Havoc Snow

I'm not sure that the argument of it adding one more person to your screen is entirely valid. Summoner is a caster class, which means if they know how to play, they'll be standing well away from the fight and out of everyones view besides other casts. This means that the only people that melee and tanks are going to see are other melee and tanks. So with that in mind, what is the difference between a Summoner's Egi being the same size as you, or replace the Summoner with another melee DPS? Either way there's another full sized character there to crowd around the enemy. And what about Garuda (who was off handedly mentioned during E3 to be a ranged attacker) who you'll never even see because it will be (presumably) standing next to its Summoner at the back of the fight. Yes they are more flashy than a normal character, but this only counts if the normal character is standing idle, or just auto attacking and nothing else. In the thick of things when everyone is fighting you're going to be throwing off weapon skills and abilities that are just as flashy if not more flashy than the Egis are, you're going to be more distracting to yourself than my Summon will be. I will admit that they may make it difficult to click on enemies to some degree if they get in the way, but that can again be said for any player as well who is getting up close and personal. Even as small as they are they still run a big risk of doing this, changing them from 2/3rds to 3/3rds the size of a Hyur wouldn't impact this that much. As far as camera angles and frame of view go, I spend most of my time in dungeons with my camera panned pretty far out and in most fights (especially when I played Lancer) I was moving around so much that my camera was never in a fixed position, so honestly I don't really see it becoming that big of an issue, and for all we know maybe Egis actually try to position themselves around the enemy as well. (wishful thinking on that)

I recall Yoshida at one point referring directly to the player characters as the Warriors of Light, and it really wouldn't make sense that everyone only forgot the Warriors of Light but yet they still forgot us returning characters as well? That implies VERY strongly that we are said Warriors of Light. While not exactly proof, it can further be justified by the fact that the CE Helmet this time around is the Warrior of Light helmet.

Another good thread to check out (also by Merri) is Eozean lore and facts, it's mostly small tidbits but it still seems pretty handy.

I doubt they'll have this since we're already going to have the ability to summon Primals in their full form later on down the line (not Summoners specifically). Which makes me wonder, if making Egis just a little larger than they are now is such a hinderance to some, how will they feel having the full scale Ifrit or Garuda taking up their frame of view?

While I have to say I agree with most of what Azthran said, I still can't help but argue that the Egis could benefit from a size increase. As Hyrist said, the Egis appear to be about 2/3rds the size of the Hyur Summoner shown in the original video, so if thats the case would added an extra 1/3rd to their size really be that game breaking for melee classes? On the topic of pet control however I sincerely hope they add a separate interface for controlling Carbuncle or your Egis. It seems almost useless if they have to take up a party member slot like the Chocobo companion does, and if I have to manually click on my pet in order to casts heals on them or something I'm gonna be disappointed, not to mention that the actually method for micromanaging the chocobo (changing stances and what not) was pretty bad, especially given you had to make a whole separate action bar for it if you wanted to switch stances regularly like I did.

Well it's also complicated because it's not just the people who fought in the war, it's the war itself that was made fuzzy by the amnesia which suggests it wasn't just the time traveling that caused it. The fact that people don't remember a lot about what happened during the Calamity means there's something much bigger going on. I'd like to say that people who knew you well were likely to remember you, but sadly the only person I ran into that showed any signs of remembering me was Minfilia. When I played in 1.X it was in Ul'dah with the Immortal Flames which meant I did a lot of quests that involved Thancred and Raubahn but neither recognized me during the storyline in Phase 3. Still I think it's safe to assume that people you grew up with, family members, things like that they would have a very difficult time forgetting who you are, even if they don't remember your part in the events of the Calamity.

