final fantasy Archives - Page 12 of 22

Heavensward

October 20, 2014 by Belghast

Fan Festival Was Amazing

Watch live video from finalfantasyxiv on TwitchThere have been several community events that I have watched over the years for the various games I have been into. I’ve watched SOE Live, and Blizzcon… so I guess I was expecting the Fan Festival to feel pretty much the same, but in the end it felt considerably different. With Blizzcon there is always the feeling that the folks from Blizzard are imposed upon to be up in front of the fans, especially during the question and answer sessions. SOE Live on the other hand feels more like a gathering of loyal fans to a long running franchise, but even it felt different. When one of the members of the FFXIV team was on stage, they were practically glowing with excitement at being there. If you think about it, I guess it makes sense… because this is a game that was so bad during the 1.0 launch that they simply could not charge money for it. These team members have through a monumental effort turned the listing ship around and not only stopped it from sinking but made it the second most successful subscription MMO on the market.

Watch live video from finalfantasyxiv on TwitchI think it goes deeper than that however. Each time a developer of any stripe was on stage, they were almost vibrating with excitement about talking to the fans. Naoki Yoshida aka “Yoshi P” the producer of Final Fantasy XIV and the man mostly credited for the games resurrection… was only actually scheduled to be on stage a few times. However he ended up sitting in on damned near every panel because you could just tell that he was having a blast at the festival. The man however that needs the lions share of the credit for pulling off this event as smoothly as it ran is Michael Christopher “Koji” Fox. Not only was he a constant bundle of enthusiasm over all matters lore, but he spent the majority of the conference live translating for every dev panel. This is a pretty monumental feat, and his localization and lore panel is one that everyone should see. Right now the twitch stream are these two 10 hour blocks of video… but I am hoping that these get broken up into individual panels.

Since the release of the game my friends and I have talked about just how awesome the localization and quest writing is for this game, and come to find out… that is almost entirely the work of Koji Fox. The Japanese version of FFXIV apparently lacks almost all of the flavor that the English version of the game has. During the Lore panel they gave a few examples of a Japanese quest that was extremely utilitarian contrasted against one of ours that is all about amazingly bad puns. I feel like the game would not have been nearly as successful were it not for all of this diligent work during the localization process. Apparently it has been noticed, and the Japanese version is going to be much more closely related to style of the English client from this point on. It almost sounded like things would even start in the English client and get translated to Japanese, but I might have misunderstood that bit. In any case Koji for me at least is the reason why this game is so damned sticky.

Heavensward

It is safe to say that I have not been this excited about an expansion in any game since the months leading up to the Burning Crusade. There is just so much that I am looking forward to in Heavensward, not the least of which is the unlocking of Ishgard. I am in the minority among my friends but I love Coerthas, and not because I particularly like the elves that inhabit it. I love snowy climates, and Coerthas is like the king of all snowy climates because it has Dragons and the Dragoons. I am looking forward to having Ishgard be the fourth city state and am hoping that it has a grand company associated with it. I am also hoping that the political assholery that is the Coerthas quest chains… does not represent all of Ishgard as a whole. The other thing that I am completely pumped about is that we don’t have to wait over a year to see this expansion. It is currently slotted for Spring of 2015 which could mean as early as March, but potentially as late as May. This is the way that you announce an expansion… a few months before release so that your fans have enough time to get excited about it, but not so much time that it feels like it is extremely far away.

I think the thing that excites me the most about Heavensward is the potential for new classes. It has already been stated that there will be several new classes and jobs to learn with the expansion, and over the course of the Fan Festival there were a few leaks. During one of the panels Gondai the battle team developer held up a Batman shirt, verifying one of the long held rumors that we would be seeing the Dark Knight. During another panel it was leaked that Samurai would also be included. Between those two I am pretty much in heaven. Both are two of my favorite jobs from the Final Fantasy series, and you can damned well bet I will level both of them… and depending on the particulars will likely switch to Dark Knight as my primary job from that point onwards. I have loved that job since Final Fantasy IV and always found it so damned disappointing when Cecil changes to being a Paladin. My theory is that Dark Knight will be the DPS half of Warrior, and likely use Two Handed Swords… but who knows.

