Will the grand finale be carried out as a live event?

[Inzoum]

To those speculating that Version 1's ending will actually be told in a prologue when starting ARR rather than in V1 itself, I'd like to say that this doesn't make any sense. Why would Square Enix cling to Version 1 by making it an important must-know-before-you-play-ARR? It would go against their idea of starting fresh with new players that don't have to know about the current game. They're pushing it as an entirely new title on PS3.

It has to happen in this version, or else it will need to be minimized as much as possible in ARR

[VitoScaletta]

Who honestly plays the 14th installment in a franchise without having any prior knowledge...? Thats what the back of the game is for.

[Len]

Well at least they were consistent; going out with a fizzle instead of a bang.

[Mug]

I hope there will be a battle of some sort, though I'm not sure how they will manage to make it look epic with the limitations of the current servers. It will be a bit silly if it consisted of an instanced battle with only 8 people in a party.

[Gerrr]

Spoiler Alert
FFXIV GRAND FINALE VIDEO

Nice crocidile!

[Romikemi]

In LFTP XXXV, (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/53080) in the Grand Finale paragraph Yoshi said:

Only the character data saved during the November 1 maintenance will be carried over to A Realm Reborn. The devs will also be focusing on the new version, and there will be no more patches or bug fixes for the current version after this point. But it seems a real shame to take away a venue where players can get together as a community. If we brought the servers back online, you would, however, need to ignore the inevitable story contradictions. Considering these factors, players that have an active subscription as of September 30, 2012, would play for free.

---

For a story contradiction to occur between now and November 11, a story has to occur that is contradicted.

You can think/hope/guess that a very large client download will be made available on November 1, and the gap between the 1st and the 11th is to be sure everyone has had a chance to download it.

It might be a closing movie that triggers as a full motion cinematic when you zone into Mor Dhona. It might be cutscene.

Based on the current client and servers, it's really a stretch to think that it would be a single, specific time of day interactive open world event.

An instanced end of the world, run by the then pointless dungeon and primal battlefield instance servers, re-imaged with new content while the networks are down to copy off our player data, is within the realm of something reasonable to think/hope/guess about.

You just have to wonder about why the 1st and the 11th, why 10 days apart? Time to allow people to download something large? Time to experience something before it's gone? Something like a story that would be contradicted?

[Alhanelem]

For a story contradiction to occur between now and November 11, a story has to occur that is contradicted.

The story contradiction will be between the 7UE storyline and the ARR storyline. There isn't going to be a new story in the 10 days before the temporary shutdown.

There isn't going to be a publicly available client download until they move to a public testing phase. the first phases of alpha/beta are closed tests.

[Romikemi]

Whatever man, I tried to spell it out in Yoshi's own words. I'm not talking about a 2.0 client in November, that's ridiculous. I'm talking about a typical update to the client software so that the network/server load of the "Grand Finale", Yoshi's words, not mine, is shared across all of the connected clients with limited burden on the Mor Dhona servers.

[Yrusama]

I thought the servers were up till the 11'th but with no saving, if they plan to do something nuts it will be then.

^This. There is no reason to take the servers down after the 11th and bring them up again otherwise. If anything, they'll likely revert the game back to a less-imperial-infested point in history after the severs come back up. Let's also not forget that they composed an entire 10-minute track for the final moments of 1.0. Look up "Dalamud Answers" on youtube. If you play with your music on, you'll know that this track is nowhere in the game except the files.

[Jynx]

So far with the big events we were supposed to see leading up to 2.0 becoming unatural elemental/Cactuar/Quqirn/Goblin spawns in odd locations.

Oh my...the world is ending we have more Cactus plants....