Hello and welcome to the 23rd edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we’re taking a look at another class from the Final Fantasy series. In the previous columns where we played armchair class designer, we were always starting off with a simple base. There was always work to do with differentiating the class from others and choosing resource systems, but at their core the classes always had a solid base. At their core an Engineer or a Thief fits into an MMO just as easily as a White Mage or a Warrior – they fill a Holy Trinity role and their skills are all built around actions taken in combat. Not all Final Fantasy classes are that easy of a fit though. Adding an Engineer is simple enough, but how does one make a Chemist work in an MMO?

Hello and welcome to the 22nd edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, I’m going to be looking at that most common of complaints/suggestions for modern MMOs: going Free to Play. If you read articles about nearly any MMO, watch YouTube videos, etc, there’s a couple of comments that keep showing up on those posts. “I’ll check it out once it goes F2P.” “They’re crazy to use subscriptions! No one pays a monthly fee these days!” “I give it two months tops before it goes F2P.” All of these commenters see the F2P model as either the savior of the modern MMO/gaming industry or this absolute final destination for all of those games once they’ve gotten that silly “asking for money regularly” thing out of their systems. The question is: are they right or is there room in the MMO world to ask for a subscription fee?

Hello and welcome to the twenty first edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM's column on Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week's column, we're going to be talking about character advancement. We're all familiar with the basic leveling system as we go from fledgling level 1s to the current cap of 50. The question is: can we have progression after we hit level cap?

Hello and welcome to the twentieth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we're going back to look at the recently released MMO from Carbine Studios, WildStar. The last couple times we took a look at WildStar, I pointed out areas of their game design that I thought FFXIV could learn from and incorporate into Eorzea. This column’s going to be a little bit different. We’ll still be talking about something I’d like to see brought over from WildStar to FFXIV, but it’s something Carbine still needs to work on: Adventures.

Hello and welcome to the nineteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we’ll be looking at new combat jobs. The Final Fantasy series has a plethora of class and job options from previous games that have yet to show up in the world of Eorzea. Many of those jobs will likely show up in one form or another as patches and expansions are released further down the road. Of course, these jobs will need some tweaking from their original designs to fit with the holy trinity of tank, healer and DPS; you may have been able to take down Chaos with four White Mages in the first FF game, but that’s not going to fly here.

Hello and welcome to the eighteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM's column on Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week's column, we'll be taking a look at the classes that make up the Disciples of the Land. While in other MMOs gathering is relegated to secondary skills for your combat classes, FFXIV treats the three gathering professions – Botanist, Miner and Fisher – as true classes. The gameplay for DoL classes is unique compared to any of the other Disciples, and all three classes have their own unique skills (cross-class as well), equipment and quests available.

Hello and welcome to the seventeenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we're going to continue our look at the recently released MMO from Carbine Studios, WildStar; in particular, we’ll be examining the game to see what design elements would fit well over here in Eorzea.

In part one we looked at their take on player housing (e.g. free to start, impacts rested XP, customizable to fit your playstyle, etc.) as well as their Renown social currency and how it encourages players to actually group together as they wander Nexus. While both of these are important elements that I’d like to see Square Enix take a look at, housing and social currency are more secondary activities in the grand scheme of MMOs. These systems may help prolong your interest once you’re invested, but first you have to get to that point and that requires getting past the first hurdle many MMOs fail at: combat. Luckily FFXIV has succeeded in making a keybind MMO that’s interesting to play, but there’s always room for improvement and WildStar has much to offer.

Hello and welcome to the sixteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we're going to take a look at the recently released MMO from Carbine Studios, WildStar. This one's going to be different than when we looked at The Elder Scrolls Online earlier this year; I won't be trying to help anyone choose between the two. Instead, we're going to look at WildStar as inspiration for changes in FFXIV. While the games themselves are quite different, some systems could still be used or modified to improve things for everyone here in Eorzea.

Hello and welcome to the fifteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, I’m going to talk about one of the areas of the Armoury System that I personally think could use a bit more polish: cross-class skills. In theory these abilities should allow you to customize your character’s abilities for each task at hand, similar to the limited action sets used in WildStar or Guild Wars 2. In practice? Crafters find plenty of use for them by mixing and matching abilities from the various Classes, but for most of the combat classes these skill slots are just a place to drop extra cooldowns. Not quite the key to player variety one would hope for, so let’s see what we can do about that.

Hello and welcome to the fourteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, I’m actually dipping into something from the comments. This one goes all the way back to the Crafting and Gathering preview, where ZAM poster mbncd said:

“I still feel that crafters and gatherers are missing out on a lot and that Yoshi doesn't respect them as much as the combat classes. Until DoH and/or DoL based FATEs and/or quests (outside of the run errands quest that any discipline can do and outside the the one every 5 levels guild quests) get implemented, I really won't be able to consider us to have fully fledged classes.”

It’s an excellent question – for all the talk about how the Disciples of the Land and Hand are valid means of progression with their own gear and endgame, the lack of FATEs they can participate in seems like quite the oversight. Those of us who have leveled a Disciple of War or Magic Class in FFXIV are well aware of just how large of a role FATEs play in the path from one to 50, especially once you’ve finished your first Class and have depleted nearly all of the non-repeatable quest offerings. Gatherers and crafters have even fewer options when it comes to variety in leveling. You have your class quests every five levels and you have a set of three or four guildleves to repeat for five levels before moving on to the next set. Other than those, you’re stuck grinding gathering nodes or recrafting recipes you’ve done before until the next batch opens up. If we’re going to treat the DoH and DoL classes as valid progression, let’s see if we can’t come up with a solution to this oversight.