Square Enix has published another Final Fantasy XIV video on their Youtube channel. Today’s video talks about how the 5 races were created and the hard work that the development team put into them. Nothing really ground breaking here, but it’s fun to see the motion capture system used to model the emotes and other motions.

In other news, Famitsu published another article with 50 screenshots from around the city of Limsa Lominsa. The article also talks about the retainer system, but we already have a nice image in our gallery that explains it (this reflects the current state of the retainer system in the beta, it is subject to change). Retainers provide 3 functions: item storage, selling items like a bazaar, and item seeking (they will buy items from other bazaars if the price matches the price you set). When choosing your retainer you get to pick the race and gender, then you are presented with a small group of around 5 pre-made retainers to choose from. Once selected, that retainer is yours.

Update 1: Yesterday, the director of FFXIV posted a note to beta testers about parties and guildleves and their intended way to be played. We’ve reposted the letter here.

Yesterday’s Final Fantasy XIV beta test wrapped up at 5:00pm PST. Reports from numerous people were that the servers seemed to have stabilized and it was a more enjoyable playing experience. It seems Square Enix’s focus for the last 3 weeks has been on server stability. Now that the servers are stable, they are moving the FFXIV beta to stay online all day, every day. This means that players will be able to log in any time they wish. The servers will go down for maintenance still (such as server/software upgrades), but these times will be scheduled in advance.

The servers will be coming online at:

Pacific Daylight Time
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT)

Greenwich Mean Time
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 2:00 (GMT)

This marks what SE is calling “phase 2″ of the beta test. There is a chance that large changes will be made to the client which we should find out about in the next 12 hours. We’ll update this post with any new information we find.

Update 1: No content patch was deployed today. They were just fixing server load issues.

Update 1: Added Gamestar.de to the list, they are giving away 6500 keys. As well, some of the sites had to take the the entry form offline due to problems at Square Enix. It should be back online in the next day or 2.

Five German game sites are giving away beta keys for the Final Fantasy XIV closed beta. It is unclear if these keys will be tied to the EU version of Final Fantasy XIV, but it’s worth a try. If you want a chance to participate in the Final Fantasy XIV beta, you should submit your name and email to these sites for a chance to win!

• Gamestar.de – 6500 Keys
• Buffed.de – 5000 Keys – currently offline
• PcGames.de – 2000 Keys
• Anifo.de – 50 Keys
• CetraConnection.de – 50 Keys – currently offline

Since all of these sites are in German, here are a few of the words/phrases translated for your convince.

• Vorname = first name
• Nachname = last name
• Alter = age
• Absenden = Submit
• Ihr Name = Your Name (first and last name)
• Ihre Nachricht = Your Message (just a message to attach to the submission)
• Ich wünsche eine Kopie an meine E-Mail Adresse = Send a copy of the message to my email address.

Thanks to final-fantasy-14.de for the tip.

New Screenshots Posted
We have come upon a new source of screenshots from the Final Fantasy XIV beta. We’ve updated the day 5 gallery with these new images, though not all are from day 5 of the beta. In the mix of screenshots you will see some high-resolution (5040×1050) images, do note that these are using an image stretching technique to have the game run on 3 monitors, it is not true multi-monitor support.

Day 6 of Beta Scheduled
The sixth day of beta testing has been announced for this Monday to Tuesday. This is the third week of beta testing (16 days since the first time) and there hasn’t been any major content of functional changes to the game at this point. Square Enix seems to be focusing solely on server stability at this point.

Pacific Daylight Time
Monday, July 26, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. to Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. (PDT)

Greenwich Mean Time
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 2:00 a.m. to Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 0:00 a.m. (GMT)

ESRB Rating
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) provides rating for video games in the US and Canada. They’ve released their rating for Final Fantasy XIV, rating it as “Teen”. The entertaining part of this rating comes from the summary:

This is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in which players navigate a large cast of characters that engage in missions and fight the forces of evil. Players explore environments (e.g., cities, plains, caves) and battle human and fantasy creatures. Players use swords, spears, axes, firearms, and magic spells (e.g., fire balls, energy beams) to defeat enemies in real-time combat. Cutscenes depict a man being stabbed from behind, and creatures emitting splashes of purple or yellow blood when struck. Some female characters are depicted from low camera angles, with lingering camera views of their buttocks (i.e., up-skirt shots). Dialogue contains suggestive references; for example, “The netmaster’s probably up in his office polishing the mast just thinking about her,” “stick yer manhood in the forge,” and “You cheating little whore!” Several characters are referred to as drunk or drunken, while others sometimes talk about wine, rum, and grog. The word “sh*t” can be heard in the dialogue.

