Translations (JP to English)

[Zenaku]

It's funny how there are more new information in these interviews than in the last live letter...

Info on FATE, normal an hard mode mention, pvp mention etc etc..

Again thanks for the translations!

They have to keep stuff for interview like there doing now it to build hype in japan.

[Reinheart]

Sorry guys full on cooking/cleaning right now and just saw these posts.
Looks like Soukyuu doing them so that's good, arigato~~

I'll try check back later tonight but right now pretty tied up with all kinds of preps for thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving 2 all

[Shougun]

Sorry guys full on cooking/cleaning right now and just saw these posts.
Looks like Soukyuu doing them so that's good, arigato~~

I'll try check back later tonight but right now pretty tied up with all kinds of preps for thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving 2 all

Serving Family Thanksgiving in your subli right? Enjoy! ^_^/

@Soukyuu: Thanks for being a boss and translating!

[Soukyuu]

Source: [Gamer] [ my comments ]

Not much new in this one, so I've included some of Yoshida's talk that doesn't really count as new information.

• Alpha
  
  • Aiming for 5000 players per server, 1000 players in one zone lagless
    
  • Two approaches to zone congestion
    
    • Display a message "too many players in zone, entry denied"
      
    • Spawn instances of a zone to allow for more players
      
  • still testing which one to take, as 1000 players in a zone is rarely happening naturally
    
  • alpha is planned to continue till the second week of December
    
  • they actually already have enough data from the stress tests and also enough feedback to be used for beta
    
  • letting us into the alpha is only to test how far the performance will degrade because of the distance to the servers as well as to perform stability tests over extended periods of time (servers running 24/7)
    
  • login counts are not falling, the devs have been telling Yoshida-san that "it's because YOU log in all the time!"
    
  • he's very happy to be able to talk to players directly and already had numerous discussions [I hope we don't scare him away if he attempts to do the same with us... seeing how our "discussions" usually go]
    
• Mounts
  
  • Apparently, the sprint ability introduced in alpha makes mounts seem slower
    
  • All mounts have the same speed
    
• Misc
  
  • Starting city is fixed depending on your first job, but once you reach the quest to go to another 2 cities, you can freely chose which city's quests you want to do first.
    
  • Legacy characters will start at a different place, the one where the hero party drops from the void. [I'm reading it as legacy = created before end of the era, not legacy = created on a legacy account, but I'm not sure]
    
  • Legacy characters will still be able to take all the quests just like non-legacy players, he says to think of it as a "stronger new game" [i think he means kinda like you can start a new game but keep all the items in some RPGs]
    
  • Arcanist will be available at release, Summoner could make it too, but there seem to be delays on the battle side of things, so it might not make it.
    
  • Wedding quest involves exchanging the rings at some point.
    
  • After you get your ring, you can get married.
    
  • Beta content not yet finalized, but he plans to include all the core story
    
  • Arcanist's "hitting with a book"-animation is being worked on, he plans to show it the next LIVE letter, if possible
    
  • No plans to novelize FFXIV's story, nor release some goods for now. Not until after release, when the community has grown and the game is successful enough for such investments to be worth it.
    
  • There might be an offline event where players will be able to fight against the dev team, he's thinking about doing it about half a year after ARR release if the game is successful. [I hope they will still do online events too, else people outside Japan are left out again...]
    

other news from gamewatch : http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs...23_574630.html

there is some information about regional server in this gamewatch news

HOLY... That's the second part of that long interview you posted before...

Looks like Soukyuu doing them so that's good, arigato~~

I'll try check back later tonight but right now pretty tied up with all kinds of preps for thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving 2 all

You're welcome, after reading so many of your translations, I thought I should get off my lazy ass and do some translating practice too...

It would be great if you could translate that gamewatch interview, I don't think it will contain more info than those three I already translated, but you're more proficient in Japanese than me, so you could translate with more details and probably much faster than me. I still have to check too many kanji to be able to read anything...

If you start translating it, please leave a message so we don't end up doing double work ^^

Happy thanksgiving to those who celebrate it, I'm off to bed.

[Evangelus]

thanks a lot =)

[Eruantien]

I would assume legacy means the term not the ffxiv status as well. Like having a legacy system, just means the old system. But that's cool we do have a different entrance, I'm glad they didn't take the easy way out and do the same opening.

[Dragonheart]

Looking forward the translation about regional servers :O !

[Soukyuu]

This one was very long and surprisingly had a lot of unique info tidbits. Enjoy.
Source: [Part I | Part II ] [ my comments ]

• Story
  
  • Nael is dead. [Sounded pretty final, so no "coming back as omega weapon" etc]
    
  • Gaius was just observing which party is going to fall, so he and his troops are unharmed. He is going to be our opponent for the time being.
    
  • Garlean Empire's motivation is "Primals are killing the planet, so we have to stop them. Unite under our banner to bring on an era of peace! If you go against us, this means you are aiding the beast tribes to destroy the planet. This means, you are our enemy."
    
  • Crystal tower is related to the mystery behind the Allagan Empire, and is it's legacy.
    
  • All of the 3 storylines are interwined somehow.
    
  • Dalamud was a machine created by the Allagan Empire [so, it was not the same as the sealing ceremony Louisiox tried to perform!]
    
  • The emperor Xandes (sp?) of the Allagan Empire is not dead. He is actually in a cold sleep chamber. Yoshida-san wants us to speculate whether Nael was trying to bring Dalamud down to awaken the Emperor and whether the appearance of the Crystal Tower signifies the Emperor's awakening or not.
    
