Revelations from Fan Festival 2016 Tokyo

[Tracewood]

snipped

My lore knowledge is still lacking in a few departments, but I too hope RDM is based in Limsa with some kind of connection to the Yellow Jackets and the Arcanist's guild. You might be right about the Sharlyan connection too. Also, the weapon, is the elemental doo-dad that floats considered the "off-hand"? Or part of the main? I'd like to be able to use the small shields on that class.

[WhiteArchmage]

We don't know yet, but I'm willing to bed my future red pimp hat that the crystal will be part of the main weapon in the MH slot, seeing as you need it equipped to cast, but it'll count as a 2-handed weapon so you won't be able to equip anything in your OH slot. Since SE seems to be phasing out one handed weapons for every class but the Paladin

The Chicken Knife CE bonus doesn't mention the chickobo as a different weapon which makes me think it's part of the same weapon.

[Ghastly]

.

Before crystal tower a person who's new to FFXIV has vaguely no idea who they are. It's ONLY when we do the crystal tower story that we understand who they are, same with mhach. Two times...two times they follow the same reason, to learn about people we don't know about. It didn't happen once, but twice. History leans more in my favor than yours, that's all I'm pointing out.

By the way return is a keyword, if you listen to koji fox and yoshida when they pick titles for things they don't just throw them together without meaning. They know what they're doing, and they always have a reason.

PS: I'm not arguing absoluteness, I'm just bringing up proof but that doesn't mean it's 100% going to be FFXII Ivalice and Eorzea will change from Hydaelyn to Ivalice (you're being extreme with this thinking). The point is the new raid has a high possibility of being a teaching story about people from Ivalice. That much is a really, highly, very likely scenario.

[Vexander]

My lore knowledge is still lacking in a few departments, but I too hope RDM is based in Limsa with some kind of connection to the Yellow Jackets and the Arcanist's guild. You might be right about the Sharlyan connection too. Also, the weapon, is the elemental doo-dad that floats considered the "off-hand"? Or part of the main? I'd like to be able to use the small shields on that class.

The Focus Crystal is lumped together with the Sword, yes, they're one weapon. Not that RDMs might not be able to equip shields, I'm not sure.

[Cilia]

-snip-

Crystal Tower is a giant, giant shout-out to III. We learn very little about Allag that couldn't easily be guessed, and all the major players are analogues to III's main story characters. Doga, Unei, Xande, the Cloud of Darkness, and Noah were all major characters in III; most if not all bosses are also references to III, and G'raha is oft compared to Desch from the same. All they did was take those characters and adapt them to XIV's world. Allag continues to be a major player in the main scenario as well - most if not all villains rely on some Allagan doomsday device for their grand plans, and we continue to learn more of their depravity as the game rolls on. Bits of their history and culture are also observable outside of the Crystal Tower; the Summoner class, for instance, was invented by Allag.

The same is true of Mhach. While the main scenario has less involvement from Mhach than Allag, they are still responsible for a fair number of things in contemporary Eorzea - Black Magic as we know it is Mhachi in origin, and Scholars were trained by Nym specifically to combat Mhachi voidmages.

However, after years of stating that Ivalice has no relation to Eorzea or Hydaelyn as a whole... we're given "Return to Ivalice." While there is no context one way or another, it's got a lot of people understandably worried they're backpedaling on that. We've got myriad Ivalice references (the Ascians' names, Belias, Auracite, etc.) already - do we really need more? Especially the setting's name itself, leading to God knows what else from there?

... it's OK to be happy and excited for that, but some people aren't for reasons that should be perfectly understandable. If it's acceptable for you to voice your elation over "Return to Ivalice," it's also acceptable for others to voice their discontent with the same. That's freedom.

[Belhi]

I'm going to hold my judgment at this point till I actually see it in context. That said I agree its important that FF14 doesn't lose an identity of its own in all the references to past FF games. FF14 borrows a lot but currently still identifies as its own world. In isolation heavy FF12 themes could be a problem but we will see what ground the MSQ treads. Fingers crossed that the Allag mostly sit this next expac out apart from the 8 man raid. I like the Allag but letting them sit in the background for a while would be nice.

I believe I saw something saying RDM will start in Ul'dah. Not sure where its style fits but honestly it doesn't strike me as a Limsan class. RDM is more Three Musketeers than Pirates of the Caribbean. I am expecting that they come from somewhere outside of Eorzea.

[Hinoto-no-Ryuji]

-snip-

I think the pessimism is a bit surprising, personally. While I'm 100% in the "keep our world unique" camp, and even felt a similar sinking sensation when I saw the reveal, further thought has mostly assuaged that.

While it's true that no place called Ivalice has ever been even hinted to exist in FFXIV before now, I don't see any reason to be worried. I very much feel that the Crystal Tower series is the key to guessing how Ivalice will be used in this world - it will be, as you put it, a "giant, giant shout-out." This is, after all, a game that loves patterns, and exactly how content from other Final Fantasy games gets incorporated is a pattern that is well-established at this point. So, then, Ivalice will be a place lost to history, and the raid series surrounding it will have all sorts of references to Vagrant Story/Tactics/XII in its characters and narrative and gear and bosses while tweaking all so that they fit with the established world of Hydaelyn. Nothing Yoshida has said or done makes me think this would be any different than before.