With those little quote, we can look forward to some fun dialog.

The fifth day of beta testing for Final Fantasy XIV has recently come to an end. For the first time since moving to day long beta tests, the beta ran for the full duration of 22 hours. Out of the previous four tests, one ran for its scheduled 4 hours, one was out-right canceled, and two ended early due to server issues. It would seem the log-in servers have stabilized (some), which means testers were able to log in and test the game, instead of staring at the log-in screen.

Nothing really new has been released or revealed with day 5 of testing. There have been various complaints about the current state of the game from testers speaking on public forums. Their topics of complaint cover things such as balance, control, and technical issues. These issues are standard for the beta test of a new MMO; it is on Square Enix to get these issues all resolved in the next 2 months.

A few screenshots made their way out for this test. One of the screenshots contains a monster named “Fallen Pikeman”, which looks to be the first humanoid monster to be seen in screenshots.

Square Enix published the photo above showing that the collectors edition of Final Fantasy XIV is currently in production. They seem to be right on track for the September 22 release date.

Beta 5 Announced
For those with beta access, Square Enix has published play times for day 5 of beta testing.

Pacific Daylight Time:
Friday, July 23, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. to Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. (PDT)

Greenwich Mean Time:
Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 2:00 a.m. to Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 0:00 a.m. (GMT)

The last beta test ended early due to log-in server problems. Square Enix posted they hope to have these issues resolved for this beta test, but only time will tell. We’ll post any new information that players release from this test.

Square Enix has published a press release (reported by Famitsu) stating that Final Fantasy XIV will have 18 classes at release. Along with this, they have updated the armoury section of the FFXIV website. With only 7 combat classes and 11 gathering/crafting classes, Square Enix leaves themselves a lot of room to add more combat related classes. Lets hope we get more combat oriented classes soon after release. The 18 classes we’ll have at release are:

Disciples Of War (melee/physical classes)

Disciples of Magic (caster classes)

Disciples of the Land (gathering classes)

Disciples of the Hand (crafting classes)

We’ve also published a gallery of high resolution images to our gallery of all 18 classes.

Update 1: FFXIVCore has done a good job gathering all the information from this.

Recommended System Requirements:
Square Enix published a page that lists the Recommended System Requirements for Final Fantasy XIV. This goes along with the minimum system requirements already published on their website. The new recommended requirements are based on specific graphics settings. As you read over these requirements, you’ll notice that these specs for recommended hardware is rather high, using technology that has been released in the last year or 2 (or the graphics card they list, which was released 2 weeks ago). The good thing is that these numbers are the recommended requirements, the game will still be very playable with the minimum settings assuming you set the graphics options accordingly. Here’s a text version of the requirements:

OS	Windows® 7 32-bit/64-bit*
CPU	Intel® Core™ i7 2.66GHz or higher (AMD Phenom II X6 1055T)
RAM	4GB or more
HDD/SDD	Installation: 15GB of free space
	Download: 6GB of free space on the drive containing “My Documents”
Graphics Card	NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460 or better with VRAM 768MB or more (ATI HD 5830)
Sound Card	DirectSound® compatible sound card (DirectX® 9.0c or higher)
Internet Connection	Broadband or better (always-on)
Resolution	1280×720 (32-bit) or higher
DirectX®	DirectX® 9.0c
Others	Mouse, Keyboard, Gamepad

A screenshot of the full recommended system requirements page is available here.

Beta 4 Report
Day 4 of beta testing is over, but things went better than the previous one. Shortly after starting day 3 of testing, Square Enix had to shut down the beta servers as they were crashing under the high load of player attempting to connect. With the start of day 4 of testing, the servers were having the same problem as day 3, where people were getting errors while trying to log into the game. It seems that the Final Fantasy XIV log-in servers are not able to handle the load of all the beta testers trying to log in at once.

