Final Fantasy XIV

Square Enix has announced today that Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is set for release on August 27, 2013 on both PC and PS3.

According to previous reports, the third phase of the relaunched game's beta will begin some time next month. This phase will be the first time A Realm Reborn will be open to PS3 players during this beta.

Click past the jump for complete details on pre-order bonuses and the Collector's Edition box contents as well as the new video.

[Source: Square Enix press release]

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Do you smell that on the wind, my friends? It smells like June is fast approaching, and more importantly it smells like soon we'll be able to welcome the third phase of testing with open arms. Which is good, since I am currently going through withdrawal. I wake up in cold sweats, try to change my class in other games, start up the Final Fantasy XIV beta client in the hopes that someone "accidentally" turned the servers back on... you get the general idea.

To help alleviate this, I'm going to talk about the two pieces of the game from the first two beta phases that are in need of the most polish. While there are places to improve elsewhere, FATEs and dungeons have issues that might need a bit more hammering to fix. Or they might be fine and we just haven't yet seen enough of the game to know everything. Either way, let's get started with the big addition to the game, the system that had no predecessor in Final Fantasy XIV's first version: the FATE system.

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The team at Square-Enix has a treat for fans eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn today: several screenshots showing off the possibilities that await in the updated character creation tool.

Several interesting looks are on display here, including vibrant hair color, hair styles, tattoos, long hair for females, plenty of sliders, and new colors for eyes. Check out these radical looks in the gallery below!

My, that's a large... sword that you're holding at a very interesting angle, there. Compensating for something, perhaps? Maybe it's impotence caused by the long wait until Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn comes to a home PC or PS3 near you?

Then we have the cure! No, it's not a little blue pill; it's a new gallery full of FFXIV screenshots and concept art from the upcoming reboot. Check them out and feel assured that your epeen will once again be in action.

[Source: Square-Enix]

We all like to stop and smell the roses. And then we like to pluck those roses, bring them home, and melt them into component enzymes that will allow us access to a temporary attack power buff. Final Fantasy XIV is beautiful, sure, but you need that attack power bonus.

If it isn't obvious, this week's stop on my whirlwind beta tour is the fine art of grabbing items from the landscape and turning them into crafting fodder. Final Fantasy XIV had quite an interesting gathering system at launch, but it also had some pretty serious problems, and so the relaunch had to completely revamp the system while retaining the soul of the original version. No pressure.

Not a whole lot changed in terms of gathering between my time in San Francisco and my time in the beta, but I did have a great deal more time to try out the gathering system. So let's take a walk on the self-sufficient side.

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Executive Producer Naoki Yoshida has a couple of significant announcements concerning the testing and release of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. He's excited to announce that the relaunch of the title will be happening in "summer 2013," with a more specific date to be announced by the end of May. He also said that details and pre-orders for the collector's edition will be coming this month as well.

"The whole team has been working at full throttle to ensure the game will be ready for a summer release," Yoshida said. "It won't be long before you can mark your calendars and begin the final countdown!"

Before the launch happens, however, phase 3 of beta testing needs to happen. This will start at the beginning of June, according to Yoshida. Phase 3 is notable in that it will be the first time that the PlayStation 3 version of FFXIV will be included in the beta testing.

We know now that the next test phase for Final Fantasy XIV will not be until June. This is good insofar as the next test will contain a lot more stuff and bad insofar as I want to play. Those of you living vicariously through impressions articles such as this one probably have less of a struggle with this scenario. And there is still a chunk of the first two phases to be discussed, obviously.

If combat is the usual "how" of MMOs, quests are the usual "what." Final Fantasy XIV started out with a handful of quests and gained several more during Naoki Yoshida's tenure, but quests still weren't the main leveling content in version 1.0. That was a function reserved for guildleves, which have taken on a new role in the beta phases just as quests are enjoying an expanded importance. But it's not as simple as that change might imply.

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It would be a rare fantasy MMO that didn't have a posse of dragons roaming the land (or flying through the skies), and Guild Wars 2 certainly does not break that trend. It doesn't mean that going head-to-head with one is any less intimidating, however.

Reader Paul sent in this little meet-and-greet with Puff, saying it was when his Asuran Mesmer first encountered a dragon. Let's just hope he remained alive to have a second encounter. Asurans often look like popcorn chicken to dragonkind.