I could agree to the lore point of view of them being small because it's all we could handle, but that's just trying to use hand wavery to explain a design team decision that had nothing to do with lore. Hvirine stated that they were larger at one point, but for one reason or another they made them smaller without any insight into why they were made smaller. Maybe it was for the reasons expressed here about line of sight or something, though I honestly just don't see the line of sight thing being that big a deal if the increases being suggested in the feedback forums. I will say this though, if they create a decent pet interface I'll be able to live with the tiny Egis, but from what I've seen from the Chocobo Companion my hopes are not very high. I'm kind of assuming that a lot of what the Summoner will do is healing, buffing, and micro managing their pet while casting debuffs or dots on enemies, and if a lot of that requires me to actually have line of sight on my pet, then I'm sorry but that's more important than a larger pet making you have to adjust your camera angle. I will correct myself however, I watched the videos that showed some of the Egis in them and they do actually float a bit higher than I had originally thought (about as high as shown in the images), however with that in mind size doesn't really matter, they'll block your line of sight no matter what.

I actually didn't realize there was even room for debate that it was a continuation/sequel to 1.X. The storyline clearly continues from the original, they reference it continually, not just in dialogue or storyline, but in the world as well. The giant flamey orange crystals you see scattered all over the place (especially in Thanalan) were remnants of Bahamuts attack, Gaius' assault on Eorzea is a continuation of his work in 1.0 before Nael showed up and took over things, and there are a lot of returning characters that have changed since. If nothing else the addition of Cid's facial hair shows it's a continuation!

I'm just going to repost this image again, because I feel it says everything I'm trying to say. People still seem to be under the impression that "larger" means "huge" and that's just not the case. No one is asking for Egis that are the same size as the Summons from FFXI (those were admittedly quite large), and definitely not asking for anything as large as the elementals from Aion, I merely used them as an example of what I was accustomed to in most games. Sadly the picture uses a point where the Egi is floating quite high off the ground, but in the latest tour of eorzea video we see Titan actually floats only just a few inches off the ground putting him roughly at about the same height as a Lalafel, so increasing their size by the suggested amount in the above picture would put them on par, if not a little smaller, than a Midlander. Perhaps I'm getting a bit too defensive over my own opinion here, so allow me to apologize. Where I'm coming from however is, whether or not they change the size of the Egi, this is the class I want to play the most. I absolutely adore pet classes, every MMO I've ever played it's always the class I flock to the quickest. Eight years of WoW I made one character, a Warlock, and I never played another character my entire career in that game. When I joined TERA my first character (and the first I leveled to 60) was a Mystic, in Warhammer Online I played a Magus (thought they weren't much of a pet class). For me the Egis ARE the class in a lot of ways, they are going to be what is iconic about the Summoner class more than the Grimoire ever will be. So my reasoning for wanting larger Egis is perhaps the exact opposite of why people DON'T want them. I want to be able to see my pets in the middle of a fight, and my fear is that in a large raid my pet is going to get lost in the mass like a small child in a crowded mall. I don't want to press X to Jason.

Can you name one situation though where you'll actually be surrounded by a "mass" of pets? Even in 26 man raids I don't imagine most groups will be comprised of more than a few Summoners, and even then points don't matter in the visual scheme of things. (see below) I can't speak completely for FFXIV since I never got to take part in endgame in 1.0, and even then it might be very different in 2.0. However I have years of experience in raiding in numerous games, as well as a lot of PvP experience, and I can say without hesitation that in large battes (meaning fights that involve multiple full parties) everything sort of devolves into a cluster no matter if the pets are Lalafell sized or Adamantoise sized. There are going to be so many other players standing on top of you, and you're going to be moving around so much it will be INCREDIBLY difficult for you to really focus on just your character. This is why in many games raid enemies are often disproportionately large. Lets look are some fights from WoW since it's the best example for raiding that I can really come up with. When you fight for example the Lich King he is HUGE, way bigger than any of the party members, but when you actually see him in the cutscene he's about half the size as he was in the fight (marginally bigger than a normal PC). This is because it's much easier to determine character position as well as discerning enemy location among a massive group all stacking on top of it. Final Fantasy tends to do this as well in the sense that every boss I can think of tends to be very large, even in the four man dungeons. So again, increased pet size being detrimental to gameplay is just an urban legend. The ONLY way they could be cumbersome would be if they made them so big that you had a hard time actually seeing the enemy, but if you look at the example I gave above that wouldn't be the case.

See this is an excuse a lot of people use that just isn't the case. It's falsified speculation that just because they're larger than they are now they'd be obstructing peoples views or getting in the way of their DPS or whatever. How would them being the same size as a Hyur be any different than if there was a character standing there instead? It would be the difference of a Lalafell standing next to you turning into a Hyur, does that make things suddenly harder for you to play your class? You can't even use the excuse of visual effects because they're no more flashy than any class spamming weapon skills or spells. The only person that could be affected by the increased size would be a Cat with ADHD that is easily distracted by shiny things. As far as as it being a confidence thing? Mm, maybe. For me though it's less about confidence and more about expectations. Summoner isn't a class you start the game with, it's a class you don't even gain access to until you're close to end game. Summons are the equivalent of endgame pets, and in every other game I've played the pet class always started something small (like Carbuncle) and once they reach end game they usually had something large and impressive. Examples being the Felguard in WoW, the Thrall of Wrath in TERA, pretty much every Elemental the Spiritmaster could use endgame in Aion, all of the Summons in FFXI, I could go on. There's nothing wrong with Carbuncle at all, but for creatures that represent HUGE Primals, even as a sliver of their power I'd expect something much larger than what we have, and for them being end game pets they're very unimpressive as far as size goes. As I said earlier, they're the same size as Minions are, and I honestly don't want to be able to compare the size of my Ifrit pet to my Cherry Bomb Minion. tldr; Increasing Egi size doesn't hurt anything, this is misleading and inaccurate. Making them the same size as a player character wold go a long way to making them look more impressive but wouldn't detriment players ability to work around them in a fight.

Well one thing to be clear on, the game states that people only forgot the faces of the people who fought in the Battle of Carteneau, not specifically the people themselves. This is a complicated concept, but to put it simply as an example, lets say you had a long time friend before the Calamity, then you went off to the Battle of Carteneau and vanished into the time warp. Five years later go by and you suddenly reappear, more then likely your friend is going to remember you, probably be upset that you've been gone for the last five years without telling anyone where you were going, but won't remember you took part in the battle. This is all speculation of course, but not everyone has forgotten about the returning members, Minfilia for example states she remembers who are you, and presumable others will as well. The whole amnesia thing (according to Yoshida) was not just a mechanic to allow for rewriting some of the story and integrating old characters, it's actually part of the story and tied to Bahamuts disappearance so we'll probably uncover the source and possibly ways to reverse it as we progress in the story.

It actually totally slipped my mind that the Highlanders were male only in 1.0!

Not to mention that for those of us playing as male Miqo'te it would mean we were all required to have some kind of amnesia, or something similar, because it would imply that we simply materialized as fully adult male Miqo'te out of the blue. For my part my character (who is in fact a male Miqo'te) has a history not only tied to the lore of 1.X, but I also place him at the Battle of Carteneau because he'll be a remake of my original character who I did play during 1.X, he'll have the mark showing he time jumped, things like that.

Well one thing to keep in mind, as illustrated by the images I posed, is that what most people are asking for is not a drastic change, and really won't have any impact on visual clutter compared to what you already have from all the incredibly flashy weapon skills and spell effects. The changes that were being requested would have no more effect than an extra party member in the group, so the only way this would be cumbersome would be if you had more than one Summoner in the party, and even then only if it were a 4 (or possibly 8) man group. In larger raids that involve 16 and 24 players it no longer matters, and in fact it might actually be detrimental to have the Summons this small because it'll be that much harder to pick them out of a large group of people grouped up around an enemy. With that many people in a group you can't really see what's going on anymore to begin with, it's pretty much just a mass cluster of being mashing keys and trying to stay alive, following some semblance of strategy when they see key triggers going off during the fight (like the effigy in the Ifrit fight). In FFXI there were complaints about Summon size which could make sense because in that game they were huge, some of them were like twice the size of the character and often floated above ground which made them appear even larger. What people are asking for here is effectively just make the Egis the same size as a Midlander Male, this allows them to still be within an acceptable size while making them appear more impressive and easier to keep track of in the middle of a fight. Not to make a comparison to WoW, but the image I posted above makes the Egi around the same size as the Voidwalker or the Felguard pets for the Warlock, or even the Warlock while using Metamorphosis, and no one ever complained about them being too in the way.