As time passed, the log-in errors slowly became less frequent but they still occur. Now people are seeing the issue of most, if not all, servers have a queue of 150+ people. Reports have been sparse on how long these queues take to get through. One could assume that 150 people would need to log off before you could log on. The testing ended early at 6:40am PDT (was supposed to end at 5:00pm PDT).

One new thing added in this beta was World Selection. One tester posted what the world selection screen looks like, which seems to be part of the character creation process.

We’ll post if we find any other new information out from this beta test.

Update 1: Updated the Beta 4 report as the testing ended early.

Nothing too exciting has been released in the last few days, but we have a few pieces of information that may be informative for some.

1) Region Lock on FFXIV
The latest twitter from Square Enix told us to check out the official Final Fantasy XIV website for an “important notice regarding the purchase of FINAL FANTASY XIV”. Sadly, the official website still hasn’t been updated with this news. Luckily the beta site was updated and it was shared with us:

Important! Read This before Purchasing FINAL FANTASY XIV!

Service accounts for FINAL FANTASY XIV and the FINAL FANTASY XIV Collector’s Edition can only be added for the same region as your Square Enix account (Japan, North America, or Europe). The game cannot be played if the product region is different from the Square Enix account region, so be sure to check the region for which the product is intended before making a purchase.

So make sure the region of your Square Enix account and the region of the Final Fantasy XIV copy you buy are the same. You can always create another Square Enix account to match your FFXIV copy. (Update: Looks like Square Enix posted this here on their site.)

2) Playing on the PC and PS3
A few weeks ago we had a reader ask if they would be able to use the same Square Enix account and associated character on both the PS3 and PC versions of the game. We contacted Square Enix’s support and they responded with the following:

Yes, it is possible to play both Windows and PS3 version for a single service account. However it is necessary to purchase both versions of the game and register both registration codes on the service account.

So it sounds like it will be possible, but you can’t just borrow the PS3 disks from a friend and play on your PS3 using your PC account. Keep in mind, the PS3 version doesn’t launch for 8 months, so these rules could easily change.

3) Beta Test #3 Canceled
We previously posted that there would be a Tuesday and Thursday test this week and the Saturday (today) test was canceled. The Tuesday test went rather smoothly minus some log-in queue issues on 1 realm. The Thursday test ended up being canceled after a few hours due to technical difficulties. It sounds like Square Enix got some solid testing with herds of people attempting to connect to the game at once and stress their servers. This should help ensure that the servers are more stable when the game releases.

4) Beta Test #4 Scheduled
Square Enix recently posted the test schedule for this upcoming week. At this point they only have 1 testing time scheduled.

PDT (Pacific Daylight Time)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. to Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. (PDT)

GMT Greenwich Mean Time
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 2:00 to Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 00:00 (GMT)

Yesterday was the second day of beta testing for Final Fantasy XIV. The flow of screenshots has slowed down quite a bit as there doesn’t seem to be much to show, but that hasn’t stopped some information from making its way out to us.

FFXIV Players’ Site
Yesterday, Square Enix announced a new players site via their twitter account. Firstly, we found a screenshot showing the character profile that the site provides. Beyond this, the site has a blogging aspect to it where players can post about their adventures. The site also allows you to follow other player blogs (much like twitter).

Attribute Point Information
Some information made its way out about the various attribute points in FFXIV. There are 6 primary stats along with 6 elemental stats. Each time you gain a physical level you get a certain number of points to assign to the 6 core stats, and another set of points to assign to 1 or more elements. Here’s an explanation of what those stats do (source):

Attributes

• STRength – determines physical attack power.
• VITality – determines physical defense.
• DEXterity – determines attack accuracy.
• INTelligence – determines magical attack power.
• MiND – determines magical defense.
• PIEty – determines magical accuracy.

Elements

• Fire melts ice, but is extinguished by wind.
• Ice obstructs wind, but is melted by fire.
• Wind extinguishes fire, but is obstructed by ice.
• Earth grounds lightning, but is eroded by water.
• Lightning boils water, but is grounded by earth.
• Water erodes earth, but is boiled by lightning.

NOTE: Attuning yourself to a certain element increases both your attack power with, and defense against, spells of the same aspect.

For those of you that want to see a visual representation of the element relations: