The Stormblood expansion for Square Enix’s MMORPG will introduce a new continent to the game as well as two new character classes. We knew the first was Red Mage and now we know the second: Samurai.
The crimson-clad, katana-wielding warriors will be a damage-based class aimed at unloading on enemies on the front lines of fights and will favour STR gear. Samurai will not have a base class and will start at level 50. Best of all, the character looks to share at least a passing resemblance to Final Fantasy 10‘s Auron, unquestionably the series’ most badarse swordsman.
The news was also accompanied by a trailer for the expansion’s opening cinematic (above) which shows off the look and feel of Othard, one of the game’s three main continents where Stormblood will take place, as well as both a Red Mage and Samurai tearing shit up. The new player hub will be the port town of Kugane, with a new residential area called Shirogane. And of course there will be new dungeons in areas called Yanaxia and The Azim Steppe.
The team behind Stormblood is reportedly also working on a version of Bliztball, the aquatic mini-game from FF10, as well. At one point in the opening cinematic there’s a giant floating sphere filling up with water, only further bolstering the expansion’s spiritual connection to Spira.
Square Enix announced the class and other details about the upcoming expansion at a keynote during the Final Fantasy 14 FanFest being held in Frankfurt last weekend. Among other things, the company said it will double the capacity of estates going forward.
But before the event could conclude, Square Enix brought out Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu to introduce the main them for Stormblood which he composed. The song is called “Revolutions”, and will be sung by the familiar voice of Susan Calloway.
A beautiful piece of art from Akihiko Yoshida will be used for the box art of #Stormblood in Japan. Can you point out the characters? #FFXIV pic.twitter.com/co8fUuSQqd
— Square Enix USA (@SquareEnixUSA) February 18, 2017
The expansion is due out on PS4 and PC this winter on June 20.
Comments
9 responses to “Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood’s Second New Job Is Samurai”
I wanted to get back into this game after my trial ended in mid 2015 but never did
I’m curious how steep the catch up curve is now. Are the lowbie group content like dungeons dead as a door nail similar to WoW?
what’s the end game like? I assume Heavensward is necessary now to truely enjoy the mmo
Very steep. You will have ALOT of story quests and what not to catchup on. I got back onboard with Heavensward and it took me soo long to catchup story wise to even get to that expansion area. By the time I finished the main story up to that point I just was too burnt out to keep playing, but thats just me.
hmm that’s daunting, maybe i’ll sub for the base game before buying Heavensward.
according to the wiki the level cap is 50 and I think I only got to level 20 on my trial before it ran out.
thanks for the feedback!
Don’t get me wrong it is super enjoyable and the lower content hasn’t been diminished at all still works fine, and theres the deep dungeons if you want to go that way but the story arc while enjoyable it takes soo much investment.
Fortunately in regards to levelling with dungeons and the like is still pretty good, given that each Data Centre now shares it’s queues. Also for Healers and Tanks queues are always pretty quick.
Without Heavensward you’ll be locked into the ARR zones, and a level cap of 50. But content like Palace of the Dead will still be available to you. Regardless I’d recommend getting Heavensward if you’re interested.
The biggest grind is not actually hitting 50 (the original level cap), but all the patched story content between the end of the original ARR story and the Heavensward content. To unlock Heavensward there are five patches of story content tracking from 2.0 to 2.5, some of which is quite tedious (but some great Primal fights, too), and one epic cutscene that is pretty long, but has some great story payoffs before getting into 3.0. Then to access Stormblood the story will presumably be the same, with you needed to complete the story up to 3.5 (part 2 of 3.5 releases next week), which will lead into Stormblood. I play the game semi-casually, and I love it. It’s gorgeous, does a great job of making you feel like the hero with a good storyline (3.0 is better than 2.x IMO but YMMV). Come join the (un)official OCE community on the Tonberry server. We’re awesome!
oh I didn’t know about Tonberry, I just did some googling and read about it. I don’t think I have a toon there and apparently it’s hard to roll new characters there? anyway thanks for that, something for me to keep an eye on
it’s funny reading 2014/2015 posts from google about people complaining they are getting 200+ ms on NA server. you know you’re old when you remember WoW raiding on ADSL1, 200ms? pfft try 400+ haha
Tonberry can be hard to put a character on, it’s true. But creation in offpeak times is still possible. And yeah I remember raiding MC in Vanilla wow with about 350ms. Tonberry is on the JP Datacentre though, so ping is much nicer.
ah yea I just worked out the whole data center thing this week when i was googling
probably should have pay attention more to the character creation screen in the first place haha. it looks like my toons are in the NA data center so it’s not so bad
The catchup curve isn’t too extreme, the game has duty roulettes which include levelling which puts all the dungeons in a random pool for people to que for which means theres very few dungeons that people cannot get a pop in the duty roulette for, DPS classes always have to wait that little bit longer for the dungeons but, no the lowbie group content is not dead, depends on what you enjoy in endgame, there is raiding, and pvp.
heavensward is definetly necessary to enjoy the game. There’s a great way to level classes without trying to buy find and scour gear, its called palace of the dead, it has its own gear (armor and weapon) that stays in hte palace which you can exchange for a nice mainhand weapon outside of the palace for your preferred class once you level it up, its floors of randomized dungeons, its interesting and a great way to level classes that maybe you didn’t enjoy leveling the normal way.