  • Main story will end at lvl50 with a tentative ending, what will follow are numbered patches, just like with the 7th Umbral Era storyline of 1.x. He emphasizes that he's not talking about expansions here. Those 3 storylines will come to a conclusion before the first expansion is released.
    
  • "The Grand Labyrith of Bahamut" is not meant figuratively, but literally. It's going to be huge.
    
  • It appears that Bahamut was not allowed to roam around freely, which is why there is a labyrinth and why the world has recovered. The whiteout at the end of the End of Era trailer takes place right before something happens. [Odin after all?]
    
• FATE
  
  • Rewards won't be useless (like, "here, have a potion"), but won't be anything rare/powerful either
    
  • Rewards will have something to do with the type of FATE cleared. For example, completing a chocobo escort will yield a reward related to chocobos.
    
  • The claiming system is disabled while in a FATE
    
  • Once a FATE starts, everyone on the zone will get that huge FATE message and the location will be marked on the map
    
  • When you get close to the FATE location, your normal objective list will be replaced with the FATE one. Once cleared, the normal objective list will become visible again.
    
  • Planning to have 5-10 different FATEs per zone
    
• Housing
  
  • After you build a house, you can't trade that patch of land. [He did not elaborate.]
    
  • Once you build a house, there won't be any upkeep cost.
    
  • Housing is planned to be implemented in the first big update after release. However, since debugging still needs to be done, we will get to test it somewhere at the end of Beta.
    
• Alpha
  
  • A lot of positive feedback on alpha ("Amazing" "Didn't expect so much from an alpha" "could have released this as beta"). He was very happy to hear that because he expected a lot more negative comments. [Do I sense a fellow perfectionist soul there?!]
    
  • Alpha was branched 2 months ago [I wonder how much they improved it in those 2 months]
    
  • Regional datacenters won't be ready for Alpha
    
  • First 2 days of global alpha will be limited time-wise, if everything runs well, it will be running 24/7 starting from the 3 day.
    
  • Alpha will end before the end of the year. [Yes. About 1-2 months of waiting time till beta]
    
• Beta
  
  • Goals of the beta include (among others) stress test, pc search and market system testing. These are sceduled for beta phase 1. They will put dummy items into the marketplace and will ask us to search for something all at once.
    
  • Basically, just as in Alpha, it comes down to squishing bugs and tweaking code to be more performant. Apparently, removing one loop from the battle code improved the performance allowing for 200 more battles in a zone - laglessly.
    
  • "Why was the Beta delayed?" "Because I told them to *wry smile*". Basically, he wants to polish it more because of the feedback he received. He's been telling the dev team that saying "it's just alpha" is not allowed and that thinking like that was what has lead 1.0 to be all over the place. [Hear hear! <3]
    
  • Beta length will depend on what kind of feedback they will receive. He wants the testers to say "it's enough already, just release it" before he does.
    
  • Still not clear if there is going to be an OBT and/or early access, this will depend on beta feedback, too.
    
• Animations
  
  • 3 animations for taking damage, different animation depending on damage taken
    
  • Final motion blending animations are not implemented in the alpha. [this should calm down a lot of people, including myself]
    
  • Beta will introduce some, but not all animation blending.
    
• Misc
  
  • They expected the servers to crash a lot on the last day
    
  • Reason why they went along with it anyway is, they wanted as many people as possible to watch the trailer at the same time
    
  • We definitely won't be able to experience the 7th Umbral Storyline/Content again, but not saying "no" to time-travel in general
    
  • Apparently, 1.0 servers were running on LUA scripts, and the biggest problems were instability and memory consumption.
    
  • Back when he decided to destroy the world [oooh, evil ] instead of just shutting down the servers, he was looking for a way to do that. That's when he asked what the dot near the moon was. Apparently, Dalamud was supposed to be used in a future scenario of the original story. Well, what he did was to ask "is it okay to make it fall?"
    
  • That's when he started to prepare the plot and thought "just dropping it is boring... what is typical for FF? Summons... speaking of summons... Bahamut! "
    
  • He admits his choice was inspired by WoW's Cataclysm to some degree. He felt this way there would be a surprise, while still staying FF-like
    
  • We didn't get the full roadmap, but a simplified one. For example, in the full roadmap, there was also a roadmap for DoL/DoH, so he did not neglect them as claimed by some players.
    
  • YoshiP "sucks at drawing" [his words, not mine xD], so he wrote the script describing the events in the End of an Era trailer instead.
    
  • ARR opening may feature a narration by Louisiox. [Don't jump to conclusions yet]
    
  • The opening will include the summary of the end of the 6th astral era (3 minutes) and will be around 8 minutes long in total.
    
  • He's thinking about including a "no cut" [end of era + opening] version of the movie on the ARR CE
    
  • Our character data is handled with utmost care and there are backups in place should something go wrong
    
  • He will be thinking about implementing other client languages depending on how many players speaking that language there will be. He knows there is a large demand for a Spanish version and he was also thinking about a Russian one. This is for something after ARR release though.
    
  • They plan to show off systems like FATE in future videos
    
  • NPC speech will only be visible in speech bubbles, not in chat log, apparently.
    

[kimoi]

[*] Legacy characters will still be able to take all the quests just like non-legacy players, he says to think of it as a "stronger new game" [i think he means kinda like you can start a new game but keep all the items in some RPGs]

Yes, the term he uses "つよくてニューゲーム" is the what we call New Game+ in English, so that's indeed what he's saying. Basically, doing the early missions will be really easy for us.

[Judge_Xero]

Little late. But thanks for all your work Rein