With the rerelease of Square Enix’s second MMO, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, a few months away, a few of us here at ZAM have had the chance to try the beta and see what’s changed. We all tried out the combat and looked at some of the major system changes and you can find out more about those in Corey’s post. While I put in a good amount of time questing and fighting like the other writers, it wasn’t my primary focus this time around. What I wanted to know was this: did Square Enix finally give me full-fledged crafting and gathering classes like they were promising when the first version of FFXIV came out in 2010?

When Square Enix originally started talking about its second MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, one of the points it kept bringing up to show its game was unique was that crafters and gatherers were now true player classes. Players that wanted to dabble in crafting or gathering could still do so on the side, but those who were primarily interested in finding/selling crafting materials or in turning those materials into equipment and supplies for other players now had full-fledged classes to specialize in. There would be actual abilities you used, gear with crafting/gathering specific stats to get, and technique to learn beyond just clicking on an ore vein or hitting Create in a crafting window. When I played the open beta for v1.0, I was… well, I had a lot of less than kind things to say that are unfit for print, especially about crafting and gathering. Fast forward almost three years and a remake later, it was time to find out what had changed and if it was for the better.

Dating back to Final Fantasy I, II, VI, VII, VIII, IX and some of the more recent titles, Final Fantasy has always held a special place in my heart. With its great stories, tactical combat and mystical environments; it was like a series that could never be tainted. Then came Final Fantasy XIV.

Greetings adventurers of Eorzea! This week at E3 Squre-Enix released a sleek new trailer, detailing the newly revealed Class and Job options coming to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. On top of that, Game Director/Producer, Naoki Yoshida accompanied by Toshio Murouchi from the community team, have released yet another Developer Commentary Video outlining the FATE system in Final Fantasy XIV. Let's dive in!

Square Enix has been getting ready to relaunch their newly redesigned second MMO, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, with the release date of August 27th fast approaching. Fans of the series have probably already picked out whether they'll be going the PC route or if they'd rather use a PlayStation 3, but what about that other Sony console that might have been mentioned in the news a bit the last couple days? Square Enix has confirmed at E3 that FFXIV:ARR will be available for PlayStation 4 users and is slated for release in 2014.

This is it FFXIV fans! Finally, we know exactly when we can fully experience the rebirth of Eorzea thanks to news broken on the official Twitter account:

The death of an MMO, while uncommon, is not unheard of. The death and rebirth of an MMO is another matter entirely.

Certainly, some MMOs have seen drastic overhauls over the course of their lifespan: perhaps most notably, World of Warcraft with its Cataclysm expansion, which sundered and reshaped the old world, but kept the core gameplay systems intact. The now-defunct Star Wars Galaxies is probably the closest an MMO has come to being completely remade, but the update that did so, dubbed the New Game Experience, was much-maligned and arguably sent the game into a death spiral.

Fernehalwes reports on Yoshi-P's latest activities in preparation for Phase 3: Testing monitors!  Discuss in the Zam Forums!