2.4 and Beyond

The most exciting bits for me however had nothing to do with the expansion. We have been waiting anxiously for the 2.4 patch to launch, and during the Live Letter managed to get a definitive date. Next weekend will be the London Fan Festival, and a lot of the job related information is being held back to reveal during that event. However the Tuesday immediately following London, the 28th we are getting the patch that introduces Rogue and Ninja, the Final Coil of bahamut and a bunch of Quality of life tweaks. What I am really hoping is that since Second Coil of Bahamut is getting uncapped in the amount of loot you can get from it each week… that they might be doing the same for Syrcus Tower. If nothing else the Soldiery gear should be considerably easier to get since once again they are introducing a brand new Tomestone category “Of Poetics”, which means they will be converting existing tomestones and lowering the price of items.

What is awesome is that Heavensward is not terribly far away, but they have a whole bunch of stuff that will be going into the game in the meantime. They confirmed that the Golden Saucer area will be going in during 2.5 and with it Chocobo Racing, various mini-games and the thing I am absolutely amped about… Triple Triad. This was a card game that existed as part of the Final Fantasy VIII game where you collected various cards throughout the world and dueled other Triple Triad players. The game play was extremely simple to pick up, but hard to master. I am so ready for this to be in game and expect me to duel a lot while hanging in our housing zone.

Community Spirit

There is a massive rundown on Reddit of all of the things mentioned during the Live Letter during the show yesterday. I highly suggest you check it out if you are wanting more information. Needless to say it is a super exciting time to be playing Final Fantasy XIV. If I was not already enamored with the community I would have been after the Fan Festival. The community spirit was constantly apparent when they dealt with players. There were a number of events set up for players who were attending the show to compete in. Among these was a preview of the as yet to be released Odin Primal fight. Teams of players had 15 minutes to defeat the encounter, which pretty much meant at maximum they had two attempts. The end result was not only bragging rights, but also an “I Beat Odin” shirt only available during the convention. What sprung up around it was an atmosphere of folks cheering on other teams as they tried to get their own shirts and the sharing of tips and pointers. As you talked to players that were defeated by the encounter, all they wanted to do was get back in line and figure out how to tweak their strategy for the next try.

Watching the crowds and watching folks on twitter talking about the experience… it was like the entire group was this big family. I was so happy to see that this same spirit that we seem to have on the Cactuar server, apparently exists on all other servers as well. I feel like each player that has made a home on their server, feels the same way about their own server as being truly “awesome”. The most interesting thing was listening to the various social channels in game during the event. It felt like most of the community was tuned into the festival and sharing tidbits of information they just saw. There was so much cheering over various things, not the least of which was the announcement that the Atma drop rates would be more than doubled starting in 2.4 and the Animus books themselves would be considerably cheaper after the Tomestone conversion. Folks are amped about what is coming during the next few months, and I feel like there won’t be a single dull moment until we arrive at the launch of Heavensward in the spring. If you could not already tell… I am extremely excited.

#FFXIV #Heavensward

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

October 17, 2014October 16, 2014 by Belghast

Little Projects

I am cheating a bit on this post, and writing it the night before I intend to post it. The plan is for us to go running around in Fayetteville tomorrow, and as such I really need not to take my normal leisurely “not having to rush to work” amount to time to write a post in the morning. Today was an insanely busy day. Right now I am taking a few days off work because it is Fall Break here in Oklahoma, and since my wife is a teacher she is out. One of the problems with living with a teacher is that you pretty much have to plan your time off around school breaks. For awhile we had planned on doing a little project, originally the intent was to rip up all of the carpet in the bedroom and paint the floor.

As time got closer to fall break we backed away from that notion, mostly because it would quite literally take all four days of this little break… and since my wife has had an insane semester so far… she really needs to take an actual break, and not a working one. Instead we opted to do a bunch of little things around the house today. Our house for starters was in massive need of a deep cleaning. Additionally we needed to gather up and take another load to Goodwill. The front closet was our key mission, and for quite some time it had been packed with coats and shoes we weren’t actually wearing any longer.

Instead we took what was useless space and turned it into something useable. Previously the closet was full with a bunch of coats that were too big for us since the weight loss. The floor was full of shoes that we longer wore, and the top was full of a bunch of board games that we had not touched since college. We kept the few things we were actually going to use from all of those categories and the end result left us a bunch of open space. We moved an 8×2 cube unit into the empty space, allowing us to store our SLR equipment on top of it, and use the other bins for scarves and such, and the lower two bins for storage of our current shoes. This left a spot on the right side that was perfect for our laptop cases, and just enough room to hang the handful of coats we decided to keep. One of the nice things is once we end up organizing something… it tends to stay organized so here is hoping that is the case with this as well.

