Hello and welcome to the 22nd edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, I’m going to be looking at that most common of complaints/suggestions for modern MMOs: going Free to Play. If you read articles about nearly any MMO, watch YouTube videos, etc, there’s a couple of comments that keep showing up on those posts. “I’ll check it out once it goes F2P.” “They’re crazy to use subscriptions! No one pays a monthly fee these days!” “I give it two months tops before it goes F2P.” All of these commenters see the F2P model as either the savior of the modern MMO/gaming industry or this absolute final destination for all of those games once they’ve gotten that silly “asking for money regularly” thing out of their systems. The question is: are they right or is there room in the MMO world to ask for a subscription fee?

Hello and welcome to the twenty first edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM's column on Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week's column, we're going to be talking about character advancement. We're all familiar with the basic leveling system as we go from fledgling level 1s to the current cap of 50. The question is: can we have progression after we hit level cap?

Hello and welcome to the twentieth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we're going back to look at the recently released MMO from Carbine Studios, WildStar. The last couple times we took a look at WildStar, I pointed out areas of their game design that I thought FFXIV could learn from and incorporate into Eorzea. This column’s going to be a little bit different. We’ll still be talking about something I’d like to see brought over from WildStar to FFXIV, but it’s something Carbine still needs to work on: Adventures.

Interested in checking out Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on the PC? Jump into the 14-day free trial and experience content up through level 20! Already a current player and want to invite a friend? Square Enix has also launched the Recuit-a-Friend Campaign.

Hello and welcome to the nineteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we’ll be looking at new combat jobs. The Final Fantasy series has a plethora of class and job options from previous games that have yet to show up in the world of Eorzea. Many of those jobs will likely show up in one form or another as patches and expansions are released further down the road. Of course, these jobs will need some tweaking from their original designs to fit with the holy trinity of tank, healer and DPS; you may have been able to take down Chaos with four White Mages in the first FF game, but that’s not going to fly here.

This weekend all eligible players—those who have previously purchased and registered Final Fantasy XIV and have an inactive service account during this promotion—can login for free! Running from today through 11:59pm PT on Sunday, July 20th, you can check out all the new content introduced in Patch 2.3, catch up with friends and more.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has received an extensive patch dubbed "Defenders of Eorzea." This patch adds the most important feature of in any video game ever: the ability to raise your own Chocobo! The chance to raise a Chocobo is just a single facet in a feature-rich patch which includes all of the following:

Hello and welcome to the eighteenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM's column on Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week's column, we'll be taking a look at the classes that make up the Disciples of the Land. While in other MMOs gathering is relegated to secondary skills for your combat classes, FFXIV treats the three gathering professions – Botanist, Miner and Fisher – as true classes. The gameplay for DoL classes is unique compared to any of the other Disciples, and all three classes have their own unique skills (cross-class as well), equipment and quests available.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn's Patch 2.3: Defenders of Eorzea is scheduled to go live on July 8, 2014. Yesterday afternoon, Square Enix released an epic 8-minute trailer for the update!

Hello and welcome to the seventeenth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. For this week’s column, we're going to continue our look at the recently released MMO from Carbine Studios, WildStar; in particular, we’ll be examining the game to see what design elements would fit well over here in Eorzea.

In part one we looked at their take on player housing (e.g. free to start, impacts rested XP, customizable to fit your playstyle, etc.) as well as their Renown social currency and how it encourages players to actually group together as they wander Nexus. While both of these are important elements that I’d like to see Square Enix take a look at, housing and social currency are more secondary activities in the grand scheme of MMOs. These systems may help prolong your interest once you’re invested, but first you have to get to that point and that requires getting past the first hurdle many MMOs fail at: combat. Luckily FFXIV has succeeded in making a keybind MMO that’s interesting to play, but there’s always room for improvement and WildStar has much to offer.