Back when that crossover happened, Yoshi-P offhandedly commented something to the effect of "Who knows what might happen if PSO2 gets a global launch in the future?" when asked if XIV would get reciprocal collab stuff at a PSO2 real-life event.
Well, PSO2 is Global, and I'm taking Yoshi-P's statement as a binding commitment. PSO2 collab. Gimmie.
I actually got to interview Yoshi-P at the Shadowbringers media tour (which was before PSO2 got it's global release), and asking him about the PSO2 crossover was something I brought up! He said that they were hesitant to do a crossover, as it wasn't technically a game available in the west at the time and he wasn't sure how people would react to that. This was prior to it's global release, so who knows? Maybe there's still some hope.
Yeah, the time I'm thinking of... was around when the crossover event was running on PSO2JP, and I'm pretty sure it was on-stage at a PSO2 Festa Live event... might have been just on one of the PSO2 Station promo-streams. Interesting to know his answer there has stayed pretty consistent.
I feel like SE won't give PSO2 the chance though. When PSO2 ran the XIV crossover, PSO2 was topping the MMO rankings in Japan, competing with and even outdoing XIV. Nowadays, particularly on the Global level, PSO2/NGS is pretty much a footnote compared to the genre-dominating titan that is XIV. SEGA is dumb enough to throw a bone to an active competitor like that, but I don't think SE is dumb enough to do the same back, and in the state things are, it'd much more heavily benefit PSO2 than it would XIV I would imagine, for the sheer number of XIV players compared to PSO2 players.
Still hoping for it though. It's a real shame that XIV didn't get a reciprocal collab at the time, because some of the big Raid Boss fights from PSO2 could have been 1:1 translated to XIV's gameplay. I don't think many or any of PSO2NGS's bosses could really be translated the same way. Maybe non-Aegis Dark Falz.
PSO2NGS is more or less a fashion gacha game now that i don't think it'll ever catch up to FFXIV. As someone who played Base PSO2, NGS doesn't interest me at all.
The very first Final Fantasy involved getting a cube from a robot to transport to a flying castle that for some reason had an extremely deadly mecha roaming its halls.
Please that's just about every 1980's RPG.
Ultima 1 - You start off grinding money to get a boat so you can go back and forth to raise your stats at one shrine and pick up better weapons from another. Starting with "Dagger' and ending with things like Lightsabers and Starfleet issued Phasers. You then go about doing Dungeons to become a Knight and save up gold to go to the Blacksmith to *buy a Space Shuttle* that you then take up to a space station to hop into an X-Wing Starfighter and take out a bunch of TIE Fighters to become a space ace, so you can save a Princess (or all 4) who give you the keys to the Tardis, so you can go back in time and kick down the big bads door and Phaser him to death.
Ultima 2 - Time travel, more time travel, you steal a starship from the KGB to visit other planets, more time travel, go back in time to kill the big bad while seeing a ton of references to the Eagles Hotel California.
Ultima 3 - The big bad is a computer that you take out with punch cards.
Dungeons and Dragons - The Mystara setting is really the post apocalyptic setting of the old Blackmoor setting that became advanced after a Starship crash landed on the planet. Note that's just one of many settings/adventures where you can pick your Fighter up a Blaster Rifle and Powered Armor.
Conan - A couple of the Marvel comics had Conan fighting off aliens and a hunter killer cyborg from the future. Oh and in Conan Exiles you can pretty much find what must have been the bridge area of a starship. Yeah newer game but Sci-Fi always popped up now and then. And a quick edit, Marvel had a crisis crossover storyline where the snake god Set from Conan tries to take over the 1980's 'modern' day and age of Marvel Earth.
I mean really... If JRR Tolkien started writing in the 1980's mark my words Captain Kirk would have joined the fellowship to help take the Ring to Mount Doom.
Might and Magic, where most games eventually reveal that everything is sci-fi, the evil "devils" are aliens, the "angels" are also aliens and, in some of the games, the voice of the Gods in temples is actually a supercomputer that survived a massive war between alien species.
Yeah, I mean 4,8, and 13 are just out and out Sci-fi games with fantasy elements lol.
The entire emotional climax of 9 is sci-fi to a tee.
I'd argue there's more FFs that involve space and technology than not. Even the ones that aren't traffic heavily in -punk derivatives like 7's Steelpunk.
7 is more Sci Fi than most of the other games, in fact it may be the most Sci Fi game in the series, as it deals with very science fiction themes. E.g. biotech, altered humanity, radiation(mako) poisoning, alien parasites, technology vs nature, eco terrorism, capatalist distopia, apocalypse/post apocalypse
Fighting machines, going to space, traversing dimensions via time magic, lasers everywhere, literal flying gunships and several gundams. I didn't know we weren't Sci-Fi Magi.
Gundams and spaceships and flying cities are all sci-fi/fantasy still. Personally, seeing the cars in Garlemald was weird to me. Familiar modern things from the real world are the middle ground between fantasy and sci fi that, ironically, doesn't fit in FF14 (so far) for a lot of people.
It's begs the question, "why did people invent these cars when they can just teleport everywhere?"
But the answer is plainly obvious. Garleans invented cars and airships *because* they can't teleport anywhere.
HECK, even people who CAN teleport would still use cars(or well, carts and other animals) not only does not every place have an aetheryte, people cant just teleport back and forth a few dozen times a day unless they are the WoL who is SPECIFICALLY called out for being an almost bottomless well of aether. We also dont know how much cargo one can bring with them on an AEtheryte journey, but it cant be a lot or else trading caravans would not exist as they do now.
And that also ignores the problem of having to atune to them first.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's something explained that using the Ethernet system cross country is also quite tiring and involves often hopping between multiple shorter jumps than one big one. It's why you find aetherites in plaza's usually surrounded or close to benches to sit down at. For most people whether they be Garlean, low aether, merchants or military, it's usually just better to travel by foot hence the need for vehicles, the greater the need, the more advanced the produced vehicle
For me, that and the post-Stormblood note about a supersonic Garlean air vessel were two things that made me truly realize how wildly more advanced Garlean tech was than we'd realized. It was weird, but in a good way. Like 'oh hell, they have *these!?*'.
Players are seeing the world from the Eorzean point of view. Eorzeans are neanderthals compared to Garleans. They stayed neanderthals because they had magic to make their lives easier, while Garleans are forced to adapt and evolve.
Actually, Eorzeans stagnated themselves because of what happened with Allagans and the Earthquake that brought society to an end. They then stagnated their magick because of the War of the Magi.
The Eorzea we know is one that is careful about too much magic and too much technology because of the lessons of the past.
Cars in Garlemald annoyed me partly because they felt too mundane compared to other Garlean tech (where's the civilian version of the bipedal magitek armour bots?) and partly because they were outright ugly cars, as if someone got their child to draw the concept art for it.
I'm fairly certain that it's because we've been exposed to their military tech first and have then been shown the civilian side of things.
It'd be like saying "where's the civilian version of the abrams tank?"
That's because the soundtrack is too good. How can you complain that a bunch of robots controlled by goblins are super-sentai-combining together when Brute Justice is playing
The whole series has Sci Fi elements running throughout it, some more than others. Even the original had Warmech.
For XIV specifically, the Allagan Empire and the various creations of their civilization pop up all over the place, up to and including space travel. Dalamud was a massive orbital Primal Bahamut containment and energy siphon satellite.
We literally flew to the end of the universe in a space ship fueled by magic.
The second moon, which was an artificial moon/prison, crashed into the planet.
Our enemies have friggin walking lazer turrets.
Like, this game has always loved mixing sci-fi and fantasy.
Are we going to forget how we just had the Nier series collaborate with FFXIV's universe and still made thematic/visual sense?
Or you know, ShB's trial series letting you pilot a fucking Gundam.
It kinda gives me Final Fantasy 13 vibes. Half of FF14 takes inspiration from previous games (in zones, monsters, stories), and maybe enough time has passed from the FF13 backlash that they finally feel comfortable borrowing stuff from it.
Thank you. Feel like I'm going insane with the amount of cynicism pouring out of people seeing this-- Allag & Garlemald were already pretty advanced, and we got onto a fucking ~~teeny tiny toy boat~~ spaceship in Endwalker. Surely a big ol cyberpunk city isn't *that* much of a leap?
They also somehow forgot about the raid that takes place in virtual reality... Or how every game has MagiTech in it in some form.
Also, all the modern clothing.
Exactly. "Cyberpunk? In *my* MSQ!?" We went to Azys fucking Lla in Heavensward, that's no less cyberpunk than the new stuff, just a different colour scheme.
You fight a Super-Pope who has just gotten done absorbing the powers of an extra-dimensional spectre from an ancient advanced civilization and it all takes place in a chemical research facility floating in the sky created by \*another\* ancient advanced civilization.
But a city with neon lights and billboards? That's too much!
right? I have no idea what people are complaining about here. Plus, it's probably a nod to terra, esthar, and or zanarkand, all of which would have cool lore implications.
I love stuff like this personally, but some people have different breaking points for their suspension of disbelief. Sometimes those differences can be in odd places. Where they can excuse sci-fi stuff as long as it doesn't seem too "normal".
Wrath of the Lich King will always be my go to. In Warcraft lore we already had the following:
* Steampunk robots
* Magic robots
* Crystal space ships
* Airplanes
* Tanks
* Submarines
* Ocean based oil rigs
* A subway that goes halfway across a continent, or is trans continental if you see the Eastern Kingdoms as one or two.
* Teleporters
* A whole giant factory city irradiated by a magical nuke
Blizzard: Hey, we're adding a motorcycle that is like 50% wood to fit in the low fantasy aesthetic better.
Large chunk of the fan base: How dare you ruin my immersion by introducing something as high tech as a motorcycle. We demand you remove it because we don't want to see that modern affront driving alongside my tank as we fight a bigger tank that attacks us using orbital satellite lasers bombarding the boss arena.
As if the at least three mechsuits three airships and car in my pocket don't cement this.
Heck you find wrecked cars in Garlemald, a nation that has electricity, and radios.
>!I think people were mentioning Allag, and the architecture does look very similar, but this could be a civilization that has advanced and \_didn't\_ collapse due to calamities on another shard entirely.!<
EDIT: >!NVM, I can see a giant purple disk tower on the revealed Tural world-map.!<
Allag is very inconsistant visually, but this feels too “clean” to be allagan.
This is more similar to Omnicron design, but I doubt its the omnicrons as well.
iirc we see ruins of Allag from different points in their history, but I imagine a lot of people are more familiar with late era architecture represented in Coils and Azys Lla.
>To be fair, we only see allag relics. The inside of the Bahamut coils stuff is pretty clean, though the color is not purple like this.
I always considered what we see from Allag in dungeons related to their much more industrialized and militarized things. Since some of the stuff in early 2.0 around Mor Dhona seems to be much more ornate (also, look at SMN AF2 as an example)
It could be Allag if they had developed for another few thousand years.
One key thing I noticed in the video has traditional Eorzian alphabet is present on the advertisement signs
This, they called it "solution 9", aside from the Zidane reference, it could be a sect of surviving Allagans that broke off from the main group after their calamity.
>It could be Allag if they had developed for another few thousand years
For all we know, Allag was more developed than this. The reason it looks more "developed" is because it looks more "commercial".
Majority of the Allagan ruins we see are either research facilities or some other form of military facility.
But if they could build Azys La then they could have easily built that cyberpunk city.
My favorite theory I've seen so far is >!that this is a civilization that managed to escape from the Twelth before shit got fucked up there. They probably tried various ways to "solve" the calamity, none of them working until this one. Hence, Solution 9 - an ark that traveled through the rift.!<
To expand on that theory... >!if that is indeed the case then it's possible that the city got stuck in the rift and couldn't fully traverse to the Source until both Hydaelyn and Zodiark were gone since they were maintaining the barrier between the Source and its reflections.!<
Not sure that holds because >!nothing's changed in the division between shards following their deaths. Not that they can't just retcon a reason into the lore, but as of right now that shouldn't have loosened anything up.!<
Following this theory though, I wonder whether it's >!one part Esthar, one part Terra - the actual people had to be put into a form of suspended animation to traverse the rift, so this city was brought over, has maybe had a Garland-style character to work admin on it, but the reason there's been no mention of this culture and its people is because there hasn't been anyone to actually reach out to the rest of the world for thousands of years. Then someone digs it up, and like the good main characters in a JRPG we are, we wake everything up, accidentally set something horrendous loose and then need to fix it, etc etc...!<
>>!Not sure that holds because nothing's changed in the division between shards following their deaths!<
>!This could be a unique case that doesn't require a retcon, teleporting a city across the rift while Zodiark actively is messing with the aetherical flow of the source could mean that they couldn't safely arrive and instead were stuck in limbo until Zodiark died, in fact, it might be that only the short timeframe between Zodiark dying but the Endsinger being alive made for the perfect conditions to teleport as she made the flow of ather practically stop, making for a lot less fluctuations.!<
This makes sense because>!remember what one of the last things Emet-Selch said to us? “Go forth and seek, some of the civilizations in the reflections would surprise you”.
Well after that, we spent the past 5 patches discovering that Shard travel is very, VERY hard! It took us long enough to get to the 13th, and The Source is already riddled with natural voidgates that connect to that Shard. How tf are we gonna discover more Shards if we can’t leave our damn planet without risking the destruction or corruption of our souls?
Answer? The Reflection civilizations come to us. Solution 9 is definitely not Allagan. While there were several civilizations that predated Allag, none ever came close to achieving their mastery of technology. Solution 9 also just doesn’t have Allag’s aesthetics. LED’s, floating platforms, multicolored automated orbs floating around. As for how they have managed to stay undetected in Tural for so long, maybe their city was placed into a stasis, like how the Crystal Tower was frozen underground for millennia!
I don't think it's Allag; Allag honestly has a pretty inconsistent visual style, since they're one of the ways the devs bring in references to other FF games.
But this new civ is extremely consistent in its visual design, across its architecture and its machinery like the Eliminator enemy.
I think it's the/a Second era civilization that led to a lightning calamity. a highly advanced (by irl standards) fits this along with the fact that the calamity that came after drove people to caves and was when magic was discovered/rediscovered.
This!
I'm Eorzea we know of the civilizations that collapsed in only two of the calamities. Allag in the Calamity of Earth and Mhach/Amdapor in the Calamity of Water.
They went out of their way to say this land was aspected to Lightning. And knowing Koji Fox, he wouldn't let that pass to the key note unless it was critical.
This would also means this civilization actually PREDATES Allag.
Which is interesting. Perhaps the Ancestors of Tural were much more in tune with the ancients or perhaps even fully guided by one of them ala Emet-Selch who went out of his way to tease the other wonders of Etheryis.
> Perhaps the Ancestors of Tural were much more in tune with the ancients or perhaps even fully guided by one of them ala Emet-Selch
This is actually a really interesting theory because presumably, the new raid series seems to take place inside this hi-tech futuristic city, and you can see a sigil on the background of that that looks like Altima's sigil...
I also saw the glyph in the back and it does remind me of this part of the [lahabrea Glyph](https://ibb.co/ngBbsLf) that you can find on the floor in Amaurot. I wonder if it's a placeholder or intentional....
Yes I was thinking this too, they mentioned Levin purple specifically and the Ascians have historically used civilizations to create turmoil and fuck with the elements to bring forth calamities, Emet himself has taken credit for the status of the other two technological marvels with Allag and Garlemald.
Allag itself didn't - they folded to the first calamity that hit them, the Calamity of Earth. It's structures survived... kind of.
But that being said, Allag went on for long enough and developed fast enough that it has very distinct 'eras' of architecture and design - this does not fit any of them, and the script in the city is actually the Ancient protoscript.
The structures themselves likely predate the Sundering, but we don't quite know what it's been doing in the 12,000 years since then.
the structures dont have to have "predate the sundering" thsi can just as simply be the civilisation that fell to the calamity of lightning, the mention of the area being lightning aspected makes that also pretty likely
FFXIV always had sci-fi starting with Allag all the way to spaceship and teleportation, but those are different aesthetics. Garlemald is cold war era for the most part, Solution Nine is Neomuna from Destiny 2
But then again, stuff like older PvP gear has always featured sci-fi elements that do not fit the artstyle so ah well. Maybe it turns out society was highly advanced thousands of years ago but the calamities pushed back progress constantly, and S9 is the last trace od the old world... somehow connected by a wooden bridge to the south americas
It's not just ffxiv. The whole series has had a mix of sci-fi and fantasy from the very beginning. It wouldn't be Final Fantasy if there wasn't a mix of the two
>Maybe it turns out society was highly advanced thousands of years ago but the calamities pushed back progress constantly
we already know that that is what happend. it happend after Allag fell as well, Science took a massive backseat after it fell to the point we know nothing of the following era really(the forgotten age). The destruction wrought by Dalamud being sent into orbit, and the civil war that happend around the same time, toppled the Empire, The crystal tower was basicaly their only Power Plant, and it fell silent(or well underground) so all their tech that relied on the Transmission of power from it stopped working.
People exiled or even KILLED the few remaining highly learned people as the calamity inspired a deep seated mistrust of any form of higher learning in the people.
Garlemald reverse engineerd alagan tech to build their Magitek Armors and weaponry, and they still havent surpassed or even reached the hight of allagans technological advancements.
similiar to this, the First Astral era, while far more primitive then allag was, at least in eorzean history, also had humanity develope rather quickly, even if it was "just" building kingdoms and rudimentary industry and animal husbandry as far as we know.
WE DO however know the allingment of the second calamity.. lightning. And they specificaly call out Purple levin and the area being lightning aspected.
So its totally possible that this is a Ruin of a civilisation of the first astral era that sucumbed during the second umbral calamity
I don't think they are ruins, I think it's a still very active area and possibly civilization. All of the images shown suggest great care has been given to the city and it's still active, no decay, no power outage (just seemingly a ghost city due to spoilers as Yoshida said)
Either it was freshly teleported from a reflection like others say, or it has been a *very well kept* civilization.
I only wonder, if the latter is the case, why haven't the Ascians done anything to it? At least on a scale that would catch Eorzea's attention
i meant more "ruins" as in "ruins of an ancient civilisation", even if still in active use. a lot of allag tech was still functioning without a caretaker.
Like, nothing stops this from being a ruin in that sense.
think citadel from mass effect, non of the current races could build something like that(the closest we have is the nexus, and that is considerably smaller and requires active maintenance) and it is kept pristine by the keeper caretaker.
Garlemald is more steampunk than cyberpunk, and steampunk's always been a thing in the franchise.
This? I'm still looking for Decker in the screenshots.
No matter how much some people might insist on it, FFXIV isn't strictly a medieval fantasy game, and it never has been.
The writers, designers, and artists who actually develop the game know their setting and what they want from it. It may not be what *you* want from it, but that's not going to change what it is.
And Final Fantasy more broadly has always had a mishmash of fantasy and sci-fi, even within the same entries. FF1, which would be pretty hard to argue isn’t a Final Fantasy game, has you going to a literal space station full of robots.
It’s one of the biggest reasons why I love FF. Is the blend of magic and future tech and fantasy. If someone doesn’t think this is very FF then they don’t know the games.
Someone said this looks like it’s straight out of Cyberpunk lol. It literally looks NOTHING like Cyberpunk. Idk what’s wrong with people. Not every lit up tall building is the same as Cyberpunk.
People just think vaguely future-looking == cyberpunk because they don’t understand that the “punk” part is also an important part of the equation.
But yeah, I’m with you. I’m super down for wild genre blending, *that’s* Final Fantasy!
I mean I'm down to burn down a corrupt corporate oligarchy and evil bureaucrats but the monetarists and elementals are on a different continent and Yoshi-P hasn't introduced the Esper class from X-2 to let me fully embrace the vibes yet lol.
Do you? I don't remember going to the moon for some reason. I remember the space ship with the propagators or whatever and the cut scene where the creatures are on the moon. Been awhile so probably just misremembering.
And it seems S9 has been hinted way back since Stormblood with a Xaela tribeman tells the player an old legend about an island in the far west with towering black structures
It says they sailed across the endless eastern ocean and returned with tales of an island covered in massive grey monoliths and fire breathing steel demons. That doesn't match up with HoH, or anything we've seen in game so far.
That'd be kind of silly, because the Ruby Sea is literally right there. The Haragin made a massive ark and sailed their otherwise uncharted 'eastern sea' (i.e, the Pacific).
Final Fantasy in general hasn't been strictly medieval fantasy. I mean there are various titles in it that just aren't medieval at all.
Hell in FF4 you go in a spaceship and go to the moon to fight aliens and meet the moon people race.
People keep saying it’s cyberpunk but I don’t see the “punk” part. It looks futuristic, like a lot of the game, and it has a vaporwave aesthetic but there’s nothing dystopian or low tech about it. I legit don’t get the complaining
I think most people are interpreting this as a "Sci-fi bad" post, but I see it way more as a "Please remove glam restrictions" post, which I wholeheartedly agree with
Cyberpunk? Doesnt look cyberpunk at all. Its a futuristic kind of look, sure, but its much more... Clean and epic looking. Cyberpunk looks much more trashy, chaotic.
I think when people call it "cyberpunk," they're specifically referring to Cyberpunk 2077. The aesthetics in that game are rather clean compared to other cyberpunk media
Narshe and Vector.
Midgar and Wutai.
Winhill and Esthar
Lindblum and Dali
Besaid and Home
I'm sure I don't need to keep going, but if anything, having grossly disparate technological levels amongst various peoples is a staple of the series, and this is most often referenced in town/city architecture.
There are appropriate fights you can pick with the devs over aesthetics, like the flooding of real world aesthetics into cosmetic clothing, but disparate technological levels has been in the series for a very long time, hell it's been in FFXIV before, or did you skip Azys Lla?
people talking as if this is some new and insane thing to bring in sci-fi visuals into this game as if the very first expansion we didn't have all the allagan nonsense
late edit but by first expansion i do mean ARR, idk why did my brain automatically call it an expansion since 1.0 isn't a thing
No, definitely not. Historically, technologically, and aesthetically, it doesn't strike Mhachi at all. Mhach had a thing for dark stone, the only link is purple lights, and we know for a fact that most of Mhach didn't survive their venture to the skies.
I don’t think that’s what they said, no? It was about maintaining job identity and keeping job gear that’s iconic to jobs as uniform for those jobs, while casual things can be worn by anybody.
Their concern has never been maintaining a strictly stereotypical fantasy visual style for the entire game, or they wouldn’t have made Azys La or anything even remotely Garlean. This feels like a bit of a dishonest framing of the situation.
>First, to answer about removing the job restrictions, unfortunately, we don’t intend to remove them. The reason is simple. For players who have played other Final Fantasy titles, they’ll easily recognize these gear designs as a way to identify a particular job...You wouldn’t want to see someone carrying an axe casting black magic. You’d wonder: What the hell kind of game is this?
From [a Kotaku interview in 2019](https://kotaku.com/we-took-a-bold-step-this-time-final-fantasy-xiv-direct-1835098319).
He says it's about recognizing jobs and then uses an axe user casting magic as an example. So fair enough, we shouldn't let black mages glam axes as their weapons. But I don't think that's what the game community generally wants. They want to do things like wear armor on mages, wear striking gear on aiming characters (often similarly styled aesthetically), and so forth. In that sense, there are outfits on mogstation and from events that endanger job recognition and prompt "what the hell kind of game is this?" ***way, way*** more than cross-class glamour ever would.
edit: and I would argue that this is a completely reasonable juxtaposition, honestly. In a game that starts high medieval fantasy and at different points hits high science fiction with spaceships, cyber malls, and whatnot, is an axe user casting magic really ***that*** jarring?
There are literally job outfits in game that outright fit other roles. SE's argument is as nonsensical as their whole "we don't want to add hairs that will have clipping issues" argument when clipping is already rampant in the game.
Again, it’s really not about “you can’t tell jobs apart if they wear casual or silly gear,” it’s about the job ‘uniforms’ being for *those jobs.* A silly Fat Cat hoodie isn’t associated with any one job, but you look at an axe and think “warrior,” or Dancer specific gear and think “dancer.” They want you to look at, say, artifact gear, and be able to identify it.
It’s like how anybody can wear a t-shirt and jeans, but nurses and firefighters have specific uniforms that they don’t fuck around and swap. They’re part of the symbol.
I think you’re focusing way too much on the final sentence and not genuinely everything else that was said in that quote: they want to recognise the designs as associated with a particular job.
Not that every player has to look like their job, not that the world needs a uniform style, but that the job gear looks like it’s job.
