The Final Fantasy XIV community is buzzing with excitement after the launch of the latest expansion, Stormblood. This new content has brought back old players and introduced a whole new generation to the game. What are some of the highlights of this media tour?
The ffxiv media tour 2021 is a complete coverage of the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker media tour.
It wasn’t long ago that I was able to sit down in front of my computer and do something that almost every Final Fantasy XIV fan desires: play Endwalker. Play the Endwalker media tour preview, which included a variety of combat professions, a few zones to explore, and a dungeon to check out before of the expansion’s official release. This mainly helped to whet my desire for the full game, as I’m sure it did for most other FFXIV fans.
While it’s difficult to put you in my mind or give everyone an opportunity to try out the experience, I’ve done the next best thing and written a lot of words on the overall experience and my first thoughts on the expansion. MOP will release all of our coverage one piece at a time throughout the morning as we examine the expansion’s tasks and locales – and speak with producer and director Naoki Yoshida himself.
The first thing Yoshida wanted us to recognize as journalists and influencers is that this media tour is taking place in the midst of the still-active COVID-19 pandemic, and we are all indebted to the medical personnel who are working tirelessly to keep people safe and treat this disease that has had an incalculable impact from Japan to the United States. We owe a lot to the individuals fighting the epidemic on the front lines, and he’s correct.
He also said that professionals who have told him that FFXIV is a means for them to unwind after a hard day at work help keep the team motivated to keep improving and providing the greatest content for the fans. We are all dependent on individuals doing their best to keep us all safe all around the globe, and it is incumbent on everyone to be grateful and appreciative of these devoted professionals.
The second element is that everything on show during the event was part of an in-development build, which is arguably more directly relevant to the game itself. Balance, tweaking, and exact timing are still being worked on. While I will share my views on all of the professions, I will avoid addressing particular skills beyond the barest mention in a handful of places, and I will not provide actual figures. This is not the time to speculate on which profession will have the most DPS; tweaking is still in progress, and everything is susceptible to change before release.
It’s also conceivable (though doubtful) that further changes may be made before the expansion’s November 19th early access release date. The crew is clearly still working on the expansion, which implies that a lot of what they’re working on is still up in the air.
Yoshida also urged everyone in the room to avoid leaking or disclosing any material ahead of time, which is critical in ensuring that all coverage is delivered at the same time and with the right context. Those who have followed the FFXIV community’s darker parts will know that at least some participants disobeyed these instructions, resulting in some of the material we’ll be discussing today being leaked ahead of time. (That will be the subject of a different column in the not-too-distant future.)
The fact that Square-Enix did something extra for those of us on the media trip this year makes the leaks even more upsetting. Previously, if we wanted to keep a record of the tooltips for different job skills, we had to screencap each one individually. This required a lot of time because of the sheer amount of tasks and skills involved; I have a big stack of screenshots from the Shadowbringers tour demonstrating this, and it left me with less time to accomplish certain other things I would have wanted to do.
This year, however, the event crew went ahead and recorded every single tooltip as well as job gauge descriptions for every job before the tour, which they then sent to all of us to use as a reference. Those tooltips aren’t provided here since we were told not to publish them but to use them as a guide; as previously said, potencies and the like are still being tweaked. However, for those of us who are writing about all of this material, this was a very helpful resource. So it’s a little distressing that some individuals, despite being instructed not to, put this material live. Doesn’t it get you a bit irritated about it?
A remote desktop software linked to a specific Japanese server was used to manage the event in question. As a consequence, there was some odd latency in certain areas, making some things (most notably the first dungeon) a bit more difficult to complete than they would have been otherwise. It’s a necessary restriction owing to the continuing epidemic and safety concerns, but it’s also something to bear in mind, particularly if some of the mechanics seem to be simpler than would otherwise appear realistic.
Finally, on a personal note, I’d want to express my gratitude to the Square-Enix team for making this event possible and facilitating all of the content you’re going to read today. For the studio’s first-ever remote media tour, this event in particular was a minefield of challenging technological problems that required a great deal of effort to make function correctly. I can only imagine the behind-the-scenes effort, so the fact that everything went so well is a testimony to the support team’s commitment, which is seldom recognized.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the story. Remember that this is an early development version, so things may change, but what I saw was very good nevertheless. We’ll kick things off soon with a look at the different profession categories, beginning with melee DPS, then moving on to a tour of the Tower of Zot and the preview zones, and finally our interview with Yoshida before noon. As each of the nine parts becomes available, they will be added to the list below:
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The ffxiv reddit is a website that has been covering the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker media tour.
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