Final Fantasy XIV Letter from the Producer Live Set for February 22

[Raistlin]

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Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn producer Naoki Yoshida has started his international media tour to hype the upcoming release of the beta version. We’ve been told that no new info from the tour will be available until after it’s over, but now we have been given an end date. The Lodestone has announced that the next Letter from the Producer Live has been scheduled for Friday, February 22, starting at 3:00 AM PST (11:00 GMT), and that should contain lots of juicy new details.

There’s been nothing definitive stated about this yet, but it also seems likely that the Live Letter will be close to when the beta version is finally released. We were originally told mid-February, so the 22nd would actually be on-time for this development team (relatively speaking)! At the very least, we should be given the beta release date then.

Currently, the dev team is in LA on the first stop of the media tour. No new info has been released, as expected, but one of the dev team members posted this picture to the developers’ blog:

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Yes, that is a Final Fantasy XIV elevator at the LA office for Square-Enix. They must be as excited for FFXIV as we are.

[Del Murder]

'as excited'?

[Loony BoB]

Murd, you don't go around painting your walls with FFXIV images? What's wrong with you!?

[Xannidel]

Seeing how I seem to muck up drawing stick figures I highly doubt I could do anything decent.

[Raistlin]

'as excited'?

If I had the money, I would totally have an FFXIV-painted elevator.

[Ouch!]

And not really deserving of its own thread, but expect beta invitations later this week or early next week. Yoshi-P confirmed that the letter is drafted and has been sent for proofing and translation.

[Raistlin]

Yeah, apparently Yoshi-P will be announcing the beta release date with the next normal Letter (not the Live Letter), which is expected by the end of this week. That's not to say that the beta will open by Friday, but we should at least know the date.

Dare I suggest that ARR is actually on schedule? I can't say for sure until we find out the final date for phase 1, but I can't imagine it's too far into the future.

[Loony BoB]

Given how wide open the schedule is at present, I'd say it's on schedule, yeah. But the Beta will be where any real issues are spotted. It only takes one problem to delay an MMO by a week or so, and there can be a lot of those problems when you get a lot of people playing and pointing them out.

[Ouch!]

I'll let Raistlin make the official post when he has time, as I certainly don't, but the emails went out this morning as rumored. Beta starts on February 25.