Final Fantasy XIV’s new class will unleash your inner Bob Ross
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
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Final Fantasy XIV wrapped up the final leg of its Fan Festival tour in Tokyo over the weekend. As with the other Fan Festival events, players were treated to a wealth of new information on Dawntrail, the next expansion in the critically acclaimed MMORPG series — in addition to graphical updates, a new playable race, and information on the expansion’s new area (and you can check out the full keynote address here). We also got a first look at the second job class being added to the game: Pictomancer.
By this point in the Dawntrail hype cycle, the most dedicated fans had already figured out the Pictomancer was coming. During the Las Vegas Fan Festival last year, game producer Naoki Yoshida made the keynote address wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem T-shirt — a clue in that all the turtles are named after famous painters. The Pictomancer class was first introduced in Final Fantasy VI, but unlike that iteration of the class that was only able to draw enemies to attack them, FFXIV’s Pictomancer will be able to draw enemies, weapons, and landscapes as well as utilize a number of support spells. Unfortunately, Yoshida broke with his tradition of announcing a new FFXIV class by cosplaying it himself, saying via a translator, “It’d be a little bit difficult for me as a 50-year-old man to portray the image of this job.”
In addition to the Pictomancer news, Yoshida confirmed that Dawntrail will release onFFXIV time not Square Enix time, meaning that its summer 2024
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