were just sent out of harm's way rather than far into the future. It's possible he didn't even know where he was sending you, but it was the best he could do given the circumstances.
Just guessing, frankly. Can't say I'm not curious, though. Taken as an extended (albeit unintentional) prologue, it's one hell of a setup.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oLc46pARMSE#t=99s
The Last Baron by Mastadon dubbed overtop the unedited cinematic, by coincidence it syncs up incredibly. It is the raddest fucking thing I've seen. :O
You shouldn't? be required to rebuy the game if you had previously been a subscriber. It should just be the sub.
How they'll distribute the client remains to be seen; since its a new engine they can't just have people install the old one and there doesn't seem to be any indication they expect people to rebuy the game. It'll probably just be straight digital distribution via their horrid torrent system, but we shall see.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
But that's like saying that your dog is better because he just growls at you menacingly instead of trying to actively gnaw off your leg.
:P
Also new Alpha footage:
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It's faster paced than 1.0 combat in that you have 3 resources instead of 2, (time is the third, makes sense with how they divvied up abilities in 2.0) so that you're not going into fights auto-attacking till you get enough TP to do an ability. You have some abilities that still require TP, thus time, and those will only really come into play in longer fights or in chains. What you'll be using mainly solo are MP abilities and time abilities. MP abilities are still resource intensive as you can run out; but the time abilities will be ones that you can use off the bat that require nothing banked for it, just for it to not be on cooldown.
The little bit of combat they showed was just going into fights and unleashing the initial barrage of timed abilities and finishing quickly; no clue about level disparities or whatever; but the main idea seems to be to bring combat into more of a modern MMO style instead of the old slower FFXI style.
But anyway, yeah, not even alpha yet so give it some time.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
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wait, did you play this at all?
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i tried to play ff14 at launch and it was a disaster
my pc could barely run it and then when i actually was able to play it, i didn't find it fun
but i spent years playing ff11 and i'm enamored with the ff14 setting so i have high hopes for 2.0
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I'm really digging the music so far. It's got that Skyrim "made for the atmosphere" feel. The areas themselves look top notch too, and hopefully will look even better as it moves from Alpha to Beta to Final.
But they're so empty...I don't just want players and enemies running around, I want more wild life too. Again, Alpha state, so hopefully these areas will feel more "lived in" as it nears the final stages.
Yoshi-P also recently confirmed what most of us already knew: the original FFXIV team didn't research WoW in any way, shape, or form. Slow clap for those folks there, that's going to sit among the all-time boneheaded decisions from devs.
He also goes on to say that Square Enix is essentially "doomed" if they ever pull off another failure like FFXIV. He may be stating the obvious, but he's also probably the only person in that company who realizes this.
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Also, enemies tended to be in areas that made sense. When you got closer to a beach or a lake you'd start seeing crabs, fliers out in the open, creepy things and wild beasts in forested areas. Beastmen set up camps in semi-logical places and would mill around them, with campfires that lit up at night and the crowded in, and went out during the day as they expanded a bit. My point being that obvious care was taken as to choices for enemy locations and spawns (not counting Abyssea, but those zones serve a different purpose entirely) to make every area feel 'right' and alive. EDIT: So in that sense, yeah, it's got a ton of wildlife to make it feel real. In XIV zero care was taken, shit just spawns everywhere, even where there are specific monster 'camps' there's no real reason for them, and just kind of exist. How they did the personal instancing for leves was a good idea but just really poorly (for setting an atmosphere) implemented; but I'll grant that the completely generic zone 'design' (if you can even call it that) didn't really leave many options there.
For my money XI still has the best zone design and feel of any MMO I've played, though GW2 looks like it could give it a run for its money; I just am not willing to shell out for that one yet.
Anyway, hopefully the shift back to the XI type of zone will allow the designers to really get detailed with stuff and make every zone feel unique and personal again.
I'm sure it's technical limitations to a point, but watching that video, seriously they could jsut make that place look a lot more alive by simply increasing the spawn density of non-aggroing enemies in well traveled areas, in a sensible way, to make it feel lived in. And, for instance, going up into that bridge section that is raised; just toss an NPC here and there along the path, it would go a long way to making it feel like a world where these npc's actually live in.
Either way though, that single video looks 1000% better than anything in 1.0. EDIT: it's got a very Sanctuary if Zi'tah feel to it, if the fog dispersed. A very excellent zone indeed.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I'm sure there will be more...stuff...once they get that part sorted.
Edit: In fact, here is a report that states exactly what they hope to get out of the Alpha test: http://www.siliconera.com/2012/11/30/this-is-how-the-final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn-alpha-helps-square-enix/
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I wonder how limiting the PS3 is to their design. Currently the PS2 is the major limiting factor for XI, but even despite it, it still has very detailed zones. I will grant though that they're very low poly zones with low res textures to compensate. I wonder how scale-able it is, so maybe PC players could see just visual details like a mess of butterflies or something, and PS3 players would just not display it to save precious resources.
But...I imagine the PC version will be heavily limited by the PS3 version and they won't go much above what the PS3 can do on the PC version, if XI is any indication..
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
That report. Its in line with the plans and timeline that were laid out prior to the shutdown in one of YoshiP's blogs, but it made me wonder how 'full' the world of 2.0 will be at launch.
They're still only showing Gridania, and I haven't read anywhere that the Alpha is anywhere but. It says there will be 40 zones though, so that must include ul'dah and Limsa regions. I know, I know, Alpha, but I'm starting to wonder if 1)2.0 will launch without major sections of the world or 2)2.0's launch is gonna be a lot further out that I was expecting.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Square has been really solid with their optimization skills lately, if Sleeping Dogs and Hitman are any indication. I'm certain they'll do right with Realm Reborn, where they had failed miserably in every single aspect of FFXIV.
Let's hate that game forever.
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Nah, I'm certain they mean PS3. Not to say PS4 won't get a version, I'm sure it will; but the specific gripes I've heard from YoshiP and other 2.0 Devs have been explicitly about difficulties getting things to be smooth on the PS3, even with the revamped engine.
Actually, I'm really hoping their need for this to be successful makes them a little more open to a 360 or whatever the next Xbox is going to be, version. I mean, the one thing they can't give in to is having closed servers on Live; but they got Microsoft to capitulate with XI, and another SE MMO, while not as vital at this point for Microsoft, would be a nice bullet point for the launch of the new system, which might not be too far off from 2.0's launch.
That's just dreaming though.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
This is Square, the slowest game developer on the known solar system. I'll be surprised if it even hits the PS3 in 2013, but even a year ahead with the PS4 in stores, it would still be released as a PS3 game.
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Ask and ye shall receive.
Pro: You get the long-winded quest exposition after you agree to do the quest, not before.
Con: Clicking on the key item in order to have it interact with the thing in the environment. I hated this shit in WoW, just let me double click the mound of dirt and have the game auto-fill the jar.
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But it looks more, as you said, tactical; to me more like FFXI and less button mashy like WoW.
Which is great.
But not for everyone.
Which is fine.
:rotate:
Also there seems to be some weirdness with the mouse in that video. I wonder if they're playing on the PS3 and it has some mouse emulation? Or something?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand