At the Paris Fan Festival for Final Fantasy XIV, game director Naoki Yoshida was at it again with a whole slew of announcements for the upcoming Shadowbringers expansion.
The first of the announcements was the reveal of one of the new jobs for the expansion: the Gunbreaker. The Gunbreaker uses a gunblade stylized after those featured in Final Fantasy VIII, and will be the fourth tank class added to the game. The gameplay loop will revolve around using bullets to do more damage, or more special moves, and it has a whole hella lot of style.
The next announcement was incredibly out of left field. As if to respond to the endless amounts of players demanding a NieR crossover event in FFXIV, Naoki Yoshida revealed that the next alliance raid series will be written and advised by Yosuke Saito and Yoko Taro, the producer and director of games like NieR: Gestalt and NieR: Automata. The raid series itself seems to be about Automata specifically, but its impossible to tell what exactly that could even entail. Either way, uh, holy shit.
The last bit of major news was the longtime coming reveal of the newest (and last?) playable race for Final Fantasy XIV, the Viera. Based very much so after FFXII’s Fran, the Viera seem to be exclusively female, and are hella ripped and tall and live in the woods. Yoshida mused that the development team had to actually completely recode the way that helmets worked in the game for everyone to accommodate the Viera’s long ears, and damn if that isn’t the best bit of development trivia I’ve heard in awhile.
Shadowbringers will be launching on July 2nd, 2019, with an early access period available to pre-orderers starting on June 28th.
