Square Enix just released a new video featuring the city-state of Gridania in the alpha version of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Check it out!


The video features characters in the alpha version of ARR running through Gridania. According to a community rep on the official forums:

Were they were successful? Gridania was my starting city, so I have a soft spot for it, and I think it looks great. The revamped look really captures the atmosphere of a wooded town. And a moogle even had a cameo! ...

One of the Alpha testers broke the Non-Disclosure-Agreement and has linked some screenshots of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Please excuse or ignore the upskirts they did of their mi'qote about halfway through the album; some people just have no taste! The gallery does include a number of shots of new environments though, which are a significant improvement over the 1.x version.

Check it out here. ...

Despite none of this being saved and carried over to A Realm Reborn, Final Fantasy XIV 1.x, with less than a week left to its final days, underwent a quick maintenance today to tweak the current festivities. The following changes were made:

- The prayers of the adventurers have been heard by the twelve deities.
* Adventurers will now have a chance to receive a gift from the twelve deities upon resting at the inn.
* Adventurers will now receive a boon from the twelve deities when they pray for the safety of themselves or a fellow adventurer. Please be advised that the adventurers will experience the wrath of the twelve if they pray for the safety of an enemy.
- The strength of certain monsters that have unleashed their true potential has been toned down.
- As relief for adventurers facing enormous odds stacked against them, all items can now be repaired for 1 gil by the repair NPC.
- To assist the adventurers that are fatigued from the recent battles, adventurers will now be able to ride their mounts within the cities. ...

I know what you’re thinking: didn’t we just have one of these? Yes, we did, but Final Fantasy XIV producer Naoki Yoshida just loves us too much to stay away for long. But actually this is a special occasion: FFXIV has undergone its final save maintenance, and nothing new from 1.x will now carry over into A Realm Reborn. He also included a couple of new alpha screenshots!


His words are brief and heartfelt , so I’ll just copy them here:

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As the preparation for Final Fantasy XIV's final save maintenance begins, Square Enix have revealed a fun little easter egg. That 'moon' you see up in the sky, casting an ominous shadow over Eorzea, is Dalamud. And it's set for a collision.


The final save maintenance is scheduled between 2pm and 10pm on October 31 PDT, so nothing after that will count towards your characters in A Realm Reborn. But the game will be playable up until November 11, at which point Dalamud is expected to crash into Eorzea and - presumably - wipe everything out!

Make sure you're a part of this memorable moment! Robert Peeler, community manager at Square Enix NA has invited everyone to join him and fellow Square Enix employees in these final moments. It certainly will be a climax to remember!

Following the end of Final Fantasy XIV 1.x, producer/director Naoki Yoshida will be hosting a Letter from the Producer LIVE Part IV, so keep tuned here ...

Naoki Yoshida, producer for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, just released a short Letter from the Producer with some quick updates. Most significantly, he announced that the alpha testing of A Realm Reborn will officially begin on October 29, 2012!

Yoshi-P also snuck in some nifty screenshots from the developer’s stress testing of ARR. Here they are, with Yoshi-P’s commentary:

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Square-Enix has just released screenshots from the new character creation interface that has been built for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Check them out below!


The first thing that leaps out at me from the screenshots is the much greater degree of customization that is allowed from the new interface. Lip color? Highlights? You could spend all day just going through the options if you wanted.

And of course, female characters have a “Bust Size” option.


It looks like the development team has done a lot of work to revamp the character creator. The options for “facial features” still seem fairly limited, though they vary substantially between the sexes/races, and I’m sure more options will be added as the game develops.

What do you think about the new interface? Are you eager to ...

Some assorted updates for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn:


The Lodestone has announced that notification emails have been sent out to accepted alpha testers in Japan, where the alpha testing will begin. It looks like the alpha is on track to commence at the end of this month, as promised, but only in Japan. For those players outside of Japan, there is no word yet on precisely when the alpha testing will start in your regions, but you can still apply to be an alpha tester by visiting the application site.

In response to player questions, a developer announced on the official forums that faction credits and guild leve allowance will be reset for A Realm Reborn (the link goes to an unofficial translation). If you currently have any faction credits, you should be sure to use them before the service shutdown next week! (I know, thanks for the heads up, SE, right?)

Speaking of the big shutdown, we’re just over one week away. It has been previously reported that the date of the full shutdown ...

