Final Fantasy XIV (Image courtesy of Squared Enix)
In an event anticipated since the turn of the new year, the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion was announced in a showcase last week.
Game director Naoki Yoshida and translator Michael-Christopher Koji Fox spoke on stage and commented that this is the first expansion reveal not exhibited during an in-person convention. In front of the stage, there were several monitors with live chat from YouTube, Twitch and other services to emulate the audience experience.
Accompanied by a short, cinematic video the two announced the newest Final Fantasy XIV expansion titled Endwalker.
The video showed the place-holder hero of Darkness, or Light, now as a Paladin class unlike the previous expansion Shadowbringers, which showed them as a Dark Knight. Yoshida commented that the choice to make the hero a Paladin is a homage to the original 1.0 version of the game where he was originally a Paladin.
There were also some strange levitating crystals shown off in the video which are the weapon of choice of XIV’s newest healing class, Sage. There has not been a new healing class added to XIV since Astrologian in 2015.
“We look at the Sage as a barrier-type healer,” said Fox, translating for Yoshida. “And because we try to make our jobs unique from the other jobs, we’re trying something with the Sage where they’re able to temporarily augment their own magic abilities to make them more powerful.”
Endwalker will also debut a new melee DPS class, but it will be revealed at a later date.
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