We’re also announcing our pre-order details and Collector’s Edition content! We’ve created a host of exciting goodies for would-be adventurers; let’s run down what you’ll get when you pre-order the game.

Gamers who pre-order will earn early access to the game before the launch of the official service, and some exciting in-game goodies. Step foot into Eorzea in style with a Mog Cap, fashioned after the famed Final Fantasy moogles, and summon your own Cait Sith Doll minion to follow you around on your adventure!

The collectors among you won’t want to miss the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Collector’s Edition!

What’ve we got in there…?

• A gorgeous box featuring artwork by famed FINAL FANTASY illustrator Yoshitaka Amano
• The Art of Eorzea: – A Realm Reimagined – A hardbound art book, featuring concept art and more from Art Director Akihiko Yoshida and his team of talented artists
• The Waning of the Sixth Sun – A Blu-Ray disc that features a cinematic look at the events that led up to the realm being reborn
• The Sounds of Eorzea – a collection of music from FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn by Sound Director Masayoshi Soken
• Five beautiful art cards created by the amazing CG artists at Square Enix Visual Works
• A FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn branded security token to secure your account
• Four In-game Bonus Items:
- Helm of Light – Look like one of the fabled Warriors of Light when you equip this exclusive helmet
- Baby Behemoth Minion – Summon this cute, but ferocious miniature version of Behemoth and watch him roar with excitement as you adventure through Eorzea
- Coeurl Mount – Only the bravest of warriors are able to tame and ride the mighty coeurl. Show off your prowess with this exclusive mount
- Behemoth Barding – Customize your Chocobo with the fearsome Behemoth Chocobo Armor and charge into battle
• And of course, the game itself!

Visit your preferred retailer today and pre-order the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Collector’s Edition for $79.99, or grab the standard edition for $39.99. Simply pre-order either edition to get the goodies I mentioned earlier!

Don’t forget that phase 3 of our Beta Test kicks off in June, and we’ll be inviting PlayStation 3 gamers from around the world to try the game and give us their feedback!

I’ll be in the comments below to answer any questions you may have, too! You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and the official FINAL FANTASY XIV forums.

We can’t wait to see you all in Eorzea!

This is Naoki Yoshida, the producer and director of FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn. First of all, I would like to thank the PlayStation.Blog team for the opportunity to share with you the latest developments in our game.

We were recently in San Francisco as part of a tour to show A Realm Reborn to members of the gaming media. Our guests had a chance to take the game for a spin, after which I sat down with them for an interview. I expect that reports will be hitting various online media outlets starting today, so please keep an eye out!

We consider it one of our missions to reacquaint gamers all over the world with the wonders of FINAL FANTASY. To this end, we’ll be incorporating the most memorable elements of the series into A Realm Reborn. Mind you, this won’t be limited only to the game’s launch; in subsequent patches, we plan to keep adding more great stuff from FINAL FANTASY’s 25-year history. For starters, adventurers will be able to take on the Crystal Tower (FFIII) raid dungeon, do battle with classic summons (such as Ifrit, Titan, and Leviathan), and ride magitek armor (FFVI). It goes without saying that there’ll be moogles and chocobos as well. Your trusty steed will fight beside you in battle, and can also be dressed up in neat costumes. Future patches will introduce series mainstay Gilgamesh, and also the fun and excitement of the Gold Saucer (FFVII). The list goes on and on!

We’ve also released new screens to show our progress on the PS3 version. Though performance is still being optimized, I’m sure you’ll agree that the visual quality is almost on par with the Windows PC version.

My team and I are very much looking forward to the beta test, which is about to commence. PS3 players will be able to jump in to start testing when the third phase of the Beta launches. If you haven’t already signed up to become a tester, you can do so at the Beta Tester Application Site. We want as many people as possible to join in. I hope to see you there!

We’ll continue to release new info on A Realm Reborn, so be sure to keep an eye on PlayStation.Blog. Alternately, you can visit our official site along with the Developers’ Blog. The blog regularly hosts the latest behind-the-scenes info straight from the development floor, and you’re bound to get a kick out of the info.

Thank you for reading! We hope we can rely on your support for FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn as well as the FINAL FANTASY series at large!

The loyal PlayStation.Blog readers amongst you might have noticed that we’ve been unusually quiet in recent times, but no longer, today we come bearing gifts! For all our RPG-loving fans, we’re excited to bring you the world’s first screenshots of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on PS3 (Chocobos included)!