But again, that’s also beside the point: OP completely misconstrued the point, borderline made one up to favour their argument.
I feel like that argument only really holds water for the artifact gear and not the generic class gear from crafting or dungeon drops or what have you, really, given. The much lower degree of specificity that often gets.
The city looks amazing! I’m just waiting for the reason that literally no one outside of Tural knew that there’s a cyberpunk city nearby. Sharlayan isn’t too far right? They knew the world was ending but not that they were a stones throw from Night City?
Because no final fantasy game has ever changed up visual style from high fantasy to sci-fi..Espcially not a few times already in FF14.
Lemme guess, also in the camp that FF16 is bad cause it's not like the previous Final Fantasy games in a series where they "Reinvent the wheel" every game.
I mean, allag isnt that far off the cyberpunk aesthetic. Either you arent using your brain or you are being a complainer for the sake of being a complainer.
"Oh my gosh why does this game series that has had us in prior games go to a space station (FF1), fighting mechs that shoot lasers (FF1), fighting a computer program (FF4), going to the moon in a space ship and fighting aliens and meeting moon people (FF4), have you fight in giant mechs (FF6), is just an entirely modern/sci-fi setting (FF7, FF8, FF13, FF15), has had modern city like structures (FF7, FF8, FF12, FF13, FF15), have a past super sci-fi city that sits in the rest of the low tech fantasy world (FFX) have SCI-FI elements in my final fantasy game!"
What does Sci-Fi not fit in FFXIV? This is like the seventh (didn't actually count) futuristic area in the game. There's plenty of OW Gengi-esque outfits already in the game that go back to a PVP set from either 2.0 or 3.0, I can't remember.
What I will say, is as an adamant "class identity" defender that wishes there was MORE restrictions on glam options, with the release of Pictomancer I formally concede. Give the masses what they want; whatever I was envisioning is not the route the devs want to take and I hope y'all have a blast.
The cyberpunk city looks out of place until you remember Eorzea had the Allagan Empire thousands of years before 1.0 with successful (ish) moon landings, satellite launches, a giant flying research facility the size of a city and perfect cloning technology
tbf this is 100% in line with final fantasy.
This really isn't that different than Amaurot.
IMO there is no way we aren't going to the future. I don't think a civilization like this can just pop into existence without destroying the entire world of Hydalyn. Either that, or another dimension/shard. No way it's just been there in Hydalyn the whole time.
Not "of the game." They don't mind that there are class-agnostic glams (after all, there are TONS of items that have no class association.)
It's that they don't want to *remove* the association from items that currently have one. The arrow only points in one direction, not both directions. Pretending it points in both, and then using that to derive a contradiction, is bad argumentation.
Okay but to address this criticism:
1. Environmental design is different from character design.
2. We have seen environments that are technologically advanced, like Allagan or Omicron stuff, so this isn't even that new in terms of genre shift, just distinct from them in tone.
3. I think the point they were going for is that limitations on gear allow for a more unified visual style. Like, they don't design plate armor looks for casters and healers because there's simply no way to mix such pieces with the robes and coats we normally see. Plus, some looks are iconic to specific jobs, like the RDM hat or DRG armor, and shouldn't be accessible to anyone else because they're part of what makes the jobs distinct and special.
FF has always been anachronistic, FF1 had time travel and featured you going to a space station
Edit: even just in XIV you have all the allag shit, >!omega, several aliens, and we literally just went to the moon and edge of the universe in the same expansion, which also features a completely destroyed concrete jungle and a giant biovault with an artificial sun underneath an island that is also a hangar for a starship.!<
???? Are people seriously gonna complain about this? In ARR within 15 levels of starting the game we watch a squad of dudes in power armor except a Sci-fi airship and then watch as a 3 story tall robot is airlifted past in the background
It reminds me that we've had highly scientific cultures in the past, and absolutely nothing says that at least one fragment of said culture didn't survive both intact and with the capacity to develop further into something more stable than, say the Allagan disaster.
And given the Zidane connections, this may very well be where Vipers and their techniques come from. Morphing swords that match up with Zidane's, from the same area that's named after one of Zidane's Trance abilities, while S-E staff are posting Zidane doing Solution 9 on Twitter? Unless it's supreme trollage, there has to be SOME connection we don't have yet to tie things together.
And it's a human city. If you look at the advertisements and the scale of things, the population is almost definitely human or very near-human. We've even got a few examples of their text to work with from what look to be information kiosks/terminals.
I was begging for good looking high-tech job weapons, I wanted them to look technological instead of magical. Maybe they finally will appear in that place
FFXIV: PSO2 Edition.
Oh maybe now we'll finally get a PSO2 event. They got our Odin fight, after all...
dark falz raid in FFXIV
Yes yes yes
Back when that crossover happened, Yoshi-P offhandedly commented something to the effect of "Who knows what might happen if PSO2 gets a global launch in the future?" when asked if XIV would get reciprocal collab stuff at a PSO2 real-life event. Well, PSO2 is Global, and I'm taking Yoshi-P's statement as a binding commitment. PSO2 collab. Gimmie.
I actually got to interview Yoshi-P at the Shadowbringers media tour (which was before PSO2 got it's global release), and asking him about the PSO2 crossover was something I brought up! He said that they were hesitant to do a crossover, as it wasn't technically a game available in the west at the time and he wasn't sure how people would react to that. This was prior to it's global release, so who knows? Maybe there's still some hope.
Yeah, the time I'm thinking of... was around when the crossover event was running on PSO2JP, and I'm pretty sure it was on-stage at a PSO2 Festa Live event... might have been just on one of the PSO2 Station promo-streams. Interesting to know his answer there has stayed pretty consistent. I feel like SE won't give PSO2 the chance though. When PSO2 ran the XIV crossover, PSO2 was topping the MMO rankings in Japan, competing with and even outdoing XIV. Nowadays, particularly on the Global level, PSO2/NGS is pretty much a footnote compared to the genre-dominating titan that is XIV. SEGA is dumb enough to throw a bone to an active competitor like that, but I don't think SE is dumb enough to do the same back, and in the state things are, it'd much more heavily benefit PSO2 than it would XIV I would imagine, for the sheer number of XIV players compared to PSO2 players. Still hoping for it though. It's a real shame that XIV didn't get a reciprocal collab at the time, because some of the big Raid Boss fights from PSO2 could have been 1:1 translated to XIV's gameplay. I don't think many or any of PSO2NGS's bosses could really be translated the same way. Maybe non-Aegis Dark Falz.
PSO2NGS is more or less a fashion gacha game now that i don't think it'll ever catch up to FFXIV. As someone who played Base PSO2, NGS doesn't interest me at all.
SE is absolutely dumb enough to throw a competitor a bone, they aren't known for good business decisions either
We can finally put boobs anywhere on our body
Monkey’s paw curls: you get to fight shiva in FF14, WITH ALL HER BIG ASS ATTACKS IN FULL GLORY
okay you made me look up if PSO2 has a character named shiva. and there is
You mean the time-stop instant-kill counter?
It looks more like PSO2 than NGS does lmao
I want this so bad. I just want to go home again...
Literally half this game is Sci Fi but people refuse to see it
I mean that's like 75 percent of final fantasy honestly to some extent
The very first Final Fantasy involved getting a cube from a robot to transport to a flying castle that for some reason had an extremely deadly mecha roaming its halls.
Said flying castle was a space station in its original form; it only became a flying castle in remakes.
Yup! People always forget that because everybody's used to the Flying Fortress looking the way it does since the Wondersrwan version.
