Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Dengeki interview summary

Here's the summary of the Dengeki interview. As always, no guarantees for translation correctness. Blue are my comments, rest was present in the interview. I left out some fluff, leaving only the bare points, maybe Rein will want to translate it fully. Yoshida-san talked a lot about their reasons for everything they are doing and he's being honest and straightforward about it, which I like.

Alpha

Alpha -> Wipe -> Beta, to not risk dragging any data bugs from alpha to beta
alpha is currently the minimal niveau they want to have
Once again a reminder from YoshiP: "alpha" = "stress test", not "play the game"
Global alpha will start end of the month
Plans are to get a lot of people in, if login counts drop, more will be invited. Aiming for a login rate of 60% of invited players.
PR will be parallel to alpha, for example promoting characters not usable in alpha [I'm guessing he means new races?]

Beta

Beta content packaging started
Beta will be next year
Controller UI will become available
Phase 1 will once again be a (closed) stress test
in Phase 2 they will increase the amount of participants
Phase 3 will make our saved data available
All races will be present in the beta version
Not all animations will be present for all races, so dummy animations will be used (for example, miqo'te ears not visible on a helm)

story of ARR

something similar to 4 heroes of light of FFI
end of era trailer has a continuation -> opening of ARR
ARR is set 5 years after end of 1.0, why world has recovered so fast is related to what happened in the last moments between Louisiox and Bahamut. Will be the main of the 3 storylines in ARR until the first expansion and will explain about the Allag Empire, Dalamud, why Bahamut was sealed and what became of Louisiox.
2 other storylines:
conflict with Garlemard
first goal of the empire is to stop the beast tribes
conquest is only secondary
fight against the primals
aether energy is same as FFVII lifestream: use (summoning) damages planet, needs to be stopped
story will be episodic
first ep: conclusion of the 7th umbral era catastrophe (cap still lv50)
"Ishgard", "Recovery of Ala Mhigo", and "The Garlean Empire" used as examples for new story episodes/expansions
old 1.0 story got scrapped, however the essence is still there.

FATE

every participant gets a reward
start will be announced in the field
event flow:
-> get close to the area
-> party is autoformed + level synched
-> fulfill objective
-> reward based on damage and participation time
no timers to be able to participate again

Housing

S-sized land = S-sized house
no expansions; if you want a bigger piece of land, you have to buy it (full price)
if you don't need land, you can sell it to the NPC
moving to another patch of land is also possible
a newly bought house comes without any furniture
apparently, in L-size houses you can distribute the space inside to make own rooms. [Not sure I got that correctly]

Cities

LL & Ul'dah won't be shown a little longer. Both maps and the cities were changed.
"Universal design": all DoW Guilds are marked red, no matter the city
What was changed was mostly the ways between point of interest, making them shorter.
In case of LL, floor textures were changed to better distinguish between lower and upper floors.
Ul'dah's gate MIGHT be able to open now.

PS3 Version

PS3 Beta after PC Beta enters phase 3
Aiming for about 40 players visible on screen
additional to that, 4 M-Sized or 1 L-sized monster
since there will be LOD, you won't get the impression there are only 40 models visible on screen.
PS3 version coming along nicely
More about the PS3 version at the beginning of 2013

Misc

You won't be able to use macros from 1.0
Safe to delete the old client, but don't throw away you registration codes! [probably needed to DL ARR CE?]
Both PS3 preorder and collector's edition will have a bonus
All music in alpha is by SOKEN
Dev team size is currently 9 times the size of the original team
Bahamut design comes from Hiroyuki Nagamine, base by Akihiko Yoshida. Naoki Yoshida requested for Bahamut to be less mechanic and more leaned towards classic design, so that everyone seeing him would instantly recognize him.
He thought about voicing the NPCs too, but decided against it to favor faster update cycles. Voicing 4 languages takes too long, and should new languages be added, it would take even longer.

Now Recruiting Beta Testers!

In preparation for the upcoming launch of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on Windows PC and PlayStation 3, we are looking for enthusiastic players to take part in the beta test.

● Players who met the Legacy campaign requirements can participate in the beta test starting from phase 1 and are not required to apply. However, we ask players who wish to participate in the PlayStation 3 beta test to apply for it.

● If you applied to be a PlayStation 3 beta tester for FF XIV Version 1.0 and were selected to test the Windows version instead, you need not apply again to test the PS3 version—your original application will be reconsidered when we start selecting PS3 testers. However, if you wish to be considered as a Windows PC tester, we ask that you apply specifically for that.

ffxiv.com/beta/na | ffxiv.com/beta/eu

Char escribió:http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/benchmark/

Ya han sacado la benchmark oficial con la que podeis saber que tal corre el juego en vuestros PCs.

Y video mostrando nuevas zonas tanto en PC como en PS3, horrible el rendimiento en PS3, espero que lo porteen a PS4

Spoiler: