Revelations from Fan Festival Around the World 2021

[Anonymoose]

It is time.

Expanded trailer shows (at least)...

• Estinien with Vrtra
• In-game visit to Sharlayan
• Zenos as a scythe-wielding job
• More than dust on the moon...

KEYNOTE REVELATIONS

NEW JOB: REAPER

• Melee DPS (Two-Handed)
• No Corresponding Class
• Starting Level: 70 (Ul'dah)
• Requirements: Endwalker + Any other job at LV70
• Can call upon an AVATAR FROM THE VOID (WHAT?)
• Can SERVE AS A HOST for the avatar (WHAT!?)
• The man who wouldn't let us be Thief has evolved.

NEW PLAYER HUB CITY: OLD SHARLAYAN

• Big mf Thaliak statue.
• Spiral-shell shaped aetherytes
• Pretty sure Y'shtola just told Alphinaud's dad where he could stick it. To his face. While he was at work.
• In 1.0, it was intended that Eorzea have six starting city-states: Ul'dah, Limsa Lominsa, Gridania, Ishgard, Ala Mhigo, and Sharlayan. Due to time and resources, this had to be cut down.
• There is a manor that is very important...but we're not going to talk about it right now.
• Yoshida declines to name Fourchenault directly.

MAIN THEME

• Main Theme: Music by Soken, lyrics by Koji with input of Ishikawa (which in 3 or 4 days; Koji jokes that this was a long time compared to the 2 hours he got for Sophia.) Additional voices by Amanda Achen and performed by THE PRIMALS with vocals by Sam Carter from Architects.

NEW AREA: LABYRINTHOS

• A bit of an enigma. The buildings look ancient, but there's some kind of strange technology here, as well. It might not look it, but this place is actually underground. The sky is a decorative dome, with an artificial sun. Please look forward to it. (Sharlayan NERV HQ? lol)

NEW AREA: THAVNAIR

• Exceedingly colorful. Heavy south Asian vibes.
• In the video it's under a peaceful blue sky but will it be like that in game...? Ehhh...

NEW AREA: ???

• Floating island gardens. (Xarakish...? Zeal...?)

NEW AREA: MARE LAMENTORUM

• Castle and caves (with plants!?) on the moon...
• There appears to be air and gravity... but there is a reason for that...
• Ragnarok...?

AND MORE!

• A completely original take on the Magus Sisters
• Loporrits (MOON BUNNIES)

NEW ALLIANCE RAID: MYTHS OF THE REALM

• An exploration of the history of the Twelve...

RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 23, 2021

OCEANIA DATA CENTER!
MALE VIERA CONFIRMED!!
FEMALE HROTHGAR EN ROUTE!!!

Q&A REVELATIONS

This is not meant to be a full archive. Words may not be exact due to repeated or rephrased clauses, or paraphrased ideas.

THIS IS A GENERAL Q&A, SOME ANSWERS WILL NOT INVOLVE LORE.

Q1: Ah beans, I was admiring their backgrounds and missed the question wording. It's about expansion titles.

A1: Early on we didn't know where the Hydaelyn and Zodiark was going and we were still deciding between flying and swimming content. As a Final Fantasy fan, there's always this idea of aiming for the sky, so I thought we should do that for our first expansion. That's how it got the Japanese name, the fancy character for Azure Sky, with the name of Ishgard tacked on the end.We found that when we had a theme like that, we were more unified as a dev. team. So we did that with Stormblood, creating Crimson Liberator to evoke that blood-red sky. It was originally a bit more in the sky theme but we ended up going to two places and it didn't really work so we gave up on that and went with Liberator. And the Japanese title of Shadowbringers translates to Jet-black Villains. My original idea was based on bringing back the Darkness and we wanted to do a play on Light and Dark. We talked with Ishikawa-san and Oda-san, and Ishikawa-san had the idea of a antihero / rebellion sort of feel. The team will brainstorm and throw out ideas until we get one that sounds really good. So the idea for Endwalker, which in Japanese is Moonset Finale, is that I just really wanted to have the word finale in there. For the English titles, this process is different. We thought we'd have a single nice word with multiple wordings, but every time the legal team would be like "It's already used, you can't use that, or that, or that." Then Koji came up with Heaven+ward, like warding something off, we make up a word, we have that as our title. The only problem we had was that the game wasn't quite as popular as it is now, so there was confusion in foreign media when they didn't know what we were going for. They'd say Heavenward or Heaven Sword and it's like, "no, that's not it." After that we just started mashing words together until we got one we liked. I know you wanted to hear some we haven't used, but I still like them and might want to use them so, I'm sorry, but I can't say.