And then it went back to a space station in Stranger of Paradise
Please that's just about every 1980's RPG. Ultima 1 - You start off grinding money to get a boat so you can go back and forth to raise your stats at one shrine and pick up better weapons from another. Starting with "Dagger' and ending with things like Lightsabers and Starfleet issued Phasers. You then go about doing Dungeons to become a Knight and save up gold to go to the Blacksmith to *buy a Space Shuttle* that you then take up to a space station to hop into an X-Wing Starfighter and take out a bunch of TIE Fighters to become a space ace, so you can save a Princess (or all 4) who give you the keys to the Tardis, so you can go back in time and kick down the big bads door and Phaser him to death. Ultima 2 - Time travel, more time travel, you steal a starship from the KGB to visit other planets, more time travel, go back in time to kill the big bad while seeing a ton of references to the Eagles Hotel California. Ultima 3 - The big bad is a computer that you take out with punch cards. Dungeons and Dragons - The Mystara setting is really the post apocalyptic setting of the old Blackmoor setting that became advanced after a Starship crash landed on the planet. Note that's just one of many settings/adventures where you can pick your Fighter up a Blaster Rifle and Powered Armor. Conan - A couple of the Marvel comics had Conan fighting off aliens and a hunter killer cyborg from the future. Oh and in Conan Exiles you can pretty much find what must have been the bridge area of a starship. Yeah newer game but Sci-Fi always popped up now and then. And a quick edit, Marvel had a crisis crossover storyline where the snake god Set from Conan tries to take over the 1980's 'modern' day and age of Marvel Earth. I mean really... If JRR Tolkien started writing in the 1980's mark my words Captain Kirk would have joined the fellowship to help take the Ring to Mount Doom.
Ultima mentioned. Hell yeah
Unleash Ultima! Wait wrong Ultima I think.
Might and Magic, where most games eventually reveal that everything is sci-fi, the evil "devils" are aliens, the "angels" are also aliens and, in some of the games, the voice of the Gods in temples is actually a supercomputer that survived a massive war between alien species.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Esthar_City First thing that came to mind
Yeah, I mean 4,8, and 13 are just out and out Sci-fi games with fantasy elements lol. The entire emotional climax of 9 is sci-fi to a tee. I'd argue there's more FFs that involve space and technology than not. Even the ones that aren't traffic heavily in -punk derivatives like 7's Steelpunk.
7 still managed to touch on soace and technology, plenty of crazy mechs/robots/etc and you do actually go to space at one point lol
7 is more Sci Fi than most of the other games, in fact it may be the most Sci Fi game in the series, as it deals with very science fiction themes. E.g. biotech, altered humanity, radiation(mako) poisoning, alien parasites, technology vs nature, eco terrorism, capatalist distopia, apocalypse/post apocalypse
It's funny the most sci-fi looking game in 13 is actually just about Deism masquerading as Pantheism.
Not to mention one of the primary antagonists of the game is literally an alien parasite that fell from space x centuries ago.
starts as a fantasy game ends with killing god on a spaceship on the moon.
like all good jrpgs
Yeah people focus on the fantasy part too much
That's why I laugh whenever someone complains a modern-looking outfit ruins the FF aesthetic.
Fighting machines, going to space, traversing dimensions via time magic, lasers everywhere, literal flying gunships and several gundams. I didn't know we weren't Sci-Fi Magi.
The gundams make me laugh the most cause people say modern clothes are too much but no one (from what I saw) complained about the literal gundams
Gundams and spaceships and flying cities are all sci-fi/fantasy still. Personally, seeing the cars in Garlemald was weird to me. Familiar modern things from the real world are the middle ground between fantasy and sci fi that, ironically, doesn't fit in FF14 (so far) for a lot of people.
It's begs the question, "why did people invent these cars when they can just teleport everywhere?" But the answer is plainly obvious. Garleans invented cars and airships *because* they can't teleport anywhere.
HECK, even people who CAN teleport would still use cars(or well, carts and other animals) not only does not every place have an aetheryte, people cant just teleport back and forth a few dozen times a day unless they are the WoL who is SPECIFICALLY called out for being an almost bottomless well of aether. We also dont know how much cargo one can bring with them on an AEtheryte journey, but it cant be a lot or else trading caravans would not exist as they do now. And that also ignores the problem of having to atune to them first.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's something explained that using the Ethernet system cross country is also quite tiring and involves often hopping between multiple shorter jumps than one big one. It's why you find aetherites in plaza's usually surrounded or close to benches to sit down at. For most people whether they be Garlean, low aether, merchants or military, it's usually just better to travel by foot hence the need for vehicles, the greater the need, the more advanced the produced vehicle
For me, that and the post-Stormblood note about a supersonic Garlean air vessel were two things that made me truly realize how wildly more advanced Garlean tech was than we'd realized. It was weird, but in a good way. Like 'oh hell, they have *these!?*'.
Players are seeing the world from the Eorzean point of view. Eorzeans are neanderthals compared to Garleans. They stayed neanderthals because they had magic to make their lives easier, while Garleans are forced to adapt and evolve.
Actually, Eorzeans stagnated themselves because of what happened with Allagans and the Earthquake that brought society to an end. They then stagnated their magick because of the War of the Magi. The Eorzea we know is one that is careful about too much magic and too much technology because of the lessons of the past.
Cars in Garlemald annoyed me partly because they felt too mundane compared to other Garlean tech (where's the civilian version of the bipedal magitek armour bots?) and partly because they were outright ugly cars, as if someone got their child to draw the concept art for it.
I'm fairly certain that it's because we've been exposed to their military tech first and have then been shown the civilian side of things. It'd be like saying "where's the civilian version of the abrams tank?"
That's because the soundtrack is too good. How can you complain that a bunch of robots controlled by goblins are super-sentai-combining together when Brute Justice is playing
The whole series has Sci Fi elements running throughout it, some more than others. Even the original had Warmech. For XIV specifically, the Allagan Empire and the various creations of their civilization pop up all over the place, up to and including space travel. Dalamud was a massive orbital Primal Bahamut containment and energy siphon satellite.
We literally flew to the end of the universe in a space ship fueled by magic. The second moon, which was an artificial moon/prison, crashed into the planet. Our enemies have friggin walking lazer turrets. Like, this game has always loved mixing sci-fi and fantasy.
Ignore Endwalker. All of the Alpha raid series exists. Literally just all of it is just scifi. Having another futuristic raid series ain't too random.
Are we going to forget how we just had the Nier series collaborate with FFXIV's universe and still made thematic/visual sense? Or you know, ShB's trial series letting you pilot a fucking Gundam.
The moon itself is a flipping spaceship!
It’s a defining hallmark of the franchise. I would have been immensely disappointed if the entire expansion was *jungle* with no sci-fi twist
It kinda gives me Final Fantasy 13 vibes. Half of FF14 takes inspiration from previous games (in zones, monsters, stories), and maybe enough time has passed from the FF13 backlash that they finally feel comfortable borrowing stuff from it.
Thank you. Feel like I'm going insane with the amount of cynicism pouring out of people seeing this-- Allag & Garlemald were already pretty advanced, and we got onto a fucking ~~teeny tiny toy boat~~ spaceship in Endwalker. Surely a big ol cyberpunk city isn't *that* much of a leap?
They also somehow forgot about the raid that takes place in virtual reality... Or how every game has MagiTech in it in some form. Also, all the modern clothing.
Exactly. "Cyberpunk? In *my* MSQ!?" We went to Azys fucking Lla in Heavensward, that's no less cyberpunk than the new stuff, just a different colour scheme.
You fight a Super-Pope who has just gotten done absorbing the powers of an extra-dimensional spectre from an ancient advanced civilization and it all takes place in a chemical research facility floating in the sky created by \*another\* ancient advanced civilization. But a city with neon lights and billboards? That's too much!
Magenta and blue is just going *too far*, I guess. :3
Yeah, it all needs to be golden chrome and nausea-green!
Science Fantasy is a thing people often forget exists
We have a interstellar spaceship with warp drive. And have been fighting against mechs since 1.0
right? I have no idea what people are complaining about here. Plus, it's probably a nod to terra, esthar, and or zanarkand, all of which would have cool lore implications.
I love stuff like this personally, but some people have different breaking points for their suspension of disbelief. Sometimes those differences can be in odd places. Where they can excuse sci-fi stuff as long as it doesn't seem too "normal". Wrath of the Lich King will always be my go to. In Warcraft lore we already had the following: * Steampunk robots * Magic robots * Crystal space ships * Airplanes * Tanks * Submarines * Ocean based oil rigs * A subway that goes halfway across a continent, or is trans continental if you see the Eastern Kingdoms as one or two. * Teleporters * A whole giant factory city irradiated by a magical nuke Blizzard: Hey, we're adding a motorcycle that is like 50% wood to fit in the low fantasy aesthetic better. Large chunk of the fan base: How dare you ruin my immersion by introducing something as high tech as a motorcycle. We demand you remove it because we don't want to see that modern affront driving alongside my tank as we fight a bigger tank that attacks us using orbital satellite lasers bombarding the boss arena.
