Comments from the Devs

[Spider-Dan]

Character customization
Bust sizes vary by races, for example Roegardyn will have bigger sizes than sunseeker, moonkeeper coming after it. [Hyur/Elezen not mentioned]

I foresee a lot of big-tittied Galka women in the future. Well-played, SE.

I wonder what incentive they will give to Miqo males?

[Gokulo]

Bulges

[Lokus]

So according to that translation of the interview, normal mode dungeons are face-roll easy to pug. Guessing it's like the Garuda fight for the story quest and then the actual Garuda fight for the phat lootz.

Also

"He is also worried about crossing a certain line after which it will become hard to distinguish between PCs and NPCs/Monsters"

Total cop out to me. Meh.

[Madeline]

Don't worry, we won't. You should at least argue the man down if you disagree with him, that was p. funny though.

On a lighter note, I've gotten 2 emails from SE and almost jumped for joy both times. One for Hitman Absolution and one for the newsletter. Am sad/trolled.

[Gokulo]

On a lighter note, I've gotten 2 emails from SE and almost jumped for joy both times. One for Hitman Absolution and one for the newsletter. Am sad/trolled.

^ exactly the same

[Madeline]

Well that settles that.

Global Alpha Test Start Date

Greetings adventurers,

We're pleased to announce that the next phase of the A Realm Reborn Alpha Test is tentatively scheduled to start on Wednesday, November 28.
This phase will be adding in users from all regions (JP/NA/EU), and tester selection notifications will begin being sent out on November 26th.
Be sure to keep an eye on your email!

Just one more reminder... Don't forget about the confidentiality agreement regarding the Alpha Test (as referenced in this post).

I guess when they said the 26th they meant the emails were coming on that day. Or it's changed, who knows.

[Lokus]

You're an absolute idiot for thinking this, your intelligence is lesser than that of a retarded monkey.

There's no need to thank me for my amazing contribution to the thread.

Come again retarded monkey?

[shidobu]

On a lighter note, I've gotten 2 emails from SE and almost jumped for joy both times. One for Hitman Absolution and one for the newsletter. Am sad/trolled.

^ exactly the same

"SQUARE ENIX!! OH MY GOO--DAMNIT STOP FUCKING TROLLING ME SE"

and hell yea at emails invites on monday atleast its a set date now for
deal or no deals monday cant get here soon enough and then weds....

[Charismatic]

I foresee a lot of big-tittied Galka women in the future. Well-played, SE.

I, for one, plan to make one... I did as soon as they were announced.
Either that or fem highlander.

I want a muscle slut with boobs.

[millionsknives]

Another interview translation by Soukyuu

Story

• Nael is dead. [Sounded pretty final, so no "coming back as omega weapon" etc]
• Gaius was just observing which party is going to fall, so he and his troops are unharmed. He is going to be our opponent for the time being.
• Garlean Empire's motivation is "Primals are killing the planet, so we have to stop them. Unite under our banner to bring on an era of peace! If you go against us, this means you are aiding the beast tribes to destroy the planet. This means, you are our enemy."
• Crystal tower is related to the mystery behind the Allagan Empire, and is it's legacy.
• All of the 3 storylines are interwined somehow.
• Dalamud was a machine created by the Allagan Empire [so, it was not the same as the sealing ceremony Louisiox tried to perform!]
• The emperor Xandes (sp?) of the Allagan Empire is not dead. He is actually in a cold sleep chamber. Yoshida-san wants us to speculate whether Nael was trying to bring Dalamud down to awaken the Emperor and whether the appearance of the Crystal Tower signifies the Emperor's awakening or not.
• Main story will end at lvl50 with a tentative ending, what will follow are numbered patches, just like with the 7th Umbral Era storyline of 1.x. He emphasizes that he's not talking about expansions here. Those 3 storylines will come to a conclusion before the first expansion is released.
• "The Grand Labyrith of Bahamut" is not meant figuratively, but literally. It's going to be huge.
• It appears that Bahamut was not allowed to roam around freely, which is why there is a labyrinth and why the world has recovered. The whiteout at the end of the End of Era trailer takes place right before something happens. [Odin after all?]

FATE

• Rewards won't be useless (like, "here, have a potion"), but won't be anything rare/powerful either
• Rewards will have something to do with the type of FATE cleared. For example, completing a chocobo escort will yield a reward related to chocobos.
• The claiming system is disabled while in a FATE
• Once a FATE starts, everyone on the zone will get that huge FATE message and the location will be marked on the map
• When you get close to the FATE location, your normal objective list will be replaced with the FATE one. Once cleared, the normal objective list will become visible again.
• Planning to have 5-10 different FATEs per zone
• Housing
• After you build a house, you can't trade that patch of land. [He did not elaborate.]
• Once you build a house, there won't be any upkeep cost.
• Housing is planned to be implemented in the first big update after release. However, since debugging still needs to be done, we will get to test it somewhere at the end of Beta.

Alpha

• A lot of positive feedback on alpha ("Amazing" "Didn't expect so much from an alpha" "could have released this as beta"). He was very happy to hear that because he expected a lot more negative comments. [Do I sense a fellow perfectionist soul there?!]
• Alpha was branched 2 months ago [I wonder how much they improved it in those 2 months]
• Regional datacenters won't be ready for Alpha
• First 2 days of global alpha will be limited time-wise, if everything runs well, it will be running 24/7 starting from the 3 day.
• Alpha will end before the end of the year. [Yes. About 1-2 months of waiting time till beta]

Beta

• Goals of the beta include (among others) stress test, pc search and market system testing. These are sceduled for beta phase 1. They will put dummy items into the marketplace and will ask us to search for something all at once.
• Basically, just as in Alpha, it comes down to squishing bugs and tweaking code to be more performant. Apparently, removing one loop from the battle code improved the performance allowing for 200 more battles in a zone - laglessly.
• "Why was the Beta delayed?" "Because I told them to *wry smile*". Basically, he wants to polish it more because of the feedback he received. He's been telling the dev team that saying "it's just alpha" is not allowed and that thinking like that was what has lead 1.0 to be all over the place. [Hear hear! <3]
• Beta length will depend on what kind of feedback they will receive. He wants the testers to say "it's enough already, just release it" before he does.
• Still not clear if there is going to be an OBT and/or early access, this will depend on beta feedback, too.

Animations

• 3 animations for taking damage, different animation depending on damage taken
• Final motion blending animations are not implemented in the alpha. [this should calm down a lot of people, including myself]
• Beta will introduce some, but not all animation blending.

Misc

• They expected the servers to crash a lot on the last day
• Reason why they went along with it anyway is, they wanted as many people as possible to watch the trailer at the same time
• We definitely won't be able to experience the 7th Umbral Storyline/Content again, but not saying "no" to time-travel in general
• Apparently, 1.0 servers were running on LUA scripts, and the biggest problems were instability and memory consumption.
• Back when he decided to destroy the world [oooh, evil ] instead of just shutting down the servers, he was looking for a way to do that. That's when he asked what the dot near the moon was. Apparently, Dalamud was supposed to be used in a future scenario of the original story. Well, what he did was to ask "is it okay to make it fall?"
• That's when he started to prepare the plot and thought "just dropping it is boring... what is typical for FF? Summons... speaking of summons... Bahamut! "
• He admits his choice was inspired by WoW's Cataclysm to some degree. He felt this way there would be a surprise, while still staying FF-like
• We didn't get the full roadmap, but a simplified one. For example, in the full roadmap, there was also a roadmap for DoL/DoH, so he did not neglect them as claimed by some players.
• YoshiP "sucks at drawing" [his words, not mine xD], so he wrote the script describing the events in the End of an Era trailer instead.
• ARR opening may feature a narration by Louisiox. [Don't jump to conclusions yet]
• The opening will include the summary of the end of the 6th astral era (3 minutes) and will be around 8 minutes long in total.
• He's thinking about including a "no cut" [end of era + opening] version of the movie on the ARR CE
• Our character data is handled with utmost care and there are backups in place should something go wrong
• He will be thinking about implementing other client languages depending on how many players speaking that language there will be. He knows there is a large demand for a Spanish version and he was also thinking about a Russian one. This is for something after ARR release though.
• They plan to show off systems like FATE in future videos
• NPC speech will only be visible in speech bubbles, not in chat log, apparently.

---

Sounds good! Minor gripe would be NPC speech will only be visible in speech bubbles, not in the log. Sometimes it's handy to go back and read exactly what they said, if I realise I must have misread a line or something. But I guess the quest book will cover all the essential info.

[Deuce]

Edit: Whoops didn't see the translation get posted minutes ago while I was typing this lol.

More translations from the OF thread thanks to Soukyuu.

This one was very long and surprisingly had a lot of unique info tidbits. Enjoy.

