Final Fantasy XIV Journal

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

Well this is just dandy. In order to actually get your body piece for AF, you need 8 people and access to Arum Vale, one of the new raid instances. Fine and dandy save the fact you need to have cleared Darkhold raid instance to even ENTER Arum Vale. Attuments are fine when you have an active community, but who the fuck does Darkhold anymore? Fucking stupid.


edit- Ok its no so bad. You can do Darkhold now with 4 people. They're linked because of storyline purposes. Still kind of annoying if you haven't run the instance yet.

[Hathen]

I really gotta say, as far as armor designs go...SE sure as hell tops every other MMO I can think of.

[Fred Flintstone]

What does FFXIV AF armor look like?

[Agent D.]

That's because what I said was 100% true.  However, Square seems to be genuinely trying to clean up the turd.  But yeah, 2.0 is when the PS3 release hits.

Yeah yeah, we established the fact that ffxiv ver. 1 was a flaming piece of day old dog shit. But thanks for the confirmation, will wait for ps3 release before I bother looking into it again really. Also curious, is it still gonna be cross server, pc and ps3, or are we fucked to live through dcuo and it's lack of interconnectivity again? I know originally it was cross platform, but originally it was ps3 based and almost done and blah blah blah, wondering if they've decided to change any of that.

[Parn]

It's still intended to be cross-platform.

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

I really gotta say, as far as armor designs go...SE sure as hell tops every other MMO I can think of.

Are you serious? Aion blew SE's armor design out of the water. Tera makes the new AF look terrible. By old FFXIV standards the new armor is amazing looking, but in the grand scope of the genre they're merely serviceable.

[Hathen]

There's something about the way the SquareEnix art teams design their armor that makes it look more..."practical", for lack of a bother word. They keep most of their designs relatively simple in concept, but make it look good. The FF fanboy in me also does the wave when there's those familiar FF job designs in the armor, I suppose.

And, while SE also does this in both XI and XIV, they don't have as much of the bikini-armor thing for female characters as most other MMOs do. I get they're fantasy games and all, but I'm pretty anal about things like that.

[Parn]

I understand what you mean completely, because I share the same sentiment.  Korean MMOs are so over the top with many of their armor designs that they end up looking ridiculous to me.  TERA takes it even further with the hyper-sexualization of characters, even the little 8-year-old-girl-race which caters to major creepy pedophile fucks like this that I won't even touch it no matter how good the gameplay is.

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

I agree somewhat. Many of the female armors are hypersexualized but many of the robes are very tastefully done. The male armors are awesome. The Elin race actually has pants now, and are totally adorable.  My comments are about the intricacy and attention to detail.

In regards to FF armor being functional, are you kidding me? Have you looked at the DRG AF in FFXIV? It's nice looking but totally impractical. It's a spiky mess. The gloss is nice but the textures themselves are pretty poor.

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

What does FFXIV AF armor look like?

It looks like this...



This is how much of the DRG set I've managed to complete so far. Basically 3 "coffers" in not so friendly places. The body piece is going to require some hoops on my part. I have no clue where to actual weapon is obtained. 


Here's the rest....




Paladin AF



Black Mage AF



White Mage AF



Monk AF



Bard AF



Dragoon AF

[Hathen]

I will definitely agree that as far as textures/technology goes, SE's way behind. I just feel that they usually have a way of taking pretty low specs and making it look great. It's really just a personal preference of mine- I guess it's because I grew up liking a lot of war historical things and Arthurian legends.

The DRG AF is certainly crazy looking but I meant more as a general rule. Just take that chainmail you're wearing in that top screenshot there...it's very simply designed, but the way it's designed, it has this..."realistic", simplistic design to it that I really like, which is something SE seems to do a lot more overall. Robes and such tend to be bit more uniform across games, yeah.

Compare that to say, the armor in Tera your character was wearing here, or the armor your character wears in Aion here. These are all pretty mid-level armors. For me, it contributes a lot to the overall feel and experience you'll get when you run around the game world- lots of other peeps, after all.

Funny thing is that as much shit people throw at WoW for having crazy armor designs, characters look pretty normal in mid-level armor (though I guess not so much when you get clown-inized by quest and/or dungeon running), though one thing that drives me crazy about the armor in WoW is that it all looks so...flat. I mean, that thing's supposed to be a mail of some sort, where FFXI had iron scale mail look like this.

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

I can totally see your point, and in many instances I do agree with you. I'm also a fan of the "Heavy Metal" style over the top stuff too - chains and lace baby! I think they both look pretty good. SE does have that amazing artistic touch with even the simplest things, but you can't beat some of the Korean devs for armor variety - it's like a freakin' Victoria's Secret fashion show ;p

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

After much party hopping, I finally finished DRG AF!





These are the stats:



Here's what Jump looks like....





Here's my new ride.




I gotta say, while it was kind of a pain in the ass putting groups together for the last few quests in the AF chain, the experience was totally worth it. The final fight is challenging with a pretty bad ass cutscene at the end. Much more enjoyable that the original AF series in FFXI.

[Akanbe-]

I'll chime in that I too like FF11/14s armor quite a bit.   They're pretty ornate, but imo it fits nicely with the classes themselves.  Glad to hear it's slowly but surely getting better.  Hopefully the cataclysm will redesign the world in that you won't have near as many repeating world textures as you do now.

Also grats Tenchi on completing your armor set.

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

One of the additions with the latest patch was chocobo barding. There are 3 sets, and each trio is unique to each grand company. Here is the Ornate Barding from the Immortal Flames, Ul'dah's Grand Company.




Doesn't increase mount speed, but may reduce the chances of being lamed when attacked while riding.