Video Preview of Gathering and Crafting for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Today, Square-Enix released a new video preview of the gameplay in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s alpha phase. This one focuses on showing off the new gathering and crafting interfaces.

The video starts with gathering. The character is presented with a list of the items that can be gathered, as well as the chances of success for each. You simply select one at a time until the resource is used up.

Then the video cuts to a crafter. The crafter’s log lists all of the available recipes. You simply click on the recipe you want, and then are then given the option of using certain skills to complete the item. Each skill impacts the item’s development differently, and the item must be completed before its durability runs out.

Gathering looks a bit tedious, but what else is new? It would be nice to have a feature where you could select one item for the gathering process to repeat automatically (without having to click again and again on the same thing you want to collect), but maybe we’ll see that later. On the promising side, the crafting process looks very interesting.

It looks like people who are interested in that sort of thing will have plenty to do in ARR. As for me, I just want to kill things.

It's looking like a huge improvement for gathering classes over what it was like in 1.x. I spent far too much time on BTN in the final weeks of 1.x and made absurd amounts of money. All in, including money spent on gear, I made something like 40m in a little over a month. The ability to specify which type of item you're interested in is a nice feature, although I expect that it will decreases prices; not that that's bad news in the grand scheme of things.