Q2: I loved seeing Kefka, Cloud of Darkness, and Exdeath in FFXIV. Will we continue to see appearances like this going forward?

A2: To tell you the truth, we have not decided! I can't give you a more specific answer because the workflow might be different than you imagine. You might think, "We want to use this boss," and we find a place for it. Truthfully, it's the other way around. We work out the story first and then we think, "What boss will work well here?" and sometimes the best idea is something from an older game. But obviously players enjoy this and we care about what the players enjoy, so we keep an eye out for these opportunities.

Q3: Could you please elaborate on the inspiration for the Thunder God Raiden and that bird thing?

A3: Hm? Man, that is a tough question. So obviously we had a strong image of lightning. So the strong memory the Warrior of Light had was lightning and the bird is like - man, there was something else there - was that a Ramuh-egi? Was that like a bird? It turns out the Warrior of Light has a famously flawed memory.

Q4: I hear that you main Black Mage. Can you tell us what made you choose Black Mage in the first place?

A4: When it comes to online games, I like magic and caster roles. I have a dark history of playing far too much Diablo, and that's the class I played then, too. It was great to blast enemies from a distance, though I had to worry about hitting my allies as well. I felt like I could control the battlefield - whittle down HP, turn things to stone, wipe out the field at once - which I felt was a fun way to play. Also in Ultima Online and Everquest I played tank-caster, so it felt natural to choose a job I could use powerful magicks.

Q5: What is your happiest moment and hardest struggle since 2.0?

A5: I think it was the opening of the housing system. A lot of you probably remember, but we had those Legacy and Reborn worlds, and the difference in the guild markets was ridiculous. I knew we had to get rid of that discrepancy somehow or it'd just keep getting worse and we'd never have a proper cross-world community. That's why we had the Legacy prices set higher - which made people angry with me - but we had to do it. Still it was very psychologically stressful. Quite a while has passed since then and sometimes I still look back on it and wonder "Was there a better way?" but I haven't thought of one. The easy answer to happiest memory: our first Fan Festival ever in Las Vegas. There was a problem with the registration which led to a massive line and the marketing department had me to out and apologize in person, like "they'll feel better waiting just seeing you." So I went out with the intention to apologize, but as soon as people saw me the energy changed and everyone was just like, "YOSHI-P!" and I was walking along the line talking to so many people and apologizing. One person I talked to was 60 or 70 even, talking to me about really enjoying being there. The long lines and eagerness of people to talk to us was so amazing. I was shaking by the time I got on stage. I'm so grateful to our Warriors of Light for these experiences.

Q6: I saw you raiding the other day and I was just wondering - do you research third party guides online or come up with your own strategies?

A6: As soon as a patches releases, Western players tend to come up with big lists of like, what is the "best-in-slot" list and best rotation and stuff. Of course, I check those out. As for Black Mage, I've been playing it so long, I know my rotation. I have about three timing styles and I switch between them and use which one feels best, so you could say I figure it out for myself. I'm really into spell speed, so even when I have to get out of the way I'm trying to cram in as many attacks as possible. Sometimes I look like I'm just having a stroll in Savage, walking around. That's not true! I've timed those, it's part of my strategy! <laughs> I see videos by others and it's like, they do have a whole other approach compared to me. But I like to find the timing that works for me in that content.