Sadly I don't have an alt, though even if this were taking place during a time period time jumpers could come I'm not sure my character would attend either way. Hope you all have fun though!

I completely agree with the feedback, sad about the response. It would have been a good place to meet in the middle. I like the appearance, I was worried about it at first, but I think they're well designed, whilst I personally would have preferred it to work like it did in FFXI (and it didn't create any problems), I am not disappointed, I just think they could be a wee bit bigger. I'm not exactly sure why SE won't make them bigger, but as much as I would like them to be bigger, I don't think it'll spoil my enjoyment, but then I'm gonna be a Scholar, not a summoner. The funny thing is in FFXI I was harping on about how Scholar should get a pet, at least after seeing Schultz using the Crimson Grimoire as a pet, it could have been a reward for doing Survival of the Wisest. Ah well, a faery will suffice. The response Hvinire gave didn't really explain much, just that at one point the Egis were actually a little larger than they are now but the design team decided to make them smaller. On the plus side of things, changing the size of the Egis doesn't really require a lot of work, so I'm holding out hope that maybe they'll reconsider it post launch. As far as appearance goes, and the lore behind what they are, I think the Summons are pretty awesome. They look close enough to the original Primals they are based on while maintaining their own unique appearance, so I'm happy with things on that end. My biggest issue and the one thing I'll have a very hard time learning to live with is just that the most well known, iconic class in Final Fantasy (and I say this because EVERY game has Summons in it, and thus to some degree Summoners) uses Summons that are no bigger than the vanity pets we have. I still plan to main Arcanist/Summoner, so if they don't change it I'll learn to live with it eventually... I just don't have to like it!

Another thing too however is that Linkshells, unlike guilds, are not exclusive. You are not forced into joining a single Linkshell and as such a group purely dedicated to being a Courier service is still a feasible idea. You can be a member of the Knights of the Twelve, or Misericorde , or whatever whatever other LS you might want as your main and still join a Courier LS as a sort of side job. This ensures that you have a group dedicated purely to this service, while allowing people to join other groups to fall back on when work is slow.

I had registered my e-mail at the code-redemption website, not the actual code I had received. But I did get an email from Enix thanking me for pre-ordering and it had that information with it. Also stating to keep my code until they email me again, closer to early access with all the steps needed to set the game up, blah blah blah. ****Edit: HOWEVER, I do remember it not saying specifically august 20th, just that it will be seven days before actual launch and that it was supposed to be a seamless transition into the launch. I just did the math myself and assume the 20th if all went well with phase 4. Ah okay, I misunderstood what you meant by that. Though there is a thread with a dev post on the beta forums that mentions specifically they can't confirm or deny whether the 20th is the actual start date for early access. I would think that if they were promising a 7 day early access this would be a given if they game is set to launch on the 27th, but the fact they they are still kind of protesting it means it might not be a 7 day early access.

Moogles classify officially as a beastman race, much like goblins and sylphs, so I think they can be seen by everybody and occupy the same plane of reality. There are some cutscenes where they are only visible to the player, true, but I think that they might just have the power of selective invisibility. In 1.0, they helped conjurers in the Shroud communicate with the elemental spirits, so non-Echo people have definitely had dealings with the moogles. Whether or not an individual would trust their mail to a beastman, though... An additional point is that Mognet is also new -- it only appeared in the last five years of game when the Moogles became more active after the Calamity. Actually it's stated pretty specifically that not everyone can see them, E-Sumi-Yan is surprised when he finds out you can see them and states that only certain people have that ability. It's never specifically stated that it's tied to the Echo, that was merely a link that many players made since the Echo made us capable of speaking to Beastmen. In the case of the original 1.0 Gridania opening I believe neither Yda or Papalymo were able to see the Moogles, only you were, and again in the case of the 2.0 Gridania opening no one else in the caravan can see them and they remark that they're surprised you can see them. This is evident by the fact that one of them drinks the old merchants bottle of... whatever... and he doesn't even notice despite them doing it right in front of them. One theory I had was that moogles could somehow alter time, because during the original Gridania opening they manage to freeze you, Yda, Papalymo, and the treant, and in the 2.0 Gridania opening no one seens to notice that you just had a lengthy conversation with yourself...

