How FFXIV Works According to 1UP and more from ZAM

UPDATE #2: New higher res images of the areas have been posted at BG and I’ve added the images to the gallery below. Credit goes to Luciferu.

UPDATED: Elmer posted more details in his article over at ZAM, including the following new images:

Image courtesy of ZAM.com

Image courtesy of ZAM.com

From Elmer’s update:

“Guild Leave” will be the main system of quests in the land of Eorzea.  The article states you can use a variety of “leaves” to customize your own quests.  This use of items to construct the requirements of your task sounds familiar to the Moblin Maze Mongers system in Final Fantasy XI. Each card, or “leave” depicts a patron saint of Eorzea doing a task representative of the goal that card will impose on your character.

The left-most card has a picture of a holy knight named Saint “Danofen” slaying a dragon.  It is labelled 勇胆 (yuu-tan) for “Stalwart Bravery” and is used to create a quest wherein you must defeat a fearsome monster.

The middle card depicts a Saint “Toturu” hunting rats.  This is labeled 勤勉 (kin-ben) for “Diligence” and assigns a goal of exterminating bothersome creatures to receive the gratitude of others.

The right-most card shows Saint “Moorugin” forging a sword.  The object here is to craft bows from branches for the benefit of fellow adventurers.

1UP has posted a long article detailing some of the information that will be included in this Friday’s Famitsu feature on the game, which is reported to be about 9 pages long.

How Final Fantasy XIV Works – 1UP

Eorzea’s nations used to be constantly at war with each other, but the advent of airborne battleships and other shockingly powerful weapons has created a state of détente throughout the land. The resulting peace has led to a wide swath of soldiers and mercenaries suddenly without a job, and so they’re now forming guilds and calling themselves under a new name: adventurers.

That’s the very basic plot behind Final Fantasy XIV, the PS3/PC online RPG that Square Enix revealed at this year’s E3. Now Square Enix is ready to reveal more of the goods, and in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine, game director Nobuaki Komoto offered some of the first really concrete details behind the MMORPG’s gameplay. Here are the details:

– Eorzea, the continent where players begin their game, is a small continent with several surrounding islands. Time passes, and weather changes, on a regular basis in this world, with one in-game day currently set to be about an hour of realtime. This exact figure may change, but as Komoto puts it, “it won’t be like Eorzea will be night for hours because it’s nighttime in reality… I want FFXIV to be enjoyed even by those who can play only a short time out of the day, so I’d like the sort of time schedule such that it’s always a different experience timewise when you login to Eorzea.”

– Eorzea is home to five races which, although they have different names, look quite a bit like the races in Final Fantasy XI. You have the Hyuran (Hume in FFXI), Miqo’te (Mithra), Lalafell (Tarutaru), Elezen (Elvaan) and Roegadyn (Galka), and as you’d expect, you can fully customize the look your character no matter what race he or she’s a member of. Hyuran are further divided into “midlanders” and “highlanders,” and Miqo’te are divided into the diurnal Sunseekers and the nocturnal Moonkeepers, though how this affects gameplay is still under wraps.

– FFXIV’s “armory system” is what defines your character’s growth. The game has four broadly defined “job skills” — Fighter, Sorcerer, Gatherer and Crafter — each of which has a variety of more specific classes (Swordsman, Blacksmith, Caster, etc) attached to it. You can change your class instantly simply by changing your weapon and armor, and as you fight and complete quests with that equipment, your character will advance in that class. You’re free to concentrate entirely on one class, or try to balance yourself out among all the job skills.

This armory system isn’t exactly like the “job” concept that most Final Fantasy games work under. “The way I see it, the player can define how his own job works,” says Komoto. “For example, if you have the Swordsman skill, that’s enough to let you play by yourself, but if you’ve also raised your Sorcerer skill enough to unlock that skill’s healing magic, that’ll make solo play a lot easier for you. You can carry enough equipment around at any given time to change your style freely, and the system makes this easy by letting you change sets of equipment all at once.”

– This skill and class system largely replaces the traditional RPG concepts of levels and experience points in FFXIV. Instead of worrying about EXP, “I think the main thrust will be raising the skills you have at hand,” as Komoto puts it. You’ll probably still have to engage in good old-fashioned MMORPG grinding to improve your character, though.

– FFXIV’s quest system involves visiting Eorzea’s guild and receiving work passes from the guildmaster. Other players can cooperate with you, and everyone can put their passes together to involve the entire gang in a sort of mini-campaign. The available passes change at regular intervals, and completing a single quest from one of these passes will be a relatively short process — Komoto estimates it at around half an hour or so. “You don’t need a set number of people for each quest,” he said. “That you can work out by yourself with the other players in the guild, since they’re all there for the same goal.”