The final E3 presentation of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn wrapped up this evening with some very special announcements, and information, also including a brand new trailer. Without further delay please enjoy the brand new, and very informative, “Letter from the Producer” Q&A.

The question on everyone’s mind; What class does Scholar come from?
Scholar comes from Arcanist!

How does that work?
We mentioned before during an earlier letter that our plan for A Realm Reborn is not to have one job for every class, we want branching classes into multiple jobs, and this is the first one, Arcanist will branch to Summoner and Scholar.

Will we see more branching jobs in the future?
Players can be rest assured that we will have lots more classes branching off into many more jobs. We know that a lot of players out there want classes like Ninja and Samurai, but whether they are going to be starting classes, or job classes, or even if they appear at all, we cannot say at this time, start speculating!

Arcanist has Carbuncle, What about Summoner?
Here is a picture of Arcanist with Carbuncle and Summoner with… no, this is not Ifrit, we are calling this Ifrit Egi.

Ifrit Egi? That sounds familiar
In Final Fantasy XII there existed Egi creatures.

Are there more Egi versions?
Garuda, Titan and many others!

Arcanist and Summoner both have pets, but Scholar does not?…
Of course, Scholar is a pet job, as its classes are, and as such Scholar has a Fairy Pet. Our Art Director worked on Default Bravely: Flying Fairy, so we know he is great at drawing Fairies.
Of course the Scholar will have their own spells and abilities, the fairy helps heal party members, it is a healing class primarily.

As a Healing Class, how does it differ to White Mage?
White Mage focuses on big heals and cures, them cures will be healing individual characters. Scholar is focused on healing all the party members over-time, such as Regen, the Fairy Pet fights, while the Scholar is making sure the party is consistently healing. In instanced dungeons the Scholar will have a different role to White Mage, and will be just as useful as White Mage.

We have talked about it in the past that Arcanist has different forms for Carbuncles, will that carry over to Summoner and Scholar?
This Fairy Pet will have a major role in lots of the job quests, as such, there will only be one Fairy. Depending on how you play, the Fairy “mode” will change, and you will get many different modes depending on the type of battle; the appearance of the fairy will change accordingly.

Going back to Summoner real quick, you mentioned Titan and others Egi. Will they have different roles? (Tank, DD, etc)
There will be different roles for different Egi, when Titan comes out, who wants to see Titan cast a spell? Titan is a tank, Ifrit is probably a tank or a damage dealer, Garuda a spell-caster.

Well that just about covers Scholar, I think you have given enough information?
We have come all the way to E3, and we had the producer on the first day, and people were angry that there was not enough reveals or information, but we have something for you, here is in-game footage of Arcanist, Summoner, and Scholar (Video at end of article).
How these classes work in the battle system, including balance, we will talk more about that over the next few months, these three classes/jobs will be available at launch.

Are there any other classes or jobs that you are considering implementing within the first year of A Realm Reborn
We want to have them, but if we say what they are, the battle team will kill us. But we do want to have something released before the first expansion.

How long after release should we expect DirectX11 support?
Currently we are working on PS4 as well as the DX11 support. The one that we finish first, we do not know, but we hope to have them both finished within a year. The biggest challenge for us is the pipeline difference between DX9 and DX11, getting over these challenges is what we do. DX11 support will increase the quality of the game leaps and bounds above the current version.

When can we expect Ishgard to be added?
For those of you who were Legacy players and have been around since the original, around half way through, around patch 1.17~ we added the Grand Company quests that went continued after the main storyline. In A Realm Reborn, after the main story, we want to start another story revolving around Ishgard. Ishgard is at war with the dragon beastmen, and because of the conflict they have cut themselves off from the world. Maybe this story is about helping Ishgard out to help them open their doors, but when the doors open, the new expansion will be released.
The quest will not just be talking about Ishgard now, but getting players to learn about the city history, the people, the background and lore. Ultimately getting players prepared for when we open the gates

The fishing system, how will it work and how has it changed?
The players will get to find out more about Fishing in Phase 4, the system will not be something similar to an action mini-game, we believe that fishing is supposed to be relaxing, you are communicating with nature, and all this nature in Eorzea needs to be relaxed. Depending on the lake, river or ocean, you have to choose your rod, your bait, your lure. This all depends on the water, time of day, what type of fish you are looking for, etc. Obviously RMT is a problem, and their bots can be an issue, we do not want to make the fish valuable, we want to make catching fish an achievement to the player, so you can see your records, see your personal achievements so it will not be RMT lucrative.

Will super bosses from other Final Fantasy titles make an appearance in A Realm Reborn, such as Osmose or Ruby Weapon?
Yes, we want to implement lots of monsters from past games, and things that have been series staples until now. We do not want primal fight equivalents, but perhaps a dream team from past titles.

How much downtime will there be between Phase 4 and Early Access?
Not much, maybe one, two or three days.

