FFXIV 3.0 : Heavensward - Expansion Information and Discussion

**Eldelphia** · 2014-10-14 08:22

I know we haven't had an official announcement on the expansion yet but it's likely that we may hear more at the upcoming Fanfests and info may get buried in other threads. It would also be nice to have a thread to discuss stuff we find out. If the mods want to shut this down as too early, I understand but I think things have kicked off a bit with Solracht posting this http://gamerescape.com/2014/10/13/sq...en-no-ishgard/

**Katlan** · 2014-10-14 10:25

yay a pre-pre-pre information thread w/ a question mark in the title!

**Shenrien** · 2014-10-14 16:29

Part of me really hopes that with the expansion and DX11 they'll return the world to an open sandbox world where everything is connected and there are no loading zones to break things up unless traveling to another continent. It just really bugs me that if they ever introduced flying mounts I'm gonna have to look for some specific spot to go to the next area rather just flying right over shit to get to where I want.

**Niiro** · 2014-10-14 17:51

Haha, no, not happening.

Spoiler: show

**Lucavi** · 2014-10-14 18:15

Not getting that until a Japanese company is fully funded by western dollars to make an eastern-style MMO for western interests (PC-onry, open world).

Japan will live and die linked to Sony and the Japanese console market. If they could find a way to squeeze a full MMORPG experience onto a mobile, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

**Shenrien** · 2014-10-14 19:08

You say it's not going to happen, yet it's exactly what 1.0 was from what I can remember, unless I'm mistaken.. I only spent about 6 months to get the reduced cost way back when. Yoshida also said that PS3 would be supported up to 3.0 and beyond that it would be a bit wishy-washy with what may happen to it.

I'd put my money on that when they show off the expansion trailer that there will be an absence of PS3 support being displayed when it lists what platforms it would be supported on. Especially with only 2 months remaining on the free jump from PS3 -> PS4 license.

**Sho** · 2014-10-14 19:36

I'll just lift this from that BG sticky:

Expansion Content (3.0):

* Major updates on expansion to come at Fan Fest.
* Title of the Expansion has been chosen. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
* Support for PS3 continued in expansion.
* Accompanying Soundtrack planned for Expansion. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
* Expansion coming "sooner than players think." (Gamescom, Dual Shockers; 08/15/2014)
* Same amount of content in 2.0 to be released in expansion.
* You will not need to complete The Binding Coil of Bahamut to play 3.0. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
* Emphasis being made on making the game "easy to understand" for players who are completely new to FFXIV who will start at 3.0. (Letter LIVE XVI; 07/21/2014)
* "Many surprises" to come for 3.0. (Gamescom, Dual Shockers; 08/15/2014)
* If SE holds a beta test, they will mask storyline content so as to not spoil it before release. (Nova Crystallis; 06/20/2014)
* Mock up of quests, FATEs, monsters etc complete. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
* Dungeons Names & amount of dungeons complete.

**Still doing dungeon checks. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)

* Endgame content post Bahamut's Coil in production.
* Level design currently in process.
* New town mock-ups done; working on design & details.
* Mock-up of the field areas complete. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
* New Race added.

** Yugiri speculated to be part of this new race. (Unmasked picture shown to Nakamura, who gasped). (Confirmed at Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)

*** Confirmation of new race will be timed with Yugiri's unmasking.

** Animations for new race complete.

* DoW & DoM Changes & Additions

** Level cap increased.

*** Addition of new abilities & traits with increase (2-3 skills).
*** Leviathan-Egi & Ramuh-Egi added.

** Possible revamp of entire Job/Class system. (06/21/2014; Famitsu), (Debunked by Yoshi-P on Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)

*** Possible additions to current job system. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
*** Additions to job system as the level cap increases. (Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)

** Possible coding of an entirely new job system for hybrid jobs. (06/21/2014; Famitsu) (Debunked by Yoshi-P on Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
** Gun Class (Musketeer) & Unnamed Gun Job.