Basically, there are 3 potential outcomes, as far I see it:
(1) The raid establishes FFXII and other connected titles as being in the same world as XIV. This, to me, would have the strongest negative impact on XIV's individual identity; thankfully, this also seems the least likely. Everything we know about the geography and history of Hydaelyn contradicts this notion, and it would require retcons to things as recent as the Encyclopedia Eorzea.

(2) The raid takes us through some sort of wormhole to the world of FFXII and connected titles, for Reasons. This can either be to another Shard (with its own distinct evolution having led to the worlds of those games), or simply across the void that apparently connects all the franchise for when they need to come together for fighting games. While this probably has the least impact on XIV as a whole, it's also SUPER lame, and a weird digression better suited to an Event than an entire 24-man raid tier. As such, I'd say this is a better option than (1), but still not especially desirable; unfortunately, I could also easily see the siren song of one of the franchise's most popular settings proving too much for the higher-ups at Squenix, or even for Yoshida himself, so this is orders of magnitude more likely that (1).

(3) See my first paragraph. This is the most desirable (for me, anyways) and also the most likely to happen, for reasons also mentioned there.

Thankfully, the desirability of these outcomes exists in direct proportion to the likelihood of them occurring, so I'm optimistic. Cautiously optimistic, maybe, but optimistic nonetheless.

I believe I saw something saying RDM will start in Ul'dah. Not sure where its style fits but honestly it doesn't strike me as a Limsan class. RDM is more Three Musketeers than Pirates of the Caribbean. I am expecting that they come from somewhere outside of Eorzea.

I could have sworn I saw that, due to feedback, Yoshida has decided to put all the Job Quests in new areas, rather than having people traipse back over the old ones. I might be mistaken, I'll try to dig it up.

[Enkidoh]

(1) The raid establishes FFXII and other connected titles as being in the same world as XIV. This, to me, would have the strongest negative impact on XIV's individual identity; thankfully, this also seems the least likely. Everything we know about the geography and history of Hydaelyn contradicts this notion, and it would require retcons to things as recent as the Encyclopedia Eorzea.

This simply will not happen because the development team has already come out long ago and said a big NO to that idea:

1:57:29
Q: A lot of names from Ivalice have been mentioned such as Dalmasca, Belias, and Zodiak. Is there some kind of connection between Hydaelyn and Ivalice?
A: Maehiro: To be absolutely clear, there is no direct connection between FFXIV’s Hydaelyn and FFXII’s Ivalice or even FFXI’s Vana’diel. They are not the same world in different dimensions or time—they are their own separate worlds. However, there are certain connections to people or objects that appear in these other worlds that figure into the story of FFXIV as it has been conceived and is being told.

Yoshida: We’ll be revealing more as we move forward.

Once again, I'm going to just apply Occam's razor here and consider the Ivalice raid to be nothing but a location concept taken from one of the Ivalice-set games and given a FFXIV spin and actually part of FFXIV's lore but with no actual direct connection to Ivalice other than the raid's name and concepts used in it (like Palace of the Dead being an old Gelmorran ruin warped by a voidsent that just happened to take the form of Nybeth from Tactics Ogre). It's a fanservice reference in name and concept only, it's not going to be the actual Ivalice plonked in FFXIV.

[Belhi]

I could have sworn I saw that, due to feedback, Yoshida has decided to put all the Job Quests in new areas, rather than having people traipse back over the old ones. I might be mistaken, I'll try to dig it up.

I think its as much people annoyed that they had to access Ishgard before they could start a job introduced in HW. Imagine someone hits 50 but is told they cant play RDM until they are 60 and finish the HW MSQ and HW patch MSQ.

Anyway it says it starts in Ul'dah. It might move on to Ala Mhigo once you reach 60.

[Cilia]

While I do agree that "Return to Ivalice" is more likely than not just another giant shout-out, I can't help but feel like there's enough Ivalice references already. I've never played any of the games in the setting (except about half of XII, which apparently only got good after the point I quit because I hate being more or less forced to do sidequests to advance the main story) so I don't get the obsession with it or the vast majority of the references.

That's the drawback of relying on nostalgia.

If Lolorito decided to rename the East Aldenard Trading Company "Shinra, Inc." I'd have the same problem. Not because I don't get the reference, but because this isn't VII, no matter how much I enjoyed that game, and I'd like to see XIV stand on its own two feet instead of constantly relying on nostalgia. Even Shadow of Mhach, despite being an exploration of a dead Eorzean culture, still does that with sky pirates (XII) and Cait Sith (VII/XI).

The fact the game already has myriad Ivalice shout-outs, and now we're being given a raid series titled "Return to Ivalice," has me worried. If you take away the knowledge and love of Ivalice and look at it objectively, it should be pretty understandable why.