Last week Gamer Escape was invited out to San Francisco to get hands-on time with Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers at the media tour as well as to sit down with Naoki Yoshida to ask some questions about the upcoming expansion.

The build that we sat down with was from April 30th and as such, this article, and all of our articles from the media tour are based on play of an in-development build of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, and content in the final version is subject to change.

Our Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Media Tour Coverage

Job Analysis

Additionally, because there is a vast amount of content in Final Fantasy XIV, complete with their own individual communities, we wanted to make a couple of mentions to let you know what was, and was not available to us during our hands-on time.

What We Didn’t See

Just to get this out of the way first, we know that there are a lot of players in the community that are eager to see what changes are coming to Disciples of the Hand and Disciples of the Land. Likewise, there are also those that heavily invested in PvP. During our hands-on time, we were only given access to battle classes in PvE environments. We apologize for those that were looking forward to information about those subjects, however, that information was not available.

What We Did See

During our time with Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, we were able to explore The Crystarium, Lakeland, Il Mheg, and the level 73 dungeon “Dohn Mheg” Which we took on both with a group, and with Trusts. We also had access to every battle class at level 80.

Before we sat down with the build, Final Fantasy XIV Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida gave us a presentation about the changes coming with 5.0 and what we would be able to see in our hands-on time. This presentation was the same one given during the Letter from the Producer LIVE LI. If you haven’t seen that information yet, I would highly encourage you to check out our write up.

After the presentation, we went to our stations and were allowed to explore and experiment with everything. We did our best to acquire as much knowledge as we could about as many things as we could. However, we did only have so much time, and even if you plan ahead for these big events, things usually never go as you expect and things may slip through the cracks. I guess really this is just a long-winded way of saying, if we’re missing anything, you can blame the Machinist changes for consuming way more of my time than I would have ever expected.

We hope you enjoy our preview coverage of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers!

Square Enix provided travel and accommodations for this event.