Source: [Part I | Part II ] [ my comments ]
Story

• Nael is dead. [Sounded pretty final, so no "coming back as omega weapon" etc]
• Gaius was just observing which party is going to fall, so he and his troops are unharmed. He is going to be our opponent for the time being.
• Garlean Empire's motivation is "Primals are killing the planet, so we have to stop them. Unite under our banner to bring on an era of peace! If you go against us, this means you are aiding the beast tribes to destroy the planet. This means, you are our enemy."
• Crystal tower is related to the mystery behind the Allagan Empire, and is it's legacy.
• All of the 3 storylines are interwined somehow.
• Dalamud was a machine created by the Allagan Empire [so, it was not the same as the sealing ceremony Louisiox tried to perform!]
• The emperor Xandes (sp?) of the Allagan Empire is not dead. He is actually in a cold sleep chamber. Yoshida-san wants us to speculate whether Nael was trying to bring Dalamud down to awaken the Emperor and whether the appearance of the Crystal Tower signifies the Emperor's awakening or not.
• Main story will end at lvl50 with a tentative ending, what will follow are numbered patches, just like with the 7th Umbral Era storyline of 1.x. He emphasizes that he's not talking about expansions here. Those 3 storylines will come to a conclusion before the first expansion is released.
• "The Grand Labyrith of Bahamut" is not meant figuratively, but literally. It's going to be huge.
• It appears that Bahamut was not allowed to roam around freely, which is why there is a labyrinth and why the world has recovered. The whiteout at the end of the End of Era trailer takes place right before something happens. [Odin after all?]

FATE

• Rewards won't be useless (like, "here, have a potion"), but won't be anything rare/powerful either
• Rewards will have something to do with the type of FATE cleared. For example, completing a chocobo escort will yield a reward related to chocobos.
• The claiming system is disabled while in a FATE
• Once a FATE starts, everyone on the zone will get that huge FATE message and the location will be marked on the map
• When you get close to the FATE location, your normal objective list will be replaced with the FATE one. Once cleared, the normal objective list will become visible again.
• Planning to have 5-10 different FATEs per zone

Housing

• After you build a house, you can't trade that patch of land. [He did not elaborate.]
• Once you build a house, there won't be any upkeep cost.
• Housing is planned to be implemented in the first big update after release. However, since debugging still needs to be done, we will get to test it somewhere at the end of Beta.

Alpha

• A lot of positive feedback on alpha ("Amazing" "Didn't expect so much from an alpha" "could have released this as beta"). He was very happy to hear that because he expected a lot more negative comments. [Do I sense a fellow perfectionist soul there?!]
• Alpha was branched 2 months ago [I wonder how much they improved it in those 2 months]
• Regional datacenters won't be ready for Alpha
• First 2 days of global alpha will be limited time-wise, if everything runs well, it will be running 24/7 starting from the 3 day.
• Alpha will end before the end of the year. [Yes. About 1-2 months of waiting time till beta]

Beta

• Goals of the beta include (among others) stress test, pc search and market system testing. These are sceduled for beta phase 1. They will put dummy items into the marketplace and will ask us to search for something all at once.
• Basically, just as in Alpha, it comes down to squishing bugs and tweaking code to be more performant. Apparently, removing one loop from the battle code improved the performance allowing for 200 more battles in a zone - laglessly.
• "Why was the Beta delayed?" "Because I told them to *wry smile*". Basically, he wants to polish it more because of the feedback he received. He's been telling the dev team that saying "it's just alpha" is not allowed and that thinking like that was what has lead 1.0 to be all over the place. [Hear hear! <3]
• Beta length will depend on what kind of feedback they will receive. He wants the testers to say "it's enough already, just release it" before he does.
• Still not clear if there is going to be an OBT and/or early access, this will depend on beta feedback, too.

Animations

• 3 animations for taking damage, different animation depending on damage taken
• Final motion blending animations are not implemented in the alpha. [this should calm down a lot of people, including myself]
• Beta will introduce some, but not all animation blending.

Misc

• They expected the servers to crash a lot on the last day
• Reason why they went along with it anyway is, they wanted as many people as possible to watch the trailer at the same time
• We definitely won't be able to experience the 7th Umbral Storyline/Content again, but not saying "no" to time-travel in general
• Apparently, 1.0 servers were running on LUA scripts, and the biggest problems were instability and memory consumption.
• Back when he decided to destroy the world [oooh, evil ] instead of just shutting down the servers, he was looking for a way to do that. That's when he asked what the dot near the moon was. Apparently, Dalamud was supposed to be used in a future scenario of the original story. Well, what he did was to ask "is it okay to make it fall?"
• That's when he started to prepare the plot and thought "just dropping it is boring... what is typical for FF? Summons... speaking of summons... Bahamut! "
• He admits his choice was inspired by WoW's Cataclysm to some degree. He felt this way there would be a surprise, while still staying FF-like
• We didn't get the full roadmap, but a simplified one. For example, in the full roadmap, there was also a roadmap for DoL/DoH, so he did not neglect them as claimed by some players.
• YoshiP "sucks at drawing" [his words, not mine xD], so he wrote the script describing the events in the End of an Era trailer instead.
• ARR opening may feature a narration by Louisiox. [Don't jump to conclusions yet]
• The opening will include the summary of the end of the 6th astral era (3 minutes) and will be around 8 minutes long in total.
• He's thinking about including a "no cut" [end of era + opening] version of the movie on the ARR CE
• Our character data is handled with utmost care and there are backups in place should something go wrong
• He will be thinking about implementing other client languages depending on how many players speaking that language there will be. He knows there is a large demand for a Spanish version and he was also thinking about a Russian one. This is for something after ARR release though.
• They plan to show off systems like FATE in future videos
• NPC speech will only be visible in speech bubbles, not in chat log, apparently.

