Final Fantasy XI Fan Fest 06

Last weekend the players of Final Fantasy XI attended their annual fan fest. 1up has a blowout on coverage of the event, with a rundown on the event's announcements, an interview with the development team, and a fan-fest edition of My Life in Vana'diel. Eurogamer was on the ground there as well, with some comments about cat-ear-wearing fans rounding out their coverage. From that article: "Whooping players, each hanging dry-eye-balled and pregnant-lung-ed with anticipation tiptoe transfixed. They swing on every word their creators choose to bless them with. Each announcement of gameplay tweaking and balancing, however mundane to an outsider (new spells for Black Mages! White Mages to be able to heal all ailments in one go! Warriors can now throw axes! Mog Lockers will be able to hold 140 items!) brings with it jeers or cheers from those players in the audience that will see their character's social stock increase or decrease as a result. Black Mages are to be penalised for questing in groups: Hell Yes! Hell No! All around players fist the air or stamp their feet in incredulous response to the microcosmically evolutionary pronouncements."

Comments

An Awesome Time

[sarlos]

I was one of the lucky thousand or so attendees there. It was pretty exhilerating seeing the future plans for this game. I uploaded all my pictures in a zipped file to my FileFront account:
http://files.filefront.com/Fan_Festival_Pictureszi p/;4887263;;/fileinfo.html

You can also browse some pictures uploaded to my xs.to account:
http://xs.to/albums/114206161816073712224927.html

Finally, I have a commentary I was updating semi-live on Allakhazam:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mid =1141871674105963075;num=524;page=1

Wow what a weak description

[falcon5768]

Mog safes where like a fraction of the important info there. The whole thing was a first preview of sorts of the brand new expantion, the new areas and quests its adding (like Assault) and the three new jobs they are adding (Puppetmaster, Blue Mage, and Corsair) as well as a first time announcement of the addition of Chocobo raising and racing in game.

The job adjustments while good and bad (as well as not finalized) was just a small fraction of the plans for the future.