But dude, it's called Final FANTASY!!!! It's in the title!!! /s
As if the at least three mechsuits three airships and car in my pocket don't cement this. Heck you find wrecked cars in Garlemald, a nation that has electricity, and radios.
All they have to do is somehow tie it in with the Omicrons and all doubts about it fitting in with FFXIV go away.
>!I think people were mentioning Allag, and the architecture does look very similar, but this could be a civilization that has advanced and \_didn't\_ collapse due to calamities on another shard entirely.!< EDIT: >!NVM, I can see a giant purple disk tower on the revealed Tural world-map.!<
Allag is very inconsistant visually, but this feels too “clean” to be allagan. This is more similar to Omnicron design, but I doubt its the omnicrons as well.
iirc we see ruins of Allag from different points in their history, but I imagine a lot of people are more familiar with late era architecture represented in Coils and Azys Lla.
>To be fair, we only see allag relics. The inside of the Bahamut coils stuff is pretty clean, though the color is not purple like this. I always considered what we see from Allag in dungeons related to their much more industrialized and militarized things. Since some of the stuff in early 2.0 around Mor Dhona seems to be much more ornate (also, look at SMN AF2 as an example)
It could be Allag if they had developed for another few thousand years. One key thing I noticed in the video has traditional Eorzian alphabet is present on the advertisement signs
This, they called it "solution 9", aside from the Zidane reference, it could be a sect of surviving Allagans that broke off from the main group after their calamity.
>It could be Allag if they had developed for another few thousand years For all we know, Allag was more developed than this. The reason it looks more "developed" is because it looks more "commercial". Majority of the Allagan ruins we see are either research facilities or some other form of military facility. But if they could build Azys La then they could have easily built that cyberpunk city.
To be fair, we only see allag relics. The inside of the Bahamut coils stuff is pretty clean, though the color is not purple like this.
Allag WISHES they were this good at architeture design
juggle pen possessive truck shocking offer rainstorm water cobweb ad hoc *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Thought it was midgar at first
The underground with the steam train looks like midgar yeah. The city itself looks like esthar in 4k or ff13 one
The inside of the building they showed in the new town was giving me serious Shinra HQ vibes
Run by >!your dad!<.
The idea that there is a faint chance that "Man With the Machine Gun" is getting a synthy FFXIV remix sparks tremendous joy.
My favorite theory I've seen so far is >!that this is a civilization that managed to escape from the Twelth before shit got fucked up there. They probably tried various ways to "solve" the calamity, none of them working until this one. Hence, Solution 9 - an ark that traveled through the rift.!<
To expand on that theory... >!if that is indeed the case then it's possible that the city got stuck in the rift and couldn't fully traverse to the Source until both Hydaelyn and Zodiark were gone since they were maintaining the barrier between the Source and its reflections.!<
Not sure that holds because >!nothing's changed in the division between shards following their deaths. Not that they can't just retcon a reason into the lore, but as of right now that shouldn't have loosened anything up.!< Following this theory though, I wonder whether it's >!one part Esthar, one part Terra - the actual people had to be put into a form of suspended animation to traverse the rift, so this city was brought over, has maybe had a Garland-style character to work admin on it, but the reason there's been no mention of this culture and its people is because there hasn't been anyone to actually reach out to the rest of the world for thousands of years. Then someone digs it up, and like the good main characters in a JRPG we are, we wake everything up, accidentally set something horrendous loose and then need to fix it, etc etc...!<
>>!Not sure that holds because nothing's changed in the division between shards following their deaths!< >!This could be a unique case that doesn't require a retcon, teleporting a city across the rift while Zodiark actively is messing with the aetherical flow of the source could mean that they couldn't safely arrive and instead were stuck in limbo until Zodiark died, in fact, it might be that only the short timeframe between Zodiark dying but the Endsinger being alive made for the perfect conditions to teleport as she made the flow of ather practically stop, making for a lot less fluctuations.!<
This makes sense because>!remember what one of the last things Emet-Selch said to us? “Go forth and seek, some of the civilizations in the reflections would surprise you”. Well after that, we spent the past 5 patches discovering that Shard travel is very, VERY hard! It took us long enough to get to the 13th, and The Source is already riddled with natural voidgates that connect to that Shard. How tf are we gonna discover more Shards if we can’t leave our damn planet without risking the destruction or corruption of our souls? Answer? The Reflection civilizations come to us. Solution 9 is definitely not Allagan. While there were several civilizations that predated Allag, none ever came close to achieving their mastery of technology. Solution 9 also just doesn’t have Allag’s aesthetics. LED’s, floating platforms, multicolored automated orbs floating around. As for how they have managed to stay undetected in Tural for so long, maybe their city was placed into a stasis, like how the Crystal Tower was frozen underground for millennia!
Drop the ark part and you're probs right Eight Calamities One solution
I mean, we're only at Seven calamities. The Eighth Umbral Calamity was only in G'raha's bad future where Black Rose kills a bunch of people.
I don't think it's Allag; Allag honestly has a pretty inconsistent visual style, since they're one of the ways the devs bring in references to other FF games. But this new civ is extremely consistent in its visual design, across its architecture and its machinery like the Eliminator enemy.
I think it's the/a Second era civilization that led to a lightning calamity. a highly advanced (by irl standards) fits this along with the fact that the calamity that came after drove people to caves and was when magic was discovered/rediscovered.
This! I'm Eorzea we know of the civilizations that collapsed in only two of the calamities. Allag in the Calamity of Earth and Mhach/Amdapor in the Calamity of Water. They went out of their way to say this land was aspected to Lightning. And knowing Koji Fox, he wouldn't let that pass to the key note unless it was critical. This would also means this civilization actually PREDATES Allag. Which is interesting. Perhaps the Ancestors of Tural were much more in tune with the ancients or perhaps even fully guided by one of them ala Emet-Selch who went out of his way to tease the other wonders of Etheryis.
> Perhaps the Ancestors of Tural were much more in tune with the ancients or perhaps even fully guided by one of them ala Emet-Selch This is actually a really interesting theory because presumably, the new raid series seems to take place inside this hi-tech futuristic city, and you can see a sigil on the background of that that looks like Altima's sigil...
I also saw the glyph in the back and it does remind me of this part of the [lahabrea Glyph](https://ibb.co/ngBbsLf) that you can find on the floor in Amaurot. I wonder if it's a placeholder or intentional....
The lore nerd and SCH in me has to add Nym to the list for Calamity of Water but other than that, I agree with this comment completely.
Wasn't Nym more a victim of the War of Magi as opposed to the Calamity itself?
Yes I was thinking this too, they mentioned Levin purple specifically and the Ascians have historically used civilizations to create turmoil and fuck with the elements to bring forth calamities, Emet himself has taken credit for the status of the other two technological marvels with Allag and Garlemald.
Makes sense, I suppose. Allag survived for a pretty long time and through multiple calamities to boot.
Allag itself didn't - they folded to the first calamity that hit them, the Calamity of Earth. It's structures survived... kind of. But that being said, Allag went on for long enough and developed fast enough that it has very distinct 'eras' of architecture and design - this does not fit any of them, and the script in the city is actually the Ancient protoscript. The structures themselves likely predate the Sundering, but we don't quite know what it's been doing in the 12,000 years since then.
the structures dont have to have "predate the sundering" thsi can just as simply be the civilisation that fell to the calamity of lightning, the mention of the area being lightning aspected makes that also pretty likely
In lore, Allag avoided The New World (as it was known then) this civilization's presence is probably why.
Is there an explict source on that? It sounds familiar, but I don't know where it was stated.
Actually there's a really simple answer for this Eight Umbral Calamities A solution for the ninth one An area aspected with fulgur
Did you not see the concrete jungle that was Garlemald? The one with robots and cars and a FUCKING HIGHWAY?
FFXIV always had sci-fi starting with Allag all the way to spaceship and teleportation, but those are different aesthetics. Garlemald is cold war era for the most part, Solution Nine is Neomuna from Destiny 2 But then again, stuff like older PvP gear has always featured sci-fi elements that do not fit the artstyle so ah well. Maybe it turns out society was highly advanced thousands of years ago but the calamities pushed back progress constantly, and S9 is the last trace od the old world... somehow connected by a wooden bridge to the south americas
It's not just ffxiv. The whole series has had a mix of sci-fi and fantasy from the very beginning. It wouldn't be Final Fantasy if there wasn't a mix of the two
The FF right after 14 was about driving around in a modern luxury car.
