Greetings, everyone!

Morbol (a.k.a. Foxclon from the Japanese Community team) reporting in from PAX East 2017!

First off, I have to tell you...it was freezing! Boston was very cold!



This shot was taken on Saturday morning, where it was clear bright skies at 8:30 a.m. at around 10°F ! It felt like it was -4°F to me. It was even too cold for Yoshi-P and myself and we're from Hokkaido!

Yesterday, it was...

A snowstorm!

However, the last few years at PAX East it's been taking longer and longer to actually enter into the convention itself. The main reason is...

This! Erected like a wall protecting a castle, you can see a line of metal detectors all lined up in the center of the picture. The security checks have been strengthened worldwide. There were some cosplayers wearing really light clothing that had been lining up for several hours as well. Be sure to stay healthy!

Moving onto the event, we kicked off Saturday with the Yoshida Live Q&A session!



There were over 1,000 people in line before the panel started! We received a broad variety of questions during the event. When it comes to Live events, we have no idea what type of questions we will receive, so I was a bit anxious. Overall I think there was a good variety!

Here's my view from the front of the stage. Lots of excited players raising their hands!

The panel was also streamed live through Twitch. Were you able to check it out?

If not, we have an archive available, so give it a watch here.

Now let's take a visit to the show floor!



It was insanely packed!

It hasn't even been an hour since the show began, and this is how packed it is throughout the entire day. Thankfully, a lot of people visited the Square Enix booth and FFXIV area.

I tried to circle it here, so you could see how packed it was. We actually had to use another neighboring booth's space to continue our line that was over 4 hours long. Sorry that it was so packed...

The battle challenge this time was against the Warring Triad with various challenging handicaps.



Winners received this Stormblood shirt as a reward! There were a pretty good number of new players, so some teams had a bit of a struggle. In the end, it looked like many teams were winning and getting their rewards.

In between interviews, Yoshi-P would visit the show floor and meet up with the attendees.



Since it's PAX, there are lots

of

Various type of people in different

Costumes....

What the!

That's a pretty good overview of PAX East 2017 for us! We can really feel the energy of the attendees each year! Yoshida held a few interviews during his time here, and those should be released on each of those sites in time. There may have been some fresh new details released as well...! "Please look forward to it!"

From here on, Yoshi-P will be in "Director" mode for Stormblood and it's going to be quite busy. However, as was mentioned during the last part of the Q&A session, the transfer of NA Data Center and new information related to Stormblood will be announced in a future Letter from the Producer LIVE, so please look forward to it!

Oh yeah, Yoshi-P and I received "commendations" from some fans! Thank you!

- Morbol (needs to finish working on his Anima weapon)