Partial lift of NDA?Follow

Not too sure if I should post this , hopefully there's a MOD on now to nuke this thread if need be, but "a little chocobo" told me that SE has lifted the NDA over the character creation and what's in Gridania. Not sure if it's a trap because if we do discuss it then aren't we breaking the NDA stating we can't even say we're in beta? Can a mod clarify this please?


Edited, Apr 26th 2013 6:13pm by marsupialboy

Edited, Apr 26th 2013 7:48pm by marsupialboy

So you can talk about how green and foresty Gridania is, you just can't talk about how you feel about that.

That's silly.

Let's hope that wasn't directly from the beta site. It looks awfully official to not be. If that's the case, then I'm pretty sure it's breaking the NDA just to post it.

Does that include quests in the city as well?

I edited out the quote from SE just to be safe.

I didn't mind the quest but I hear a lot of people had a hard time with it. I was a little lost at first , but once I found my first one and knew what to look for then it wasn't so bad. I find Gridania hasn't changed as much as I thought it would, but I like what I see and can't wait to see the other two cities. Not sure if it's just me but the pathway leading down to the Adventurers guild seems like you can turn off to the right a lot sooner than 1.0. Sometimes it's the little things

Well if i am not mistaken yes when beta phase 3 comes the NDA will be fully lifted.

I will say that it may be just the Beta, but it feels significantly more crowded there.

Not just in terms of the population. The Grand Company's station is no longer a separate zone. Both its location and the Atherite Crystal are moved into a zone called New Gridania, which is essentially the entry section of Gridania, containing the Carline Canopy, the Woodworkers Guild, Adders' Nest, the Atherite (which is huge, btw) and the Archer's Guild.

Also, for those who've played in Gridania in the old vision. You can finally sit at the tables! Pretty much every surface that looks like it was made to sit in/on can be.

Old Gridania is more compact as well. If anything I'd say that in some places Gridania lost the feel of spaciousness it once had in favor of not seeming dull. Again, it just may be due to the condensed population but I can't help but feel a tad bit claustrophobic compared to the old version.

I still thoroughly enjoy the areas. I just can't help but feel there's a roof over my head instead of the sky.

I'm really happy with the redesigned Gridania. Quite a few times when I was unable to actively play, I found a spot to stand around or sit down and just watch life pass me by. I abhorred Gridania in 1.0 and I think the SE devs agreed that it was the city zone that needed the most work (along with the Black Shroud outside), hence it being the one they tackled first.

It's still pretty limited compared to a lot of recent games, but a definite improvement over say, FFXI.

The options for character creation are supposed to be expanded in phase 3, so we'll have to wait and see what that means.

I did like the male miqo'te. At first glance I was kind of afraid they'd just taken the hyur model and put cat ears and a tail on it, but no, that's not the case at all.

I guess I cant talk about archer combat?

I think that was done because the entire city as one zone could not be loaded into the memory of PS3 at once. The old tunnels in 1.0 were to allow the zone to load invisibly in the background while you ran through the tunnel, but the result was long, vast, empty stretches of nothing in between the zoned areas. They decided to cut the pointless tunnels and put in hard zones again.

It ought to be safe to say, since Wint's already said it, that the loading time is minimal in between zones. On my SSD it's no more than five seconds. I barely even thought about it after the first few times. The decision to have the name of the zone appear and to keep the chat functions and such going are vast improvements to the similar zoning in FFXI (also much faster than XI, where zones and cutscenes sometimes take 30 seconds to fully load.)

Yeah I have an SSD as well and loading is very quick. I was more thinking of map purposes. Like you could open up Gridania, Uldah, and LL and see everything in each town at once. All the guilds, quest flags etc.