In our first PlayStation 3 reveal, we wanted to give you a guided tour around the game’s interface and menus. With a wealth of different options and commands at your fingertips at any time, it was important for us to create an elegant UI that is easy to read and navigate. Taking inspiration from previous games, the look and feel of the new Final Fantasy will be instantly familiar to long-time fans of the series.

The accompanying screenshots show an action bar with 16 total slots; of which, the left eight can be accessed by pressing the L2 button, and the right eight with the R2. The corresponding eight slots are mapped to the controller’s directional pad, along with the Circle, x, Triangle, and Square buttons. Players can set up to eight action bars, and cycle through them by pressing both the L2 and R2 buttons.

In Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, we’ve put an emphasis on customisation. Knowing that everyone has their own personal tastes, not to mention the need to have a load-out that compliments the character and role you’re playing in-game, all of the UI elements that you see in the screenshots can be enabled, disabled, and repositioned to suit your preferences. Menus are also simple to navigate, with the command you’re looking for only a few button presses away.

The UI, like the rest of the game, is built to offer the high-quality experience that you would expect from its PC counterpart. With Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn supporting cross-platform play, it was important that the features and gameplay align across both platforms. The graphical quality is no exception to this, and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn takes full advantage of PlayStation 3′s resources to bring you the amazing visuals you’ve come to expect from Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s development is well underway (currently entering an alpha test phase) and the PS3 version is still on track for simultaneous release with its PC counterpart in 2013. We hope these screenshots have you salivating and eager for more; make sure you keep an eye on the blog, because we’ll be back in the near future with some PS3 gameplay footage. If you’d like to find out more about Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn — and to view our latest trailer — check out the game’s official site.

As always, please leave your feedback and questions in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them.

When it was first launched back in 2010, Final Fantasy XIV for PC was criticized by players and the media, and eventually the planned PS3 version was postponed. Since then, Square Enix decided to reshuffle the leading developers of the game, with Naoki Yoshida now acting as Director and Producer. His challenge is to helm the 2.0 version of Final Fantasy XIV, which is a re-imagination of the original release. It will mark a new beginning for the game when (update: the beta) gets launched this winter, coinciding with the release of the anticipated PS3 version.

The game was not ready to be demoed publicly at E3 this year, but we got a chance to see a brief live demo behind closed doors of the game still running on a PC. It featured lush visuals, with a richly detailed character running through a forest area with dense vegetation and impressive lighting effects passing through foliage. It was something we definitely aren’t used to see in an MMORPG. “Right now it’s optimized for PC. We’re about 50% into the development of the PS3 version, but it’s pretty much how it’s going to look on the console as well,” explains Yoshida. “It uses the same new graphics engine we built just for this game. This summer we’ll have an opportunity to show the PS3 version.”

In the meantime, he briefed us on what to expect from the new version of the game. “We believe that Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 can be considered the next real Final Fantasy game in the series,” he adds. This re-release is based on three pillars that have also been the aspects the series is known for: high quality gameplay, great storyline and beautiful graphics. “And on top of that, there´s our MMORPG community, which will consist of both PC players and also the PS3 players all over the world.” Which means the game will be cross-platform, like FFXI before it on PS2 and PC.

Yoshida-san is quick to emphasize how the legacy is going to be a driving force for this episode: “We’ll have some Final Fantasy staples as well, like chocobos, moogles and summons. But what is a little bit different is that these summons are like demigods in this world, so they´re really powerful, and it’ll take cooperation of all the players to fight these battles.”

Of course, bringing an MMORPG to a console system means tackling some big challenges. “It is a thing that didn’t have been done a lot in the past, and we have to make sure that we design an user interface and control scheme specially for these players”, explains Yoshida. “And we’ll also be adding in-game tutorials and quests that will help players that might not be comfortable with MMOs, and when they play the game, they will feel like they’re playing a console game that just happens to be online.”

Things are looking promising for the second coming of Final Fantasy XIV, and PlayStation fans will finally have the chance to explore the lush visuals of Eorzea in this deeply-revised version of the title. Below, Yoshida-san goes deeper in some details of his project. And we can’t wait to gather some friends and ride some chocobos around those wonderful vistas.

PlayStation.Blog: Besides the new control scheme and new user interface, does the PS3 version have any new exclusive features compared to the PC version?
Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director: Because PS3 players and PC players will all be on the same servers, we can’t give either group something special, because everyone is playing together.

But we know that a lot of players have a PS3 and PCs as well, and depending on the mood, sometimes you want to sit down and play in front of your screen, whereas in other times you want to sit back on your couch, relax with controller in hand and play. We believe that we offer opportunities for players to enjoy both worlds.