Q7: You seem so busy! I'd like to hear what motivates you - and do you have a plan to write a book about your experiences?

A7: I am in fact very busy, so I can't write a book. There are some books about me in Japanese you can ind. I'd love to write one, but I don't think I can any time soon. I don't feel as though I need special motivation to do my work, though - making and delivering fun games to everyone is something I really enjoy doing. Because you pay money for them, I have a salary, and thus this opportunity. I want to give that back to you, to keep that circle going. What gets me even more pumped to work is stuff like Fan Fest. I love hearing feedback about what was fun or interesting, and then we have motivation to go that extra mile.

Q8: How does your team decide what new glamour items to add? Do you look at fashion trends at all?


A8: To be honest, while I do look over it, the design and item teams do the real work, here. Around 3 patches in advance they look at what the players are asking for, and then what we can make. They bring me a list and we discuss what to implement next. We also get requests from the Chinese and Korean operations teams and incorporate that into those discussions. We try not to do anything too fashionable, because it probably won't be fashionable 6 months later when we put it in, and that'd be sad <laughs>.

Q9: When your ideal game design and what the players want are different, what do you do?

A9: I'm not sure I have an ideal design. When you talk about game design, your spec is basically a set of rules. If you use Spec A, you can't use Spec B. When you choose A, you'll have people who liked it, and people who are like, "Why didn't you do B!?" There will always be both. Each dev. and player probably has their own idea what is good - A will almost always default to A. But even if the team feels like A is always the better option, or better right now, sometimes players might think it's B. In those cases, often, if we implement what the players want right away it'll cause a lot of issues because we built for A. So what we have to do is implement A functionally and transition to B carefully, even if it's not entirely what the players imagined. This is why we have live letters, actually! We want to tell people, "This is why the B you expected or wanted is A right now." We need a place to have that conversation.

[Katie_Kitty]

Yoshi-P is going to throw us a curveball and announce Keyblader as the new melee.

[WhiteArchmage]

Yoshi-P is going to throw us a curveball and announce Keyblader as the new melee.

I see your keyblader and raise you Mascot

Ok, Zenos is definitely a Scythe wielder. And a gun-scythe, I damn near cackled.

Sharlayan is revealed and it is as beautiful as I expected. We even saw the damn LYCEUM. And Y'shtola facing Papa Levellieur, I was right that Sharlayan wasn't gonna bend that easily. Though trated as a plot point.

[MilkieTea]

I was right! That part of the weapon wasn't a scythe... And so was everyone else about the job being scythe!

> BGM for the moon is gorgeous and almost the same as Amaurot.

[JeanneOrnitier]

Estinien was with Vrtra from the First Brood

Sharlayan looks Greek-ish. More evidence that they're connected to Amaurot?

[RyuDragnier]

Holy crap, Sharlayan confirmed and the council room is a conch shell shape with what may be a Convocation of 13 (or similar).

[BlitzAceRush]

Good lord, they went all in with Reaper.
I love it.

[JeanneOrnitier]

Reaper is literally everything I was hoping for. New main.

[WhiteArchmage]

The Reaper's "ghost" faked me out, thought they might actually go for Necro.

[Theodric]

Sharlayan is very pretty. Much like how I envisioned it - and definitely with similarities to Amaurot, albeit with a different colour scheme.

It'll likely be a mid to late game zone. Which isn't too surprising - I'm guessing things get steadily worse as the MSQ's advance.

I'm glad we're getting another 'edgy' job. I quite like the aesthetics and I've wanted a DPS with a 'darker' vibe to it for a while now. A scythe is a cool weapon with a lot of potential for neat designs, too. I like the armour, too - gives me a real 'Bloodborne' vibe. I like the look of the 'pet' too.

I may very well make it my new main job!