Big news from yesterday's Sony presentation was Square-Enix's long awaited unveiling of their next MMO, Final Fantasy XIV Online. A lot of people anticipated this would finally be the year that SE finally made the secret known, but I think it left people with a lot more questions than answers.
We already know that it will be released on PS3 and PC. This mostly follows the pattern of their initial launch of FFXI, but instead of Japan having it a good 6-8 months before North America, it will all be released at the same time.
My initial impression of the trailer and the official website is that this is FFXI-2 and not FFXIV. We know that all of the races from FFXI will be present in FFXIV through the screenshots provided, but we know nothing of the gameplay or the story aside from SE's typical Save-The-World monologues. With that being said...
...damn the trailer looks good.
They went as far as to show us the galka (sans tail apparently...) and a pair of what appear to be twin humes fighting together. They also showed us what appears to be an updated version of the hume guy on the cover of the original FFXI instruction manual. Finally, they showed us the same Galka model walking along with a Hume and an Elvaan lady.
Again, very little is known about this game thusfar and with Square-Enix scheduled to speak today at E3, we may find out more.
Personally, I'm going to have a hard time migrating to a new MMO like this if it's basically FFXI-2 unless they offer some form of character migration. I'm not expecting to show up in the new MMO fully leveled, merited or max'd out in whatever capacity they decide to use, but I'd really hate to think that all the time and money invested in FFXI would basically be thrown by the wayside for an updated version of the game.
My gut tells me they will offer something to this effect. All along, they've told us that "Rapture" (if this is actually Rapture...) will have nothing to do with the FFXI world, yet here we are watching a trailer and viewing screenshots of content that is clearly FFXI-related. The races themselves may not be called "Galka", "Tarutaru", etc, but if they're building races that look similar to the FFXI ones, I can only imagine it's to offer up some form of continuity between FFXI and FFXIV.
For now, I'm taking a wait and see approach to it. I'm not going to get overly hyped or angry about anything until there are a lot more concrete details. If those are the types of cutscenes we can expect during FFXIV gameplay though, that's a ton of eyecandy.
Einherjar
Since I changed our schedule around to allow for Odin every 5 runs instead of every 7, our crew is 2 for 2 in keeping things on schedule. It hasn't exactly been smooth sailing, but they've gotten the job done.
Last night's Einherjar was rather insane. Generally, the first of the month brings in a lot of attendance issues. Between billing issues, working overtime, and (in some cases) guys being completely whipped by their girlfriends (*COUGH*TH-130*COUGH*), I'm usually left scrambling to find replacements and max out our attendance.
We had a grand total of 6 people last night that couldn't make it for various reasons. Our wait list had 4 people on it, 2 of which couldn't be bothered to show up apparently. In order to max this run out, I had to go find 4 people. I found 3, which was enough. If things like this weren't already complex enough, imagine trying to do this while statements like these are being made over the linkshell:
Anyway, once everything got together, we started on time. Our last T3 was lackluster to say the least and resulting in a couple of suspensions due to no-shows as well as a loss. Last night's run had us starting off against 12 Djiggas and 12 Liquified Einherjar. We wiped those out in about 7 minutes.
Before I tell the rest of this, I have to explain something. Gawayne has some seriously bad luck. When we started doing Einherjar last August, Gawayne managed to have semi-consistent Saturday attendance for the first few months. Unfortunately, his work schedule went to shit and he has had a hard time coming to runs ever since. We have a running joke with him called "Gawluck". Well it's not really a joke as it's more fact. The bad luck streaks he endures are rather legendary. Things like having to wait a year or so for his RDM hat. Almost having to wait a year for PLD body AFTER he got his RDM hat...
And in the case of Einherjar...having to wait nearly 10 months for his first T3 win. Since his schedule went to hell, he's managed to come to a few Einherjar runs, but I swear every time he shows up, our team decides to lay an egg and lose. The early losses when he was mostly active were understandable as we were still searching for our team's identity, but the latter ones just had me confused.
So last night, Gawayne managed to come and after we tore through the first 2 sets of mobs, I literally thought to myself...
"This is going too smoothly...we're about to get kicked in the nuts by Gawluck."
And sure as shit...a boss we had never seen in all of our T3 runs shows up.
Motsognir
Actual screenshot taken during the fight:
So this guy caught us all by surprise. We knew we'd run into him at some point, but since it had been so long, I had forgotten the key bits of info for fighting him. What caught me by surprise the most was that I was completely unaware he actually spawned with his demons as an individual wave. I was always under the assumption that he spawned like any other boss with a wave of normal monsters, then the demons popped after he was aggro'd.
After taking a minute or so to go over fighting orders, I had the bards two hour and start buffing us. Apparently "Pull the demons when bards are finished singing" is a little too complex for some people to understand...so we had everything pulled on top of us before we were completely buffed...
...and we wiped.
But not until we had knocked out 10 of the 12 demons. Have to give credit where credit is due...we wouldn't have wiped if pulling had been done when we were completely buffed, but the fact we did wipe, recover and finish the room off with a few minutes to spare shows a lot about our team.
And in true Gawayne fashion, he manages to break his curse in the most show-stopping way possible.
Now let's see how long it takes for him to cash in his present for all the website work he does...
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