It's not just flying lizards in this week's One Shots! What wonders await you, I wonder?

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I've mentioned in the past that sometimes plans get changed dramatically between when I plan my next column and when I actually write it. This week, it turned out that I could stop being mum about the Final Fantasy XIV beta. So that meant throwing out plans and starting back over. In fact, it meant starting way over, since I found myself with so many things that I wanted to talk about it was difficult to figure out where to start.

So I'm starting with the obvious. I'm going to talk about aspects of the first two beta phases in as much detail as I can realistically fit into a column starting with one of those obvious cornerstones of video games: combat. This isn't meant to be about impressions so much as dissecting and analyzing what I've played to this point, what is working, and what isn't. If you want to know my more in-depth impressions of killing things in Final Fantasy XIV's early test version, read on.

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LAST TIME ON THE PERFECT TEN: Games were shut down, tears were shed, memories were dragged unwillingly from long-term storage, and videos were shown. Also, Marty totally suckered Biff into driving into a truck full of manure and then got his parents to kiss at a dance so that he wouldn't be erased from the space-time continuum.

AND NOW FOR THE EXCITING CONCLUSION!

Is it completely morbid to want to revisit (or see for the first time) the final moments of MMOs? Yes, but also no. Really, it's just interesting to me, and I have no great agenda at play here. Sometimes seeing how a game goes out can tell you a lot about its community and dev team. So join us now as we hit the second half of 10 videos showing the last few minutes of these online RPGs.

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I'm going to completely fail to surprise any longtime readers of the site with this sentence: I am kind of a fan of Final Fantasy XIV.

Of course I am. I write our weekly column about the game, I discuss the game in other columns, and I went across the country to preview the game back in February. It's not a secret. Nor should it come as any surprise that I am a Legacy player and thus have had the opportunity to take part in the game's first two beta test phases. As of today, I can start talking about those experiences.

Well... I can sort of talk about those experiences. A lot of what I have to say was already conveyed back when I took that aforementioned trip in February. My warm feelings about the game have not diminished in any way over the past few months, but rather than rewriting everything, I thought I'd go with a look at some things I've discovered from not hitting just the highs and the lows.

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It's time once again to take a week off from looking at specific MMO soundtracks and open ourselves up to a theme instead. The topic? Battle music. Yeah, it can be some of the most obnoxious music in the game, especially after hearing it for the 3,000th time, but every once in a while I hear a piece that has some merit to it. These are the ones we want to examine today.

What makes for a good battle music track? I think it has to get you excited without being annoying or grating and not so loud or incredibly noticeable that you can't help but get tired of it sooner rather than later. It was actually pretty tricky to pull together six such tracks for this column, but I managed to do with with the help of Colonel Bugle up there. He's got the best MP3 collection around.

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Among the things I'm reluctant to talk about early when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV are the live letters from Naoki Yoshida. There's always a thread rapidly updating players on what is said during those letters, but that thread is filled with quick translations that may or may not be accurate, and I'd prefer not to analyze and speculate on information that may have been misconstrued. The man speaks in dense blocks of information.

To my surprise, this week we got the full translation of the latest live letter, and something that struck me was how much of the game we're still being told is just over the horizon. This is not to say that I don't believe in Yoshi-P; Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 showed that if he promises something, it will be delivered. But there are a lot of things being held back for later, and honestly it's a little disconcerting for someone waiting eagerly for the game to come out.

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As Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn takes shape, so does its website. Square-Enix has updated the official site with scads of new screenshots for many of the game's jobs and professions. We've saved you the time it would take to comb through the entire site hunting each of these down by compiling all of them in one handy-dandy gallery. Behold!

I've done a couple of articles on reoccurring concepts in Final Fantasy games before, but this is an unusual one because it seems to barely qualify at times. Final Fantasy XIV has magitek, as did Final Fantasy VI, but those are the only games to refer to it as such. Sure, other games flirt with similar concepts (Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIII, and Final Fantasy VII most prominently), but none of them is outright called magitek.

Bit there's still some interesting stuff to unpack when it comes to magitek, even if you don't consider the corner cases as you ought to. At a glance it might look like this is a simple manichean split between two factions, but there's a lot more going on and a lot of importance tied up with the term that can hint as to Final Fantasy XIV's future -- beyond the fact that we'll get to ride some magitek armor.

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