Do you play Final Fantasy XIV? Do you like scary stories? Then you should check out the FFXIV official forums for a special Halloween event. Five winners will each be awarded a special in-game item: a Scarf of Wondrous Wit.

The entry period is open now, and only lasts until October 25th, so get your entries in quickly. Or just enjoy the spooky stories of your fellow players!

Unfortunately, this contest is limited to NA players, because we’re the only ones who truly appreciate Halloween. Sorry, EU and Japan players, but it’s not our fault that your culture is inferior. ...

Recently we reported that Final Fantasy XIV’s development team just released some screenshots for the PS3 version. Now, producer Naoki Yoshida and UI developer Hiroshi Minagawa released more details about the PS3 version and its development to a Japanese news site, as well as information on new content for A Realm Reborn. An intrepid translator from the FFXIV forums provided an unofficial translation of the lengthy interview here and here. It is long and often quite technical, so here’s the significant points that I saw:

According to Yoshida, the PS3 version is about 80% done, with mostly technical tweaks to go. The PS3 graphics settings are planned to be comparable to medium settings on the PC version, which is as high as they can go on a PS3 MMORPG as big as FFXIV. It will likely not ever be possible to have a full HD display on the PS3 version.

Minagawa and Yoshi-P both commented on changes to the UI and further development of the PS3 version. A lot of the changes to the UI are based on applying a global standard for MMO controls, at least to the keyboard and mouse. There will ...

The PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is still alive and kicking! Square Enix just released some screenshots on their blog for the PS3 version of this game! With this new reveal they wanted to show off the UI, that's user interface for all those who don't know. They are keen on keeping players happy this time around so the first step is to allow players to highly customize their UIs. You can disable, enable, re-position what you want.


They truly wanted the PS3 gamer to feel more on par with the PC when it came to graphics. Pushing PS3 through its paces, it will be just as graphically gorgeous as its PC ...

Final Fantasy XIV producer Naoki Yoshida released another Letter from the Producer regarding the development progress of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

According to Yoshida, the development team is in the “final stages” of preparing the alpha test version of FFXIV 2.0. The alpha test is currently on track to start sometime around the end of October, just a few weeks away.

The rest of the Letter is devoted to detailing the results of the Player’s Poll from last month, where Yoshi asked if anyone would want to play on FFXIV 1.0 after November, even if that data did not carry over into A Realm Reborn. Yoshi said he was planning on reopening the 1.0 servers if 30% said “yes,” and so a few days after the servers are taken down on November 11, 2012, they will be coming back up! However, Yoshida cautioned that if the login numbers drop below 30% of the current players, then the servers can be taken back down.

But it seems like good news for people who are not alpha testers: you can continue ...

Today, Square-Enix published an announcement on The Lodestone detailing some changes to items and money in A Realm Reborn. Here are some highlights:

As we covered previously, FFXIV 2.0 will reduce all players’ gil and all NPC item costs to 1/10 of its current value. This is being done because some cheap consumable items, such as arrows, will be removed. The new announcement clarifies that this is only a general guideline, and rebalancing issues may result in some deviations in this formula for specific items and services. Additionally, we reported in the last Letter from the Producer III, total inventory slots will be reduced to the original 100. However, any items a player has in excess of the new 100 slot limit will not be lost. Instead, the items will be given to a special NPC, and the player can speak to it in order to regain the items at his convenience.

Player-operated bazaars will also be closing, and all items and gil will be put in the player’s inventory. Because the current cap for crystals in the inventory, 9,999, will not be changed, any crystals a player ...

The Final Fantasy XIV development team has dropped some interesting tidbits on the official forums recently. Most noteworthy is that A Realm Reborn will feature new worlds that target new players. Current players will not be able to transfer their characters to the new worlds for a while, but will be able to create new characters there. New players will still be able to choose an existing or non-newbie’d server to join. With the news about regional servers, presumably each region will have at least one sever dedicated to new characters.

Good idea or bad idea? It looks like Squeenix is trying to allow new worlds for new characters to develop their own economies independent of everything that already exists. Whether that will be successful or not or even whether that’s a good thing remains to be seen. Eventually, it looks like a world transfer system similar to the one used in Final Fantasy XI is planned, where you can pay to transfer a character between servers.

Additionally, today the subtitled ...