Story
FATE
Housing
Alpha
Beta
<ul class='bbc'>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!
- 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
<ul class='bbc'>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!