Recently, Square Enix conducted another video “Letter from the Producer” video Q&A for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. You can watch the entire video above or view a transcript of the Q&A here.
During the presentation, producer Naoki Yoshida discussed topics such as in-game weather, Chocobos, jobs and more. Here are three of the more interesting questions we came across.
Q: In A Realm Reborn, what kind of weather will there be? Also, could you give us any details on how the weather will affect the game?
A: The weather right now is clear, but there will also be sunny, cloudy, rainy, and region-specific weather. For example, since it obviously doesn’t rain in the in desert regions like Ul’dah, there will be sand storms instead. Also, as you saw in the magitek intro, there are snowy regions which will have blizzards. There will be quite a lot of variation.
Effect-wise, the biggest influence will more than likely be on fishing. During the previous Letter from the Producer Live I talked a bit about fishing, but you’ll essentially pick a fishing pole, pick your bait, and drop your line. Weather will have the biggest impact on fishing through its effects on water temperature. Other than that there won’t really be any other effects from weather.
Q: You mentioned that there would be tank, caster, and other types of personal chocobos, but could you tell us a bit more about this system? Also, will it be available at release?
A: With the Armoury, players have the ability to freely change their classes. Because of this, the character’s level will rarely remain constant. One minute your chocobo might be too strong, the next minute it could be too weak. To remedy this, we decided to sync the chocobo’s level to the player’s level.
Of course, there will still be ways to enhance your chocobo. Your chocobo can also, in a sense, gain experience and level up by obtaining skills. If you decide to teach your chocobo offensive abilities, it can take on an offensive role, and eventually learn more specialized attacks. It’s a lot like a skill tree. On the other hand, if you decide to focus more on supporting skills, your chocobo can take on a supporting role. You can also create a balanced type by taking various types of skills. Oh, and you’ll be able to change their roles at any time. For example, if you decide to play as a warrior, you can switch your chocobo to a healer role to support you in combat.
Ultimately, I believe this system fits the Armoury quite well. One more thing. Up until now we’ve shown various chocobo bardings that will be implemented in the future, but we’ve decided that we’d like players to choose bardings based only on how they want their chocobo to look. By adding stats to chocobo armor, we feared everyone would choose the same gear, so we decided to remove attributes from barding completely. We’d like you to pick what you think looks best.
Q: In the previous broadcast, you mentioned that the materia system would be changing significantly, but could you tell us specifically how it will change?
A: While we are definitely planning to make an announcement explaining the changes, I’m sure the 1.0 players, especially those who played to the end, would like to know how it will be changed.
First off, gear in A Realm Reborn will have sockets, and any item that has a socket on it can be fitted with materia. Some items may have multiple sockets, and for every socket, you will be able to attach materia without risk of failure.
The process of adding materia beyond the set number of sockets is referred to as multiple melding. However, in ARR, the only thing you will lose from an unsuccessful attempt will be the materia. You won’t lose the item like in 1.0.
Second, we’ve changed the system so that materia are no longer restricted to certain types of gear. In ARR, you will be able to meld any given materia to any given item, but each item will have a stat cap. For example, some items will have a STR cap of 5. These stat caps will differ depending on the equipment’s item level.
Again, you can read the entire Q&A here or watch the full live presentation above.