Is there any way to share housing with Family and Friends? Living together, rather than splitting costs in a Free Company House.
When you have your own housing, it has many permission settings, so you can set visiting permissions to only free company members, allies of your free company, people on friend-list of free company, or even everyone. However, it is not just a permission of visiting, but also your Free Company Coffers, and that will have its own permissions.
We are going to start off by allowing Free Companies to buy land, and then we will analyse how many Free Companies do actually buy the land. Eventually, depending on the results, we will let individual players buy their own houses.

Please explain the Dungeon Token system.
These tokens will be like a currency that can be redeemed for items, there are many types of tokens, and each type of content has its own type of token, ranked in a hierarchy. Maybe you fight a Primal and get a weapon, take that to the hyper fight, get a better token for a better fight, and so on, so forth. Again, it is only those items that you can get in that certain battle that you will receive tokens for. The more token types you have, the more item lists that will be available to you.

Many players are asking about Card-Games and Mini-Games.
We still have not had the perfect idea about this just yet, someone send us a good idea!

How many zones will there be at launch?
We have not really been counting them, but at launch with areas and dungeons, we hope to have forty-ish, with the ability to expand to around eighty through patches.

When can we learn more about Chocobo Breeding?
In a previous letter we spoke about this, when you saw the Chocobo fighting the Ixali and Yoshida left his Chocobo, we mentioned that there will be the three different branches that you can advance your Chocobo in, Attacker, Healer and Defender. When your Chocobo levels up you can place points into these trees for abilities, this will be playable in Phase 4 of the beta test. We actually just found out yesterday that users had already taken apart the beta phase 3 data files and found all the ability and skill moves. They know all the pugilist routes, Chocobo abilities and everything!

Can you please tell us the difference between the primal battles and FATE primals?
The instanced primal battles are much like the traditional 1.x battles, small instance, small arena, and a four or eight man party. You will take on the single primal which possesses multiple modes, just the same as before, one on one battle, party versus primal.
The FATE primal battles are more like everyone fighting together, anyone can fight the primal and join in. Some of the things in development for the FATE primal battles, looking at Odin and Behemoth. Behemoth for example, 30 or 40 people will engage it, and the first phase will be to break the Behemoth’s Horn, break that horn, the fight moves to the next phase. Odin as another example, perhaps 30 people are fighting him and he readies a large AoE technique, everyone runs away. If players do not finish the first mode of Odin quick enough, he will proceed to use Zantetsukan, chopping everyone in half. That is not all for Odin, but we cannot give specifics, but we did notice players saying that Odin seems too small, and there is a reason for that.

Is there multiple area targeting on monsters such as horn, claws and other areas?
Yes, other monsters will have multi-target body parts. In Phase 2, we had an instanced battle where you had to attack the tail of a particular monster. There will be more fights like this.

Will Skirmish style content be available in ARR?
We mentioned in the second or third question, about having bosses from famous Final Fantasy games, that is the kind of thing we are planning for similar content.
Even for Phase 3, we have added lots of quest battles, and we have put lots of effort into this. You might go in thinking it is an easy quest battle, go in, believing you will win, but you will die. We have put lots of thoughts into these battles. Main scenario quest battles; levels 4, 9, etc, you will not see much failure there, but after that it will get more difficult.

Will Garlean Emperor Solus Zos Galvus make an appearance in A Realm Reborn?
As many of you know, and it appeared briefly in the scenario, the emperor is sick and old, he built the empire in a single generation, the other legatus know of his ailments, and they want to be the next in line, so they are all competing to be his favourite. By the time the players get to go to the empire, he might be long gone.
We have lots planned for the empire; in 1.0, we had Nael van Darnus and him planning meteor, and then we always had Gaius in the background, and his plans for taking control. There will be times where the empire is strong, and other times when it is weak, but it will always be there, always be a constant threat to the player.

Will certain mount bardings be craftable by Discipline of Hand?
Yes! You will want to get all of them custom parts for your Chocobo and Magitek armours!

Have you ever thought about creating a mentor system, where old players can help the new players?
Yes, we have something planned for Free Companies.This will be so that you can see who the newbies are and who needs help. Another thing we are looking at is a system where new players being limited in what they can do, such as trading, to try and hault RMT activities.

Last Question. What sort of changes have been made to the “Relic Reborn” Questline?
It has not really changed that much, but it will be easier than it was in 1.0. It will still be hard, and them last few items will still be required from Ifrit, and Garuda Extreme, and that will still be a challenge, but you will not be needing to do any more Hamlet Defense.

Any parting words?
In a mere 11 hours, Phase 3 will go live. Everyone has been waiting patiently, it will be on PC and PS3 and we are very excited with all the new content. I am planning to go back to the hotel, sleep, get up at 2am, boot my PC up, remote desktop to my work PC in Japan to make sure everyone does everything right!