*** Gun Class/Job not what people are expecting.
*** Producer Letter Live III depicts a dual-wielding gun class. Dual wielding guns.
*** Information on job to be released at Fan Fest alongside expansion. (06/19/2014; Nova Crystallis)

** New jobs will adhere to original three roles that have been currently implemented (Tank, Healer, DPS). (Letter LIVE XVI; 07/22/2014)

*** Debuffer and buffer roles still possible.

** Jobs have been chosen and work is already being done on them.
** Unnamed Tank Class & Job.
** Unnamed Healer Class & Job.
** Possible branching job roles, similar to SCH & SMN.
** Skill Speed to take a larger role after the level cap is raised. (06/19/2014; Nova Crystallis)
** Working on ways to solve the limitations of the job point allocation system and the cross class system for possible secondary jobs. To be explained in detail at Fan Fest. (Secrets of Eorzea; 07/18/2014)

* DoH & DoL Changes & Additions

** DoH Job-specializations.
** Four Star recipes to be added with level cap increase.

* Quests & Missions

** Shiva related quests from 2.X series will lead into expansion story.
** Major event to end the 2.X series and lead up to the expansion.
** Expansion content will be Ishgard-centric storyline wise. (06/19/2014; Slycer)
** General theme of expansion is that of "a thousand year war." (Maehiro Blurb)
** Storyline will take on a darker tone than before.
** New primals to be added.
** Battle with Nidhogg speculated to happen at Ishgard. (Maehiro Blurb)

* The Hunt (Letter LIVE XVI; 07/22/2014)

** Rank higher than S to be added to The Hunt.

*** Rank will be on the same level as original difficulty of Odin and Behemoth FATEs.

* Chocobo Content

** Companion (Chocobo) stats to be increased to correspond with increasing levels of players and monsters in the future. (Grekumah, OF; 09/10/2014)

* Misc Additions

** Flying Mounts to be introduced. (04/11/2014; Siliconera)
** Evolve-style PvP (4 vs 1, players vs PC controlled monster) being looked into for post-expansion content. (Letter LIVE XVI; 07/22/2014)

There's feasibly a lot of stuff they could talk about across 3 Fan Fests. I'm guessing the NA Fan Fest will be the opener and we get jobs, some NPCs, and some new monsters. EU Fan Fest will very likely be more of the same information, but in different languages other than the aforementioned. JP Fan Fest will be the one that mindfucks us with tons of information, because it will land around 2.5, which would come very soon after.

PS3 will still be supported if this information is to be believed. However it was about 6+ months ago when he announced it, not that it should matter.

The storyline for 2.4 should have a lot going on that hints at the expansion as well.

**Spider-Dan** · 2014-10-16 10:20

Originally Posted by Shenrien

You say it's not going to happen, yet it's exactly what 1.0 was from what I can remember, unless I'm mistaken..

1.0 was mostly similar to existing layout, only with fewer, larger, blander zones. If you wanted to travel from Thanalan to Shroud or Coerthas to Mor Dhona, you still had to run to one specific spot to go to the next area.

**Gulkeeva** · 2014-10-16 12:00

The open worldness was possible, because... /copypaste everything, you use less memory. Now that the gaming world uses less polygons/detail, but much more diverse and not copy pasted everywhere, it uses more ram. PS3 and PS4 have a ram limitation, where as PC can use however many gigs Virtual ram there is sitting around until it goes 64bit and removes that 2gig ish 32bit limitation).

only thing they could probably do... is "load on the fly" (basically just stuff in your viewing distance) but this can cause problems for something like raiding. Imagine doing some fights and someone with a HDD still and on top of that a slow computer/PS3 not having loaded some aspect of the fight until its used by the boss the first time and rapes everyone >.>

Anyway...! I kept hearing someone say, SE plans to drop PS3 support at some point...?