I think the most exciting bit of information for me was that they managed to reduce lag by eliminating a line of code. Definitely provides a good perspective on the programmers level of dedication to creating quality software.

Also, I like the fact that they are adding a lot of FATE content to each zone. Hopefully it will help spread out the player populations more after release. Reassuring to know that they made several backups of our character data too.

Lastly, the Great Labyrinth of Bahamut sounds amazing, especially if it turns out to be as big as they're making it sound.

[Grey Jorildyn]

If the FATE content is fun and rewarding (ie. XP + whatever), then it could be a decent type of content for leveling and spreading the players out as you say. I still feel strongly that there has to be more party-conducive content as you level up so people can learn how to play their jobs. You know, like when you got the Crawler's Nest and dinged into Erase to remove the slow. Stuff like that was planned well and made having X abilities useful and gave you a chance to understand how things worked in a group setting. Games need to teach people how to play not just "zerg all this stuff attacking the chocobos".

Rest sounds pretty cool. Looking forward to it!

[Lucavi]

FATE sounds interesting and very similar to what's currently on the market, which is a very, very good thing. Its been a long time since I could say that something within a SE MMO was "similar to what's currently on the market".

Looking forward to PVEing and PVPing in the Beta.

[Evane]

Sounds good! Minor gripe would be NPC speech will only be visible in speech bubbles, not in the log. Sometimes it's handy to go back and read exactly what they said, if I realise I must have misread a line or something. But I guess the quest book will cover all the essential info.

He could be referring to the NPCs that talk automatically. Like the Atomos related NPCs.

[Spider-Dan]

FATE sounds like forced* Behest with better implementation/more varied objectives. Am I wrong?

*I say "forced" because of the replaced Objectives and disabled claiming system.

[Lucavi]

FATE sounds like forced* Behest with better implementation/more varied objectives. Am I wrong?

*I say "forced" because of the replaced Objectives and disabled claiming system.

Its like I said; like modern day MMOs. You can call it whatever you want; Campaign, Behest, whatever; its a public quest that overrides a particular area once it encompasses it. You'll want to do it anyway for the XP/rewards.

[millionsknives]

He could be referring to the NPCs that talk automatically. Like the Atomos related NPCs.

Could be! It looks like NPCs that give quests use some type of speech bubble too though. I dunno how it worked in 1.0, but that text doesn't seem to be in the DRGs chat log. I wonder if story cut scenes will use the log or this bubble.

I'm also interested to know how much player interaction will be needed in FATE events. I remember reading reviews of GW2s FATE type system, and people commenting that you didn't actually need to engage or plan with your party at all. It'd be nice if it required some co-operation and chat to help the community grow.

[solracht]

FATE sounds like forced* Behest with better implementation/more varied objectives. Am I wrong?

*I say "forced" because of the replaced Objectives and disabled claiming system.

How is it forced?

The claiming is disabled only for the FATE and your objectives are only "replaced" if you're close enough to the FATE. The first one only affects you if you're actually doing it. The second one might or might not affect you depending on how close you have to be to the FATE.

----

As a side note, I'm so happy about how it seems like the fucking Duty system got axed, that was the worst system ever.

[miokomioko]

I am confident that if there is a nearby FATE, you could either not go towards the active battlefield, or leave it if you don't wish to participate.

I wonder what happens to nearby DoH/DoL when a FATE triggers on them... Hopefully it will just exclude those not on applicable classes instead of trying to make convoluted crafting/gathering content for every FATE.

[millionsknives]

How the hell is it forced?

The claiming is disabled only for the FATE and your objectives are only "replaced" if you're close enough to the FATE. The first one only affects you if you're actually doing it. The second one might or might not affect you depending on how close you have to be to the FATE for your objectives to change.

I think he just means forced as in it auto joins you into the event when you're near it, and then auto parties you. Forced doesn't have to have a specifically bad connotation. You could just leave the FATE radius and not do the event.