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

When I finally crashed on the sofa after working on the house all day long, I logged into Final Fantasy XIV and ran my daily elite roulette with my good friend Cylladora. It went pretty smoothly and when it was finished we both logged out of FFXIV for a bit. I opted to poke my head into ArcheAge for a bit since right now it is pretty much a solo affair for me. A few days ago I applied for Greymoon the guild that everyone I know is playing the game is in… and was accepted, but I have zero clue how to actually go about getting an invite. None of the folks I know have been around since I got accepted, so I figure I will just wait until one of them is on to ask them. The guild requires folks to log into teamspeak, which seems a little odd to me. Granted I spend most of my time connected to TS, but it feels strange to require that folks just log in out of course rather than for them doing so with a purpose.

I am still slowly working my way through the content, and I am closing in on 22. I managed to get a pretty sweet katana to drop earlier which was a massive improvement over the blue sword I had been using for awhile. I took a handful of deaths because I really was not paying nearly as close of attention as I probably should have been. Lately I have been hanging out on the sofa and watching television while playing games, but tonight I opted for a movie. I had yet to see the Amazing Spiderman 2, so I decided to watch it. All in all I think it was a pretty good comic book movie. I’ve never been a massive fan of Spiderman, but I think all kids who read comic books at least know a bit of the storyline and a few of the major villains. It seemed like they did a good enough job at representing both the Green Goblin and Electro. It was good enough to pull my attention from the game a handful of times leading to deaths.

8 Bit Boy

A few days ago I watched the awesome Missy Mojo playing an interesting game on her stream. The game reminded me of a mishmash of a bunch of the late 8 bit Nintendo games as sort of a combination of McKids and Super Mario Brothers 3. 8-Bit Boy pays homage to so many different games and is an absolute steal at only $3.99. I have been playing it off and on, and while I don’t find it in the same league as the various frustration games like Super Meatboy, I find it plenty challenging. I’ve reached a point where the game has started to feel a bit like the special levels in Super Mario World. It isn’t the type of game I can play a lot of in one sitting, but I keep returning to it and whittling away at progress.

There is a certain generic character to the game, that would normally turn me off. The main character is just about as bland as you can get and at the same time looks somewhat like Mario, the character from Adventure Island, and even a little bit Alex Kidd. I think I would have rather the game actually built a strong character for you to play than something that ends up being his amalgam that never is as strong as any of them. The level design kinda feels super generic as well, borrowing elements from a ton of different games. So all of these things would normally turn me off, but I have to say the game play makes up for it in spades. It controls like pretty much the best version of all of the games it is trying to replicate. If you are into that sort of thing, you should totally check it out.

#ArcheAge #FFXIV #8BitBoy

Booking Dungeons

September 19, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Roadtrip

This week the Tokyo Game show is happening and we are starting to get a trickle of goodies out like the long awaited updated Final Fantasy XV trailer. After watching it, I have to say this looks like it might be a Final Fantasy quite unlike the others. My friend Kodra mentioned how unusual it was to see an automobile in the Final Fantasy setting, and I had not really thought about it until then but he is right. It has almost been as though they have denied the existence of Automobiles in pretty much every setting other than Final Fantasy VII. Even in the super futuristic VIII they had the requisite flying airships in the form of giant aircraft… but they still lacked anything even resembling an automobile. Let alone a crazy sedan with suicide doors like they are touring the countryside in for this game.

From the video this seems like the game is going to be more like Final Fantasy XII was in the form of a more “Action Combat” approach to the JRPG. This has its fans and its critics, but I have to say one of my favorite Final Fantasy “cousins” was Vagrant Story that featured a very action combat game play style. I even liked Final Fantasy XII for what I played of it, at some point I want to go back and finish the game. What intrigues me the most about the game is the way it feels like the monsters are almost part disaster movie, like they are taking a road trip to survey the countryside like some sort of awkward rubberneckers. I just hope I can control which ever character I choose, because man I am all about the big dude with the beard and the knock-off buster sword.