PSB: Final Fantasy has a rich universe, evolving its mythos and its narrative from episode to episode. How do you translate this into a massive open world, into an MMO form, where players can dictate the story?
Yoshida-san: It is an open world in the sense that you can explore freely, but in this open world you have this very detailed story, which has a beginning and an ending. What is good is that, once that story ends, we can add new tales. That’s one of the greatest thing about an MMO: you expand a certain story or add new storylines via patches.

PSB: We know some friends that still plays Final Fantasy XI today, 10 years after it was first launched. Do you have a roadmap to keep supporting FFXIV long after its launch?
Yoshida-san: Yes, definitely.

PSB: Are you incorporating easter eggs for fans of the series?
Yoshida-san: Yes, we’re definitely planning on lots of references to past Final Fantasies. This is a game we believe is for the fans of the series, so we want to bring back a lot of nostalgic monsters and other things. For example, we’re planning the Crystal Tower, which is the last dungeon of Final Fantasy III. Basically we’re taking all the great things from the the first 13 episodes, squeezing it into the game and giving them some polish. For example, in FFIII you were limited by the technology of the time, and we’re going to re-render that using high quality graphics. So you’ll have the opportunity to re-visit these sections and see the difference between the lower quality graphics from the past and the high resolution visuals of FFXIV.

PSB: Being players of Final Fantasy XI as well, we know the game was really party-based, and that was a problem with some audiences. Can you also play solo on in Final Fantasy XIV?
Yoshida-san: Definitely, you’ll be able to play the content solo too – it won’t be as party-based as Final Fantasy XI. But, on the other hand, we believe that in this current generation there are a lot of people with time constraints, and it’s hard for them to spend time finding a party. So we’re going to make sure that, for party-based contents, we make it easier to recruit a party. With the Content Finder tool, you’re going to be able to decide “Okay, I want to do this today”, then simply press the button and you’ll be joined by other people with similar goals. So you’ll be able to decide if you’re making a party and, if you don’t have the time, just press the button on Content Finder and you’re automatically in a party.

PSB: With the game finally launching on PS3 soon, how are you planning to attract those potential new players? You know, the console audience is very different from the traditional PC gamer.
Yoshida: We know that a lot of console players never played an MMO and they may be scared by not knowing what to do, and we want to stress that it’s very similar to an offline Final Fantasy that always had great stories, made you cry, changed your life. There will be a beta for a limited time where people will be able to try it out. And an additional factor to bring in console games are graphics: something of this quality you can’t have in any MMO title.

PSB: Will there be a public beta for 2.0?
Yoshida-san: Yes.

So I was just passing through the Square Enix booth at E3 and I noticed a door slightly ajar. I can never resist a slightly ajar door so I poked my head in to find Hiromichi Tanaka, senior vice president of software development, sitting down for a Final Fantasy XIV round table interview. There was a spare seat so I sat down, whistling behind a newspaper, and asked a few questions of my own.

As an extra titbit, there was PC monitor running the game in stereoscopic 3D in the same room, although Tanaka told me that this was purely a technical demonstration and he wouldn’t be drawn when I asked if they had any 3D plans for the PS3 version of the game.

How do you feel about the challenge of developing the first MMO on PlayStation 3?

“We had a similar experience with Final Fantasy XI as that was the first MMO on PlayStation 2 [in Japan only]. So this time, things came quite naturally for us and it helped us having the technology in mind from the very beginning.”

How do you intend to reach out to those console gamers that haven’t experienced an MMO before and are used to more instant gratification in their games?

“Because Final Fantasy XIV is designed as a cross-platform MMO, there is no difference between the PC version and the PS3 version. We believe that previous attempts to bring MMOs to consoles have been unsuccessful because they focused too much on adapting their style to suit that audience and they lost the feel of a true MMO. Therefore, regardless of the platform, we are aiming to produce a real MMO with Final Fantasy XIV.”

How much co-operation has there been between you and Sony Computer Entertainment in bringing an MMO to PS3?

“Sony [Computer Entertainment] has been extremely helpful to us, particularly with technical data while we were at the programming stage of development. We’ve also held talks regarding PlayStation Network functionality and we will be making the most of what that offers, integrating trophies and other features.”

What do you think of the PlayStation Move motion controller?

“Unfortunately, we haven’t had chance to try it out yet but we’ve heard very interesting things about it and we’d like to look at supporting it in Final Fantasy XIV, if we get the chance to do so. However, at the moment I would say that there are no current plans.”