Final Fantasy XI Developer's Tour: The November version update pt. 2

The evoliths rewarded from hunts are the game's newest form of item augmentation. Similar to the gems of World of Warcraft, gems augment everything from your attacks and defense to how your abilities function. These new crystals are slotted directly into your equipment, allowing you to augment anything to your heart's desire.

If you want to throw an evolith onto a weapon, you're going to have to etch a slot into it first, and that requires the crafting portion of the game's brand new augmentation system — Synergy Furnaces.

Synergy crafting is not your boring sit down, pull out a recipe book and pick something to make type of crafting. This is hands on, wheel spinning, pressure monitoring, furnace thwacking crafting. You're going to get down and dirty with this new system, and when I say down and dirty I mean "hurling yourself face first into a violent explosion." Doesn't that sound wonderful?

Synergy is a complicated system, but it breaks down into the simple act of adding a piece of armor or weapon that you want etched into the furnace and then pressure cooking it with elemental fuel called fewell. If you can raise the right set of elements to the levels the item needs them to be, then the crafting is a success.

As the item is etched, the elements will introduce a few problems — pressure, elemental impurity, and shield degradation. High levels of impurity in the furnace can lead to the furnace exploding in your face, while pressure makes the explosion that much more deadly when it goes off. Should the shield around the furnace hit zero, as denoted by the constantly falling health of the furnace, the elements escape and you're left with a fizzled recipe.

Luckily, you can get five of your friends to help you keep the process stable. It's a five person minigame of frantic furnace thwacking (yes, you can really thwack the furnace) as you try to keep everything in check. Sometimes you'll even need other players, as some recipes need people with high levels of different tradeskills to work on the furnace.

Needless to say, evolith/synergy crafting is rewarding, fun, and complicated. More games should take a cue from FFXI and introduce some wonderful cooperative crafting games such as this one, to make crafting less of a bore. I wish I had more time to describe the other side of the system that is creating brand new items through synergy, but I just don't have the space.

Here comes the bride!

Finally, after all of this killing and explosions, my character rushed off to a fantastic wedding on the beach, set up by the development team. It was a nice end to a frantic day, although I didn't exactly look like a well-groomed bride as I stood next to my paladin husband, all dressed in white plate mail as I stood there covered in synergy ash and monster blood.

The game's long-standing wedding system has been removed from the hands of the GMs and placed into the care of the automated event service, as you can now purchase your wedding through NPCs, buy the appropriate materials with gil, and set up wedding pieces anywhere in Vana'diel with the automated event service. While you lose the touch of a real human "priest" officiating the service, you gain the ability to have the wedding anywhere in the world and not wait for the GMs to have a free date.

As the sun set over the cove and I waved goodbye to my guides, I had to admit, this update was pretty nice. While I was a bit iffy on the wedding changes, the brand new innovative crafting and the playful fun of A Shantotto Ascension more than made up for it, not to mention the job changes and brand new Wings of the Goddess missions that I couldn't even fit into this article.

If you're a Final Fantasy XI buff, you already know all about these brand new things added to the game and are probably working to raise your synergy skill levels. But if you're new to the game, do yourself a favor and pick up the game, it's four expansions, and all three of the adventure packs for 11 dollars on Steam during the holiday sale. That's one dollar over the cost of a standard adventure pack, and you get the entire game and 30 days of play. So don't sit on the fence, pick it up and enjoy the 6 years of content, wonderfully complicated difficulty, and rewarding storylines/cutscenes that the game has to offer. It's not Warcraft, and it's better for it.