**Spider-Dan** · 2014-10-16 12:19

Also, keep in mind that while 1.0 maps were "open," they really weren't; you only had hard zone transitions for region changes (e.g. Shroud to Coerthas), but there were clearly delineated choke points between sub areas (e.g. Central Thanalan to Western Thanalan):

Spoiler: show

So the idea that you'd just be able to fly in a straight line, even in 1.0, wouldn't work. You wouldn't have been able to get on your mount in Ul'dah and just fly SE over C.Than straight to S.Than.

**Kaisha** · 2014-10-16 15:02

Full fledged flying mounts would have never happened in 1.0 either just because of how much terrain geometry work would be needed to cover all the cracks/background-geometry that was placed under the assumption you'd never see the faults from the ground perspective, which ARR also abuses because it saves on processing.

Shit'll never happen with ARR in its current state either because of some of the liberties they took with ground distance traveled during load screens. If they wanted seamless zones they could have done it already and just let PS3 users deal with a zone load transition instead, but they opted not to.

Spoiler: show

**Deuce** · 2014-10-17 16:27

Ugh, coerthas was such a pain in the ass to navigate in 1.0. Only thing I miss from those days is the size of the zones and that's it.

**Arthars** · 2014-10-17 23:26

expansion info at JP fanfest

always has been, decemberrrrrr

**shepardG** · 2014-10-18 00:07

Originally Posted by Deuce

Ugh, coerthas was such a pain in the ass to navigate in 1.0. Only thing I miss from those days is the size of the zones and that's it.

Nothing was worse than the black shroud. Nothing.

**Arthars** · 2014-10-18 00:27

1.0 black shroud............................

that 1 and only route to your aeth and blocked by a lvl 80 malboro

**Deuce** · 2014-10-18 01:20

Only reason I disliked coerthas more was because of how "open" it seemed, but then you'd be blocked by an invisible wall at a one foot ledge.

1.0 black shroud didn't tease me with freedom the way coerthas did.

**Elcura** · 2014-10-18 07:01

Hi I'm 1.0 maps and I'm terrible. I swear people pine for the worst shit.

**Sechs** · 2014-10-18 08:00

Possible coding of an entirely new job system for hybrid jobs. (06/21/2014; Famitsu) (Debunked by Yoshi-P on Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014)
** New jobs will adhere to original three roles that have been currently implemented (Tank, Healer, DPS). (Letter LIVE XVI; 07/22/2014)
*** Debuffer and buffer roles still possible.

1) is very generic and doesn't say a lot
3) is in contrast with 2).

I'm seriously skeptic they will go for a more complex model than the strict trinity system they implemented. When you make systems more complex you make them more fun for players maybe, but incredibly harder to tune for automatic grouping content like Duty Finder.
It also makes it hard to balance classes.
I'd love them to go for this route but I don't see it happening sadly =/

**Elcura** · 2014-10-18 08:04

How is 3 in contrast with 2? You can have healers that support (buff), tanks or dps that debuff or any combination in-between.

What do you think BRD is right now? It's DPS/support.

**Sechs** · 2014-10-18 08:26

I mean that currently there is a strict implementation of the Trinity System with 3 definite roles: Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer.
There are no other roles than those 3, and Debuff/Buff functionalities are imbued and spread among those 3 roles (some jobs having more and some having less of course).
This is the same exact model WoW tried to follow since patch 3.0 (sort of)
It homogeneizes a lot and makes things a bit more plain, but also much easier to balance for them, to keep "numbers" closer and to create much more predictable situations for which they can tune difficulty of fights and possible strategies much better.

A pure support/debuff role in FFXIV is not possible imho and will never be possible, but a more definite/official implementation of a 4th role called "Hybrid" is still possible and a lot of people hope they're going to go that way.
A Hybrid Role would be something that in terms of pure numbers performs much less than other "pure role" jobs, but brings something else to the table to compensate for that.
Much more emphasis on the debuff/buff side for these roles.
It's clearly not the current situation of RNG... ehr sorry, I meant BRD.

The contrast I saw is that if you say the roles will remain 3, then you won't have a 4th/5th (buffer/debuffer role), but maybe I just misinterpreted that sentence.

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