Wark Digest #162 - Sunrise
Welcome back to the Wark Digest, your weekly newsletter of new developments and historical insights from the Final Fantasy universe. I’m Chris, aka Hoogathy, and this week as the sun shines on a new corner of Final Fantasy XIV, we dissect some prototype screenshots, patch notes, and a whole smattering of other news!
This week’s newsletter is 1962 words, a 10-minute read.
Dawntrail Has Arrived
Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 7.0 maintenance ended this morning/early afternoon, depending on your time zone, and the new/returning trial “Queues (Savage)” began for all players attempting to log in and experience the new era. As players dive into either the queue or an exciting new era, let’s go over some of the highlights from the Dawntrail patch notes.
What’s going on:
Of course, the expansion Dawntrail has been added, along with its Main Scenario Quests, new regions, the female Hrothgar race, and two Jobs
Players can start the new campaign by speaking to Ojika Tsunjika in Old Sharlayan, provided they’ve completed the MSQ “The Coming Dawn”
The Viper class can be found in Ul’dah, or the Pictomancer in Old Gridania; they start at level 80 and have no prerequisites
New role and Disciple of the Hand or Land quest lines are included
The first graphical update has been implemented, improving finer details of textures, movements, environmental effects, and lighting
“Graphical updates will be applied gradually to older content in future updates”
All job classes have been updated, with new actions from level 91-100 and revisions to existing actions—click here to check how your favourite classes have changed
You can now choose to hide other nearby PCs when speaking to a quest NPC, or to only auto-advance scenes with voice acting
Per events in the story, Krile has been added as a new avatar NPC; the level cap for these allies increases during the MSQ, now up to level 100 (at which point, you’ll unlock new glamours for them)
If your party wipes against a boss in (Dawntrail) dungeons, the shortcut warp will now take players to that boss area’s entrance (!!!)
A new accessory slot, Facewear, has been added, and many items can now be dyed with two separate dyes instead of just one
Aether Current requirements in all Endwalker areas have been reduced (so you may find you can now fly in areas where you couldn’t before)
The gil cost for Teleport has been adjusted, given the influx of new locations
New blacklisting and muting functions have been added, as well as a Term Filter to mask messages bearing certain words (bye bye, spam)
Text input will be more forgiving for quest objectives where you have to enter a certain phrase; similarly, Dawntrail quests that require using a certain emoji will have an on-screen shortcut
A plethora of new gear, furniture, and other cosmetic options have been added (including winning submissions from past Furnishing Design Contests)
What we thought:
The quality-of-life changes this time around are small yet impactful: no more hoofing it when your party dies during a boss fight (in new dungeons anyway), hiding hordes of players surrounding the NPC you’re talking to, being less finnicky with contrived text entry objectives… These little things can go a long way
From early reports, it seems the queue situation is going about as well as, or better than Endwalker; this is pretty much inevitable when any live-service game or MMORPG has a big update or expansion—people want to play, it turns out!
There are more efforts in place to mitigate this aspect of the launch, and so far it seems they’re paying off
I was able to get on my NA server at the usual speed early this morning, but congestion times will rise and fall throughout the day
As mentioned a couple weeks back in my hands-on impressions of Dawntrail, everyone’s experience with the job changes will vary, and may sound less appealing on paper than they do in practice; if the changes sound daunting or unpleasant, try to give it a fair shot and see how it actually plays
I happened to get caught up with the MSQ on my main character just last weekend—the storyline through 7.1-7.5 was an enjoyable plot that bridges the era between expansions well, while paying some clever homage to FFIV and ultimately setting a curious tone for Dawntrail’s story
Given where Endwalker left things, it can’t have been easy to pick up the plot and take it in a new direction without undercutting everything that came before, so kudos to the team at CS3 for handling it so well
What’s next? A lot of waiting, most likely. Try to be patient and plan your log-in attempts well, allowing time for longer queues, and maybe have something close at hand to keep yourself entertained while waiting, like a good book! What’s more, if you do get to dive into the story, be mindful of other players and keep spoilers to a minimum—people play this game at many different paces, and the access issues will only make it harder for players to catch up, so let’s collectively try to preserve the experience for everyone else!
Thundaga Round!