Originally I was really hoping they'd be more like the FFXI Summoner in that we got to summon smaller versions of the Primals, though I understand there are a lot of people who really didn't want that. After seeing what the Egis look like I'm actually not all that disappointed by them, though I have to admit it did take me a while to get used to the idea that this is going to be what Summoners use and not their more iconic use of actual Summons. What I am disappointed by however is their size, and no I wasn't really wanting anything that was colossal, just something that was at least on par with my character height. A lot of people on the beta forums were saying any bigger and they'd be a nuisance, but I have to point out that the Chocobo Companion is about 1.5x the size of your character model, which can be quite large depending on your race (Elezen or Roegadyn for example), so we already have a pet/companion in game that is quite large. If they had made Egis the same height as your character model I think they would have been PERFECT. The following two images are taken from some feedback created on the beta forums, and I honestly think they hit home with what would have made this class even better. Sadly the devs said nope. Before: After: Notice how big a difference this makes? The Egi looks far more fearsome and impressive while still not being so big that it would be a nuisance. That's just my opinion anyways, and in either case the Egis still look cool. Can't wait to see if we get a Ramuh, Shiva, or Leviathan Egi.

As far as clarifying my own post, that is what I'm asking. First I'm not sure if it's a breach of 1.x lore. Second, and the question for the poll, has the ARR lore overwritten the 1.x lore in any case where there may be a conflict? Well regarding the Miqo'te (and by extension the Roegadyn) there really was no lore supporting the lack of male (and female) versions of these races, especially for the Roegadyn. The decision for making them gender exclusive was because that's how their former counterparts were in FFXI. The fact that we see Merlwyb as not only an NPC, but as a MAIN NPC showed us in 1.X that the opposing gender versions of these races were in the world, somewhere. There was just never an opportunity I guess for them to introduce a male Miqo'te, so including them in your story is not lore breaking in any way. The impression a lot of people got was that Miqo'te, like the Mithra, rarely gave birth to males so they were hidden away somewhere and not allowed to become adventurers because they were too vital to the survival of their species. We see now that this is not the case, as the only clan that suggests they're rare are the Keepers of the Moon, and I believe even then it only suggests that it's like 1 in 10 Keepers are male or something like that. The Seekers on the other hand never suggest anything of the sort so we can assume that they are just as likely to give birth to male children as they are female. As far as whether or not it's a continuation or a reboot, there is no lore that contradicts the previous setting as far as I know and they make no attempt at retconning anything that took place in the original game. Characters from 1.X being ported over into 2.0 are treated as if they existed in the previous storyline, Bahamut did in fact destroy a lot of Eorzea, the Garlean Empire still exists in the same form and fashion they did previously. Final Fantasy XI: A Realm Reborn could actually be viewed as a direct sequel to 1.X if anything, because the story doesn't pick up right after the events of the previous game like an expansion would, and it doesn't take place during the same scope of events like a reboot would, it picks up years later and continues the story that was concluded in the previous version of the game like a sequel would, so in short A Realm Reborn is kind of like Final Fantasy XIV-2.

When I had received the email for registering for my early access code (unfortunately I deleted this email :frustrated: ), and it stated that the early access will be a whole seven days before launch and will be a seamless transition. ***Though you're probably right about my guessed time of the start of P4, it'll probably be sometime after the 11th. Wait, we can register our pre-order codes now?

I'm actually not entirely clear what you're asking here, what discrepancies in the lore are there regarding the Miqo'te? Are you just referring to the fact that we never saw male Miqo'te in 1.0? That doesn't mean they didn't exist.

New Bayohne blog post went out showcasing some new Summoner pics!