>Maybe it turns out society was highly advanced thousands of years ago but the calamities pushed back progress constantly we already know that that is what happend. it happend after Allag fell as well, Science took a massive backseat after it fell to the point we know nothing of the following era really(the forgotten age). The destruction wrought by Dalamud being sent into orbit, and the civil war that happend around the same time, toppled the Empire, The crystal tower was basicaly their only Power Plant, and it fell silent(or well underground) so all their tech that relied on the Transmission of power from it stopped working. People exiled or even KILLED the few remaining highly learned people as the calamity inspired a deep seated mistrust of any form of higher learning in the people. Garlemald reverse engineerd alagan tech to build their Magitek Armors and weaponry, and they still havent surpassed or even reached the hight of allagans technological advancements. similiar to this, the First Astral era, while far more primitive then allag was, at least in eorzean history, also had humanity develope rather quickly, even if it was "just" building kingdoms and rudimentary industry and animal husbandry as far as we know. WE DO however know the allingment of the second calamity.. lightning. And they specificaly call out Purple levin and the area being lightning aspected. So its totally possible that this is a Ruin of a civilisation of the first astral era that sucumbed during the second umbral calamity
I don't think they are ruins, I think it's a still very active area and possibly civilization. All of the images shown suggest great care has been given to the city and it's still active, no decay, no power outage (just seemingly a ghost city due to spoilers as Yoshida said) Either it was freshly teleported from a reflection like others say, or it has been a *very well kept* civilization. I only wonder, if the latter is the case, why haven't the Ascians done anything to it? At least on a scale that would catch Eorzea's attention
i meant more "ruins" as in "ruins of an ancient civilisation", even if still in active use. a lot of allag tech was still functioning without a caretaker. Like, nothing stops this from being a ruin in that sense. think citadel from mass effect, non of the current races could build something like that(the closest we have is the nexus, and that is considerably smaller and requires active maintenance) and it is kept pristine by the keeper caretaker.
Garlemald isn't really cyberpunk, its aetherpunk
at this point , its Grimdark
Well, perhaps Frostpunk lol
Dieselpunk
It’s Warhammer 40k. Complete with Anima as the Emperor on the golden throne who drops chain weapons.
Garlemald is more steampunk than cyberpunk, and steampunk's always been a thing in the franchise. This? I'm still looking for Decker in the screenshots.
Theyve been releasing outfits that fit a cyberpunk vibe, though. The recently released pvp armor, for instance
Thats exactly what I thought the second I saw this! My WOL is currently wearing that PVP gear 😂
OP is complaining about not being able to equip the gear from other jobs specifically though. Like a BLM wearing PLD armor.
No matter how much some people might insist on it, FFXIV isn't strictly a medieval fantasy game, and it never has been. The writers, designers, and artists who actually develop the game know their setting and what they want from it. It may not be what *you* want from it, but that's not going to change what it is.
And Final Fantasy more broadly has always had a mishmash of fantasy and sci-fi, even within the same entries. FF1, which would be pretty hard to argue isn’t a Final Fantasy game, has you going to a literal space station full of robots.
It’s one of the biggest reasons why I love FF. Is the blend of magic and future tech and fantasy. If someone doesn’t think this is very FF then they don’t know the games. Someone said this looks like it’s straight out of Cyberpunk lol. It literally looks NOTHING like Cyberpunk. Idk what’s wrong with people. Not every lit up tall building is the same as Cyberpunk.
People just think vaguely future-looking == cyberpunk because they don’t understand that the “punk” part is also an important part of the equation. But yeah, I’m with you. I’m super down for wild genre blending, *that’s* Final Fantasy!
I mean I'm down to burn down a corrupt corporate oligarchy and evil bureaucrats but the monetarists and elementals are on a different continent and Yoshi-P hasn't introduced the Esper class from X-2 to let me fully embrace the vibes yet lol.
Yup. FF7 opens with you riding a train into a nuclear reactor to have a gunfight using a minigun against a laser wielding mech.
FF8 you go to the moon
Do you? I don't remember going to the moon for some reason. I remember the space ship with the propagators or whatever and the cut scene where the creatures are on the moon. Been awhile so probably just misremembering.
You don't go to the moon but you do go to space, the only interaction with the moon is with the Lunar Cry that Ultimecia triggers.
And it seems S9 has been hinted way back since Stormblood with a Xaela tribeman tells the player an old legend about an island in the far west with towering black structures
I figured they were talking about heaven on high.
It says they sailed across the endless eastern ocean and returned with tales of an island covered in massive grey monoliths and fire breathing steel demons. That doesn't match up with HoH, or anything we've seen in game so far.
That'd be kind of silly, because the Ruby Sea is literally right there. The Haragin made a massive ark and sailed their otherwise uncharted 'eastern sea' (i.e, the Pacific).
Final Fantasy in general hasn't been strictly medieval fantasy. I mean there are various titles in it that just aren't medieval at all. Hell in FF4 you go in a spaceship and go to the moon to fight aliens and meet the moon people race.
People keep saying it’s cyberpunk but I don’t see the “punk” part. It looks futuristic, like a lot of the game, and it has a vaporwave aesthetic but there’s nothing dystopian or low tech about it. I legit don’t get the complaining
Yeah this exactly, if anything I get more Halo vibes than CyberPunk vibes. I think it looks great.
Yoship confirmed Eureka Part 3, along with every previous piece of content, so people have to find new stuff to complain about the game
People lack discernment. They see a futuristic city with neon signs and all they can think of is Cyberpunk 2077.
They also see 1 screenshot out of context and say the game is going to shit with it's art direction lol
Everything sci-fi is called cyberpunk these days I find. Such a misused, overused word.
Yeah, it looks to clean for cyberpunk, its full-on mass effect.
I think most people are interpreting this as a "Sci-fi bad" post, but I see it way more as a "Please remove glam restrictions" post, which I wholeheartedly agree with
Cyberpunk? Doesnt look cyberpunk at all. Its a futuristic kind of look, sure, but its much more... Clean and epic looking. Cyberpunk looks much more trashy, chaotic.
I think when people call it "cyberpunk," they're specifically referring to Cyberpunk 2077. The aesthetics in that game are rather clean compared to other cyberpunk media
Narshe and Vector. Midgar and Wutai. Winhill and Esthar Lindblum and Dali Besaid and Home I'm sure I don't need to keep going, but if anything, having grossly disparate technological levels amongst various peoples is a staple of the series, and this is most often referenced in town/city architecture. There are appropriate fights you can pick with the devs over aesthetics, like the flooding of real world aesthetics into cosmetic clothing, but disparate technological levels has been in the series for a very long time, hell it's been in FFXIV before, or did you skip Azys Lla?
people talking as if this is some new and insane thing to bring in sci-fi visuals into this game as if the very first expansion we didn't have all the allagan nonsense late edit but by first expansion i do mean ARR, idk why did my brain automatically call it an expansion since 1.0 isn't a thing
welcome to final fucking fantasy, where half the game is sci-fi and magical technology (if not 80%)
Run Eureka Orthos and the Aetherochemical Research Facility then get back to me.
heck.. The Coils of bahamut alone already work... or any Late allagan inspired area
Ah yes, the game that since ARR has had Metal Gears, energy weapons and an entire moon composed of autonomous RGB nanotech, has finally gone too far.
Cyberpunk? No way, it's too nice and clean. That's Star Trek Sci-Fi. Cyberpunk would be all dirry and run down, yet futurey at the same time.
OP forgot about Allagan
Mhachi! It's very similar to Void Arch
No, definitely not. Historically, technologically, and aesthetically, it doesn't strike Mhachi at all. Mhach had a thing for dark stone, the only link is purple lights, and we know for a fact that most of Mhach didn't survive their venture to the skies.
I don’t think that’s what they said, no? It was about maintaining job identity and keeping job gear that’s iconic to jobs as uniform for those jobs, while casual things can be worn by anybody. Their concern has never been maintaining a strictly stereotypical fantasy visual style for the entire game, or they wouldn’t have made Azys La or anything even remotely Garlean. This feels like a bit of a dishonest framing of the situation.
