Right now, the Rising anniversary event is underway across Eorzea. Along with the coming of this year’s anniversary event came a 14-hour stream that featured what was in the pipeline for Final Fantasy XIV, both officially and hypothetically, promising players with more goodies to enjoy as FFXIV continues its story.
What’s being developed? What’s in store for FFXIV fans? Well, aside from a new raid zone that’s been teased relentlessly (Thanks, savvy onlookers who’ve noticed a flying ship in the distance), there also appear to be plans for FFXIV to get its very own Pokemon-ish Digimon-like battling system.
Intrigued? Keep reading as we recount what’s been happening this past week courtesy of this handy translation from Square Enix.
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Battle Preparations
On the battling front, aside from the usual tweaks and adjustments to the classes, there will also be new dungeons and raids.
From the old-world content, a hard mode for Pharos Sirius will be introduced. In terms of new stuff to conquer, there will be a new dungeon called the Saint Mocianne Arboretum.
There will also be a 24-person raid set on the Void Ark, the mysterious flying monstrosity you sometimes see while looking up at the sky in Heavensward territory. This will, according to their thread, require “3 tanks, 6 healers, and 15 DPS,” though I’m inclined to throw 24 dragoons into this just to see what would happen.
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More Quests!
New scenario quests and sidequests will make their way to the game, with one confirmed side story featuring a group called the Saint Endalim Scholasticate.
Also confirmed: more beast tribe quests, beginning with the Vanu Vanu tribe.
The Rising event will also introduce hints regarding future content, such as leads pointing to a future Primal in the works. Those who want to see some teasers (there’s some awesome stuff in this year’s event) should log in and check out the questline for themselves.
Aside from traditional quests, parties or free companies can also engage in airship exploration treks that will allow them to go to new territories and potentially find rare items or gathering materials (presumably) or fight vicious beasts (extremely likely).
A European Data Center
Square Enix is also planning to open a European data center in mid-October.
They noted however, that they “need to carefully copy over the data for the Worlds that are shifting over to the European data center, so we will likely need to perform maintenance that will last 3-5 days. We'll be making an announcement with details in the near future.”
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Housing and Gold Saucer additions.
Regarding housing, the FFXIV team also said they were working on allowing lighting and brightnness changes to be made in player homes.
Along with this comes work trying to open up new land (though this may be a memory thing since our characters are refreshed often and eat up a lot of data), not only in existing housing zones but also in adding new ones to Ishgard.
This includes enacting a system to remove inactive houses, with specific criteria for removal to be announced later on.
Regarding Gold Saucer changes, one thing that’s been mentioned is the addition of some kind of minion battling system based off this year’s April Fool’s joke: The Lords of Verminion. Though details on this are still sparse. It should be interesting, if only for the chance to see another game attempt to implement pet battling.
With that all ironed out, those are the main details coming from the August 22 Live Letter/Anniversary Stream. Personally, I’m most excited for housing changes, though I wonder what sort of tidbit tickled your fancy. Let me know in the comments! Cheers!
