It all began with a stone...

... and several nations previously at war but who are now in an unspoken truce due to the invention of "airbourne battleships." Okay, I threw the "stone" part in myself, but according to the latest news at 1UP, the basic plot of FFXIV is sounding a lot like FFXI.

This news hit the internet highway a couple days ago, but I've not been able to formulate an opinion. I try to not have an opinion and base reactions only on facts, but it's difficult to do that when one is so underwhelmed.

Paraphrasing from the 1UP article, there are four "job skills" in FFXI: Fighter, Sorcerer, Gatherer, and Crafter, all of which will grow depending on one's equipment. I guess if you have weapons equipped, you'll be training your Fighter skills, if you have some kind of tool equipped, you'll be training your crafting skill, etc., etc.. I'm hoping it only sounds dull now because of how little information is available. I also hope that equipping different weapons will, essentially, change your class. If you equip knuckles, you're a Monk, a Polearm, a Dragoon, and so on. I'll be seriously pissed if the intent is for everyone to be a Warrior with the only difference being the weapon one has currently in use. Hopefully, I'm way off the mark. Still, I'm apprehensive to learn how this will work out, but this isn't much to go on at the moment. So let's focus on something more concrete.

Eorzea will be the starter continent with several islands surrounding it. Cool, sounds like a big world. The five races have pretty much been confirmed: Hyuran(Hyrulian), Miqo'te(Misquito), Lalafell(Lala, fell), Elezen(Eleven), Roegadyn(Rose Garden). All, respectively, correspond to Hume, Mithra, Tarutaru, Elvan, and Galka from FFXI. You can see scans of them in this thread on ZAM.

Better still, all the races will be fully customizable. Hyuran will also be split into "midlanders" and "highlanders," while Miqo'te will be split into "diurnal sunseekers" and "nocturnal moonkeepers," whatever that means. In any case, I'm glad there won't be as many dopplegangers around.

What has me most intrigued, though, is how the quest system will work. It reminds me much of the Tactics Advance games and how mark hunting worked in FFXII. Adventurers will receive work passes from Eorzea's guildmaster to go on quests either solo or with others. Paraphrasing Komoto, he says a certain amount of players will not be needed for specific quests. It'll be up to the players how many people they want to bring. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. Maybe he means that the quest difficulty will scale up or down depending on how many people are present.

All in all, these are interesting ideas with a lot of perplexing vagueness. SE has my attention, but we'll see how long they keep it:



... Okay, I'm all ears.