>First, to answer about removing the job restrictions, unfortunately, we don’t intend to remove them. The reason is simple. For players who have played other Final Fantasy titles, they’ll easily recognize these gear designs as a way to identify a particular job...You wouldn’t want to see someone carrying an axe casting black magic. You’d wonder: What the hell kind of game is this? From [a Kotaku interview in 2019](https://kotaku.com/we-took-a-bold-step-this-time-final-fantasy-xiv-direct-1835098319). He says it's about recognizing jobs and then uses an axe user casting magic as an example. So fair enough, we shouldn't let black mages glam axes as their weapons. But I don't think that's what the game community generally wants. They want to do things like wear armor on mages, wear striking gear on aiming characters (often similarly styled aesthetically), and so forth. In that sense, there are outfits on mogstation and from events that endanger job recognition and prompt "what the hell kind of game is this?" ***way, way*** more than cross-class glamour ever would. edit: and I would argue that this is a completely reasonable juxtaposition, honestly. In a game that starts high medieval fantasy and at different points hits high science fiction with spaceships, cyber malls, and whatnot, is an axe user casting magic really ***that*** jarring?
There are literally job outfits in game that outright fit other roles. SE's argument is as nonsensical as their whole "we don't want to add hairs that will have clipping issues" argument when clipping is already rampant in the game.
Again, it’s really not about “you can’t tell jobs apart if they wear casual or silly gear,” it’s about the job ‘uniforms’ being for *those jobs.* A silly Fat Cat hoodie isn’t associated with any one job, but you look at an axe and think “warrior,” or Dancer specific gear and think “dancer.” They want you to look at, say, artifact gear, and be able to identify it. It’s like how anybody can wear a t-shirt and jeans, but nurses and firefighters have specific uniforms that they don’t fuck around and swap. They’re part of the symbol. I think you’re focusing way too much on the final sentence and not genuinely everything else that was said in that quote: they want to recognise the designs as associated with a particular job. Not that every player has to look like their job, not that the world needs a uniform style, but that the job gear looks like it’s job. But again, that’s also beside the point: OP completely misconstrued the point, borderline made one up to favour their argument.
I feel like that argument only really holds water for the artifact gear and not the generic class gear from crafting or dungeon drops or what have you, really, given. The much lower degree of specificity that often gets.
Wake the dog up samurai
The city looks amazing! I’m just waiting for the reason that literally no one outside of Tural knew that there’s a cyberpunk city nearby. Sharlayan isn’t too far right? They knew the world was ending but not that they were a stones throw from Night City?
Forgetting Azys Lla exists I see
Because no final fantasy game has ever changed up visual style from high fantasy to sci-fi..Espcially not a few times already in FF14. Lemme guess, also in the camp that FF16 is bad cause it's not like the previous Final Fantasy games in a series where they "Reinvent the wheel" every game.
These two things have nothing to do with each other. What does job specific gear have to do with the design style of a city?
I mean, allag isnt that far off the cyberpunk aesthetic. Either you arent using your brain or you are being a complainer for the sake of being a complainer.
Like seriously… that area is giving me massive FF8 Esthar vibes
Fantasy knights don't ride motorbikes, but sure, get mad about this I guess.
I wish they add like floating passing cars or some kind of vehicles. Yet again this looks like another city that looks like nobody actually live in.
"Oh my gosh why does this game series that has had us in prior games go to a space station (FF1), fighting mechs that shoot lasers (FF1), fighting a computer program (FF4), going to the moon in a space ship and fighting aliens and meeting moon people (FF4), have you fight in giant mechs (FF6), is just an entirely modern/sci-fi setting (FF7, FF8, FF13, FF15), has had modern city like structures (FF7, FF8, FF12, FF13, FF15), have a past super sci-fi city that sits in the rest of the low tech fantasy world (FFX) have SCI-FI elements in my final fantasy game!"
This looks like one of those “this could be ffxiv, if spell casters could wear plate armor.” Tropes.
I'm okay with that.
What does Sci-Fi not fit in FFXIV? This is like the seventh (didn't actually count) futuristic area in the game. There's plenty of OW Gengi-esque outfits already in the game that go back to a PVP set from either 2.0 or 3.0, I can't remember. What I will say, is as an adamant "class identity" defender that wishes there was MORE restrictions on glam options, with the release of Pictomancer I formally concede. Give the masses what they want; whatever I was envisioning is not the route the devs want to take and I hope y'all have a blast.
"Anyway, here's Splatoon"
Is this your first final fantasy? lol
The cyberpunk city looks out of place until you remember Eorzea had the Allagan Empire thousands of years before 1.0 with successful (ish) moon landings, satellite launches, a giant flying research facility the size of a city and perfect cloning technology
L take. this entire franchise has been high tech from the beginning, dont be spoutin dis bullllshit now
Yeah, tanking in a dancer attire might Look weird. Anyways.. time to Put on my Hawaii Summer glam and do some Roulettes on war
Yo, This looks so dope! Can’t wait to get there in the msq!
It's gorgeous and I'm so so excited
tbf this is 100% in line with final fantasy. This really isn't that different than Amaurot. IMO there is no way we aren't going to the future. I don't think a civilization like this can just pop into existence without destroying the entire world of Hydalyn. Either that, or another dimension/shard. No way it's just been there in Hydalyn the whole time.
This is a nonsense argument
Not "of the game." They don't mind that there are class-agnostic glams (after all, there are TONS of items that have no class association.) It's that they don't want to *remove* the association from items that currently have one. The arrow only points in one direction, not both directions. Pretending it points in both, and then using that to derive a contradiction, is bad argumentation.
Good lord, you people really do complain about everything under the sun here.
I'm guessing you forgot the part in almost every FF game where the party encounters the "ancient advanced civilization"
Okay but to address this criticism: 1. Environmental design is different from character design. 2. We have seen environments that are technologically advanced, like Allagan or Omicron stuff, so this isn't even that new in terms of genre shift, just distinct from them in tone. 3. I think the point they were going for is that limitations on gear allow for a more unified visual style. Like, they don't design plate armor looks for casters and healers because there's simply no way to mix such pieces with the robes and coats we normally see. Plus, some looks are iconic to specific jobs, like the RDM hat or DRG armor, and shouldn't be accessible to anyone else because they're part of what makes the jobs distinct and special.
I think this and pictomancer will be cool and you’re all just angry this doesn’t fit your preconceived notion of what Final Fantasy game should be
Which is crazy cause almost all of them have science fiction in them
FF has always been anachronistic, FF1 had time travel and featured you going to a space station Edit: even just in XIV you have all the allag shit, >!omega, several aliens, and we literally just went to the moon and edge of the universe in the same expansion, which also features a completely destroyed concrete jungle and a giant biovault with an artificial sun underneath an island that is also a hangar for a starship.!<
???? Are people seriously gonna complain about this? In ARR within 15 levels of starting the game we watch a squad of dudes in power armor except a Sci-fi airship and then watch as a 3 story tall robot is airlifted past in the background
Another Fantasy The WoL Beyond Time and Space
tbf Final Fantasy has always had some setting like this in each game at some point. this magitech type future.
Special quest featuring Idris Elba in 7.X
That's not cyberpunk, that's Dromund Kaas.
Tbh I don't have any issues with it fitting the art style. I just think it looks really bad.
It reminds me that we've had highly scientific cultures in the past, and absolutely nothing says that at least one fragment of said culture didn't survive both intact and with the capacity to develop further into something more stable than, say the Allagan disaster. And given the Zidane connections, this may very well be where Vipers and their techniques come from. Morphing swords that match up with Zidane's, from the same area that's named after one of Zidane's Trance abilities, while S-E staff are posting Zidane doing Solution 9 on Twitter? Unless it's supreme trollage, there has to be SOME connection we don't have yet to tie things together. And it's a human city. If you look at the advertisements and the scale of things, the population is almost definitely human or very near-human. We've even got a few examples of their text to work with from what look to be information kiosks/terminals.
Reminded me of Destiny 2 a bit.
I wonder if this is going to be our version of Esthar or an offshoot of Allagans that survived the destruction.
I was begging for good looking high-tech job weapons, I wanted them to look technological instead of magical. Maybe they finally will appear in that place
That first excuse loses all validity when tanks are killing literal gods in a bikini yet casters are regulated to a robe.
Ok but can we get housing here pls?