To commemorate the one-year anniversary of Final Fantasy XVI’s launch, Square Enix shared a new illustration of Clive by Kazuya Takahashi (officially welcoming Clive to the Cool Chair Poses Club alongside Noctis, Sora, and Lightning, yes that’s totally real and not a thing I just made up right now)
In a shareholders’ meeting, Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu provided some clarification on what the company’s redefined business strategy means for smaller games:
“If we define ‘indie games’ as casual, small- to medium-scale games, we are working hard on these too. I can’t name specific titles at the moment, but our development pipeline does not only include major titles”
Rather than aiming to release a set number of games each year, their focus will be on making the games better and optimizing the timing of their releases to avoid “cannibalizing” their own sales
Japanese broadcaster J-Wave hosted a roundtable chat with creators from both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, including Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshinori Kitase, Kazuko Shibuya, Ken Narita, and Yuji Horii, the godfather of DQ—who claimed that, when Final Fantasy first released, he thought “we have a rival now”
Sakaguchi shared some personal news later in that same chat: the series’ godfather announced that he will become a grandfather this September—and added that he originally added the birth of a child to the ending of Final Fantasy VI to commemorate the birth of his own daughter, Aya, who was born during the game’s development
Square Enix Merchandise has announced an English version of another Final Fantasy board game, Moogle Bounty Mayhem—a recently-announced game created by board game designer Seiji Kanai (who has worked on games like Love Letter) and illustrated by Ryoma Ito (of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance fame)
Though not much is known about this new game yet, it seems players will become one of 6 Moogle brothers and complete monster hunts
The Final Fantasy Trading Card Game showcased some of the special illustrations that will appear in its next set, Hidden Trials, which releases on August 2:
Sara Shimokobe has illustrated three FFIV cards, one of Asura and an adorable matching pair for Palom and Porom, while Gen Kobayashi has rendered a chilling new version of Vincent Valentine
The TCG has been hosting its Materia Cup championship events in various locations—most recently in Chula Vista, California and Orléans, Ottawa, Canada—and they’ve been sharing videos of featured matches online
Beta Tactics
Last week saw the 27th anniversary of Final Fantasy Tactics’ release in Japan, and to mark the occasion, director Yasumi Matsuno re-shared some intriguing prototype screenshots on Twitter—and some other anecdotal insights.
What’s going on:
Two of the three screenshots show the combat screen, where player characters and enemies are lined up to do battle in traditional JRPG format—demonstrating the original idea, to make a RTS game like Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen
Involved units have their HP and MP displayed as gauges alongside their portrait, and you can see some dramatic animation concepts
The third is a scenario scene with a similar style, but with many more characters on-screen and a dramatic word bubble approach for the dialog
These shots were shared a few years back, but Matsuno shared them in higher resolution this time around, and also replied to some comments and questions
The word bubbles came out of his team’s interest in American comics at the time, though the story itself was still a “blank state,” with grand dreams of a story about “a battle between a human and a demon king”
Though Matsuno himself preferred RTS, a turn-based engine was chosen as that genre was more popular in Japan at the time
For context, these screenshots are prototype mock-ups, not captured or developed on the PlayStation itself
Matsuno showed these to his boss, who (allegedly) declared “NOT THIS ONE!” (or so Matsuno jests in the present day)
He recalled feeling that, when he joined SquareSoft, the more senior staff like Sakaguchi and Kitase “were top-notch creators who had a proven track record in the game industry” while he “was on the side of the have-nots”, which he posits may have influenced the motif of status disparity in the final game (despite feeling no antagonism toward those other creators)
In the process, Matsuno related that his favourite FFT character is Gafgarion
What we thought:
Honestly, this would be a different game altogether
It’s hard to imagine Final Fantasy Tactics without that iconic isometric perspective; this looks interesting, but the look we got is more impactful (in my book anyway)
The visual identity of Tactics, so indistinguishable from the artwork of Akihiko Yoshida, still shines through despite the massive shift in visual tone; the angles and scales are wildly different, but these characters (or classes) remain identifiable
The team’s interest in American comics doesn’t really show much in the final product—though if the game was released nowadays the comparisons to Game of Thrones would be cloyingly prevalent
The speech bubbles, however, found a home in Vagrant Story a few years later, so in theory, we could have had a FFT with more Vagrant Story-esque cutscenes, and that part… sounds kinda rad?
What’s next? 27 years later, Matsuno seems very proud of his creation (as he should be). With so much buzz about a potential remaster/remake, it’s almost a challenge to talk so candidly about the game, knowing it could invite the kind of unwelcome, unanswerable question he’s shunned before, so we appreciate you for sharing this trivia with us! (Meanwhile, for the Ivalice fans out there, you may want to keep an eye out for next week’s Kupo Chronicle…)
Around the Union
Job classes are an iconic element of the Final Fantasy series, right from the first screen of the first game. Yet, with so many different games expanding the corpus of classes, some new entries are bound to fall by the wayside… especially when they’re as unusual as some of the options we explore in “7 Incredibly Obscure Jobs in Final Fantasy!” Are any of these near and dear to your heart? Did we miss a worthy contender? Sound off in the comments to let us know!
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Until next time, kupo!