Castlevania Dark Souls Edition

Another game I have been looking forward to on the PS4 since this years E3 is the game Bloodborne. At TGS they released a new trailer with some more tasty bits about the gameplay featuring what looks to be multiple classes for the player to choose from. I’ve somehow almost entirely missed the Dark Souls madness, but I am looking forward to this game as it feels more firmly in my wheelhouse. I love Castlevania, and I love the dire battle against the things that go bump in the night feeling that this game has. I just hope that the gameplay is every bit as fun as it looks like in the trailer. For a game like this to work for me, the moment to moment gameplay has to feel amazing… and from what I have played of Dark Souls my problem tends too be the wonky feeling control scheme.

This is probably going to to be a title that I end up trying before actually picking it up. I am sure this is blasphemy here but I actually thought Dragon’s Dogma felt much better than Dark Souls as far as moment to moment gameplay. As such I am really hoping that the control scheme is more similar to Dogma. In any case it is a grim dark game about slaughtering the undead and such, and that along makes me a happy camper. We need more games where we roam the country side slaughtering baddies for fun and profit. The only negative that I can see from the trailer is that like Order 1886 it looks a little bit “on rails” for my tastes. In any case I am watching both of those titles closely.

Booking Dungeons

Wednesday night we had tried to run Pharo Sirius for my friend Waren to complete this first Animus book and wound up failing miserably. In my infinite wisdom I attempted to bring along two of our lowest geared players, one of which was the healer… and quite simply he didn’t have the mana to heal the place at just barely ilevel 48 the bare minimum. Last night however we changed up the mix and brought in a very seasoned healer and cleared the dungeon with minimal effort. That really became the theme of the night, cleaning up dungeons both myself and Warenwolf needed for our Animus books. So in total we ran Pharo Sirius, Lost City of Amdapor, Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Stone Vigil. For the last of these we managed to grab one of our up and coming healers that still needed experience and got her roughly a level in doing the place.

Essentially what we learned through the failure that was Wednesday, and the success that was Thursday is that pretty much you can only afford to have a single player in the mix that is significantly undergeared for the content. There were other issues Wednesday night, like the fact that the player had not completed the level 50 quest and was missing both the piece of armor from it and more importantly the critical ability you get that for white mages is your full heal. I cannot impress upon new players enough that the moment you ding 50… go complete your last Job quest. It always gives your class something that you will desperately need from that point onwards. The game assumes you have these abilities, and will throw things at you that often times require them.

As far as leveling goes I managed to get my Paladin to 39, which let me equip a sweet new Grand Company weapon. Since I got Zantetsuken waiting on me in the bank, I thought I would take this opportunity to glamour my weapon to look like the Blazefire Saber. This might literally be the only time I get to use my spiffy gunblade from the Lightning Returns event… since seriously there is no weapon in the game nearly as cool as Zantetsuken. Additionally I have been banking the Hunt Seals needed to buy my Paladin a full set of gear the moment I ding 50. I am not sure what exactly happened, but at this point I have definitely changed focus from leveling the White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. I think more than anything it was my realization that I lacked a class to easily grind additional Atma bits on, now that I screwed up and got my Warrior Atma weapon first. Atma grinding does two useful things for me… firstly I get the chance at atma bits, but more importantly the steady flow of company seals keeps my ventures running. Hopefully at some point this weekend I will have a brand new paladin ready to go.

#FFXIV #FFXV #Bloodborne

The Atma Weapon

September 3, 2014 by Belghast

Hat For All Occasions

A few weeks ago my friend Tam stumbled onto a hat in his inventory that he has picked up somewhere. It seems he played the game significantly longer than we did, and it seemed to come from some event, or at least that is the impression I got. It was a cute white bunny samurai hat and he used it with his cavalry armor to create a rather unique looking tanking set. This lead me over to the market boards to see what other interesting hats existed, and I stumbled on a very similar hat but it was red and black, and instead of having a closed in mask the visor was completely open. I managed to pick it up for only 1500 gil or so, and immediately I noticed it fit perfectly with my Warrior relic set. So I glamoured it onto the item and started my life as a bunny samurai tank.

Shortly after that I noticed that it also seemed to work pretty well with my Dragoon armor since it also had a lot of black and gold in it. So once again I glamoured the item over my helm and began another life as the bunny samurai dragoon. Tonight I finished getting my Bard job up to ilevel 90, and as I was re-glamouring my pieces to the foestrikers gear set, I wondered just how well the bunny helm would work there too. Turns out I like the look since the Foestriker set has a lot of red in it already. So basically I am a bunny samurai for all occasions. I think Tam is a little bummed that I took his style idea and ran with it… but seriously… it works amazingly well for a Lalafell. Sadly however I don’t think the bunny samurai thing will work quite so well for my caster sets. I can’t really see a bunny samurai healer being a thing… but damned if I won’t try and make it happen.

The Atma Weapon

I’ve talked a few times in the past about the Relic weapon quest chain in Final Fantasy XIV. Essentially for those who are not familiar, it involves a long series of quests and battles to forge a weapon and then harden it while doing battle with the three original Primals. The end result is your relic weapon, which then can continue to be upgraded through additional quests. The first “Zenith” step is extremely simple in the grand scheme of things. It involves purchasing three Thavnairian Mists from a vendor in Mor Dhona for 300 tomestones of mythology each. So to get this step you literally just need to run practically any of the endgame content be it dungeons or raids, they all reward decent chunks of Mythstones. Once you have your items you simply take them back to the same vendor that originally forged your weapon and by using the forge yourself you can perform the upgrade. This takes the original ilevel 80 item to ilevel 90, and at this point I have the Zenith step on Warrior, Dragoon and Bard.

The next step is significantly trickier, but last night my friend Warenwolf managed to complete his, so I have renewed focus in finishing mine up. Essentially the Atma step is a tricky way of making players revisit old content. You get the various Atma parts by grinding FATEs in twelve different zones. Kodra noticed that the zones that are missing… are the ones that were traditionally FATE grinding hubs at release. So gone is South Shroud and Costa Del Sol as well as the later hubs of Coerthas, Mor Dhona and Northern Thanalan. The final list looks a little something like this.

Southern Thanalan: Atma of the Scorpion
Eastern Thanalan: Atma of the Bull
Western Thanalan: Atma of the Twins
Central Thanalan: Atma of the Scales
Central Shroud: Atma of the Maiden
East Shroud: Atma of the Goat
North Shroud: Atma of the Archer
Upper La Nocea: Atma of the Water Bearer
Middle La Nocea: Atma of the Ram
Outer La Nocea: Atma of the Lion
Lower La Nocea: Atma of the Fish
Western La Nocea: Atma of the Crab

Upon doing some research last night it seems that there is an equal drop chance for all zones that never actually improves over time. In fact you don’t even have to get Gold completion, you can get an ATMA to drop on bronze, silver or gold just so long as you have participated enough to actually get credit for the event. Supposedly the drop chance for an ATMA is somewhere between 1% and 10% depending on who you talk to. I have managed to get four drops so far, but some of my guild members have ground for upwards of six hours and never seen so much as a single one. I feel like this is the sort of thing that is best done in passing, however with Waren getting his it has lit a bit of a fire under me to go ahead and grind out mine as well. Sure there are other paths to upgrades, but at this point I feel like I want to do this.

Western Thanalan

The zone I have been hung up on for the last three nights is Western Thanalan. I have been trying to knock these out in a single region before moving on to others. Western Thanalan might just be the bane of my existence, and probably one of the hardest zones to habitually FATE grind in. As you can see from the map the zone is broken into three four sections divided by a series of pathways connecting them. This means it is extremely tedious to cross and often times by the time you get to a FATE a different group of adventurers will have whittled it down to nothing. Now that I at least know that Atma parts can drop on bronze contribution I am far less stressed. Previously I knew I needed to get to a FATE before the 50% mark to be able to pull enough aggro to earn Gold contribution. Now I simply just need to touch it, or hit a few overpowers to get credit at all.

I could move on to another zone, but I feel like this is probably the most difficult of them all. I might as well get the worst one out of the way so I can move onto other zones that are easier to traverse. I feel like more than likely Southern Thanalan will be another problem child, however you can pretty much live in the north or the south either one and grind plenty of FATEs since that zone is so diverse level wise, there is not a ton of overlap between the events. Additionally it seems like there is almost always a FATE up in the Amalja Beast Tribe daily area. Here is hoping that I will manage to get this ATMA tonight and be able to move on, while still keeping some of my sanity. However my mission is set, and I will get my damned Atma relic upgrade.

#FFXIV #RelicWeapon