This week is GamesCom and FFXIV: ARR director Yoshida Naoki is there giving demonstrations and presentations to the press. So far the reception has been very good, among the press and the players. So good in fact that the biggest complaint among players on the official forums appears to be the texture of the grass. While it is not the most detailed grass we have ever seen, it’s not something we will be noticing when running around the beautiful new maps on our chocobos or performing Meteor limit breaks on dragons.
Yes, limit breaks (originally from Final Fantasy VII) are making a return. In FFVII these were powerful attacks that party members could perform on enemies after charging a bar. The bar charged up during your battles as you performed attacks or got attacked. The same kind of thing will exist in FFXIV: A Real Reborn, except these will be party based attacks rather than individual.
Leaked footage from the conference by Youtube user jpgamestube shows a party using a limit break where a Black Mage casts a Meteor spell on to a dragon. We were impressed. This can be seen at 9:22 in the video below
It seems limit breaks will come in different forms, with there also being one that will heal the party. It is likely that each job will have its own limit break and the kind of limit break used by the party will be based on the job of the player who fires it off, but we can only speculate on that right now.
The leaked video also shows a very detailed and remade Black Shroud area that looks nothing like the current version. This is now a varied open forest with multiple paths. The smoothness of the user interface is clear to see; gone is the lag, the action locks and the general slowness and in is a fully customisable UI with fast features such as drag and drop. The new UI can be seen below.
As you can see, the new UI looks nothing like the old one and the list based inventory has been replaced with 4 grids of 5×5 icons. These icons can be drag and dropped into your equipment window and probably anywhere else you would need to use them. Gear sets can also be saved and changed with just a click of a button. TP has undergone some changes too, it looks like it caps at 1000 rather than the current 3000. Another change is the EXP required to level, this shows a figure 5 times that of current. It is unlikely to be a case of Yoshida making it harder to level so we must wait for more info on this.
The best pick of the new screenshots has to be this icy picture. This shows the ruins of an Ishgardian fortress. Originally people believed it to be the ruins of Ishgard itself due to the Japanese to English translation appearing on forums, however one of the localisation team members posted on the official forums that this is not the case and explained the confusion. The rest of the screenshots are below.
GamesCom still has a few more days to run so it is likely that we will get even more info in the days to come.
Edit: We have replaced the video in this article with a much better quality version.
Artwork:
Screenshot source: Game Watch
