First things first: Here's a test for you. If you can accept the content of the next two statements, continue reading. If you can't, this game simply isn't for you. Move on and play something else.

1. You can not jump in this game.

2. PvP will be an afterthought at best.  PvE is heavily emphasized.

..Still here? Good. 

Now to the topic at hand. The stickies on top of the forum contain links to all the useful information you can find about this game. However, anything specific is hard to find and a lot of information is repeated more than once. For someone unfamiliar with the game, it may be hard to find what you're looking for. And now that the release date of the game has been set for September 22nd for the Collector's Edition version and September 30th for the Standard Edition version, I feel that it is good time to make a thread where all the useful information is readily available.

Now to the information itself. I will list most of the information we have found out so far based on the subject (ex. Combat mechanics, Crafting, Character progression, Quest system). Look under the specific subject to find more info about it.

1. Character Progression

- As you defeat monsters and complete other tasks, you gain Experience points. These experience points count towards your Physical Level and once it goes up, you can allocate points to your various stats as you see fit (Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Mind, Intelligence, Piety). In addition to this, your HP and MP goes up by a fixed amount and you also gain points to put into your Elemental Affinities. It is not yet known how exactly do the Elements affect your character.You can re-allocate your stats after enough time has passed.

- As you do actions such as hit the monster or craft items, you also gain Skill Ranks. They are given to you after the fight or synthesis process ends, although the exact amount depends on the number of attacks and skills you used during the encounter. As your Skill Rank goes up, you gain more abilities and spells for the specific weapon type you have equipped. You also get to wear stronger equipment.

- Physical Level is universal while Skill Rank is weapon dependent. This means that your Physical Level only goes up once while every 'class' has it's own Skill Rank or even more than one (Gladiator has Shield and Sword SR's, for example). To balance things, Physical Level goes up slower than Skill Rank.

- By switching your weapon type, you can change your class. You can do this anywhere, anytime, aside from one exception: You can not change classes while in Active mode (more of that later).

- You can change skills between classes quite freely. This means that if you gain Bloodbath ability on Marauder class at SR4, you can equip the same skill on Gladiator as long as it is at the same Rank or higher. There are very few exceptions to this rule. To balance things out, you can only equip set amount of skills at time. As your Skill Rank goes up, you gain more and more Action Points which are consumed as you set skills and spells to your Hotbar. Skills from other classes potentially cost more Action Points, but their effectiveness is roughly the same as if you were using the skill on it's "native" class. However, there are exceptions to this:

- All classes belong to one of the 4 disciples: War, Magic, Hand and Land. Using a skill from different disciple makes it weaker (for example, Cure spell can only be cast on one person instead of being AoE and it's range is more limited. In addition to this, depending on your current weapon's stats (melee stats instead of magical), the power of the spell may be weaker as well. Skills from the same disciple retain most of their strength.

- There are currently 7 combat classes: In Disciple of War there are Marauder (Great Axe), Gladiator (Sword & Shield), Pugilist (Hand to hand), Archer (Bow), and Lancer (Spear). In Disciple of Magic there are Conjurer (Healing, Buffing & Nuking), and Thaumaturge (Crowd Control & Enfeebling). More classes are scheduled to be implemented in version updates.

- There are also Class Traits with various effects. It is not yet known what exactly do these traits do. It is speculated that you can change traits between classes just like abilities and skills.

- You supposedly do not need to touch any combat class to 'clear' the game. You can specialize in crafting or gathering and enjoy the game just like that.

2. Combat Mechanics

- Active & Passive mode: Active mode is a "battle-ready" state where you have your weapon unsheathed, move slower and your HP regeneration is weaker. In passive mode you have your weapon(s) sheathed, move faster and regenerate your HP much faster. However, your Tactical Points (coming to this later) gradually decrease as well.

- The game features a Stamina Gauge which is depleted as you use basic attacks, skills and spells. Each action consumes a different amount of stamina, based on the strength and type of the action. The stamina gauge replenishes over-time.

- Those with a Shield equipped gain additional Stamina Gauge (unconfirmed). It is not yet known if this is the same case with a second single handed weapon in your offhand.

- Basic attacks like Slash, Stab and normal magical attacks generate Tactical Points which are consumed to do special skills and cast some spells. A normal basic attack generates around 400~500 TP and most skills use 1000~2000 TP. This means that you need to think about which skill to use at what time and can not thus spam every skill as soon as it is up. 

- Some classes have Reactionary skills that can be used when a specific event is triggered, ex. you evade the monster or block it's attack. These skills do not consume the Stamina Gauge but they cost around 200 TP.

- Your Position and Orientation in the battlefield can give you great advantage against the monsters you're fighting but it can also work for your disadvantage. Here's two basic examples: a) If you hit the monster from behind or from the sides, it will take increased damage and it's evasion will be lower. b) If you are using a weapon with long range, such as Lance, you can potentially hit multiple monsters at the same time by positioning yourself correctly. as long as they're close enough to each other.

- Some classes have special characteristics to them. For example, Conjurer's spells are almost always AoE while Thaumaturge's spells take effect in a frontal cone area. Archer can, by switching arrow type, deal multiple types of damage suited for every occasion. Pugilist on the other hand has two stances to switch between: The offensive and defensive stance. The stances become better the more you use them, but if you change between the stances they reset. Thus you need to consider if it is better to stay in Offensive and keep the various bonuses you have acquired during the encounter or if it would be more beneficial to change into Defensive stance.

- While there are some 1 vs. 1 and Group vs. 1 encounters in the game, a lot of encounters happen in a Group vs. Group setting.  

- Like players, monsters also have an Active & Passive mode. This means that you can take advantage of the situation and do a Pre-emptive strike against monsters currently in Passive mode. However, monsters can also do the same to your and your group.

- You can break the monster's body parts/weapon by fulfilling specific requirements during combat. You can do this by attacking the monster with a specific skill(s) at a certain angle. but it has been revealed that in some cases they may be unable to do certain special skills, the number of items dropped may increase, or the drop rate for certain items will increase.

- You can not regenerate MP through normal means. Only by visiting several 'hubs' found in the surrounding areas called 'Aetherytes' or by using few select items or skills (with long cooldowns) you can regain some of your MP while out in the field. This means that you need to watch out for your MP usage so you don't run out of mana before getting to the next Aetheryte.

- Battle Regimens: BR's are cooperative actions you can do with your group members to bestow various enfeebling effects to the target. I will not say much about this feature at this time because it is not known yet how the system has changed in Beta version, but basically you queue up different attacks which enfeeble the target depending on what the combination of skills is (ex. Archer shoots an arrow and Conjurer follows with a Fire spell, resulting in a Burn effect for the monster).

- Monster types behave in different ways based on family but also individually. Some like to take distance from you, some like to zerg one player together, some like to run away when threatened. Some save their TP attacks for lower health, and some don't like to stay still. For example.

3. Quest System

- The game features two type of Quests: Class Quests and Guildleves. Class quests tell the story of Eorzea through various cutscenes and encounters and it is the main 'storyline' portion of the game. Large number of cutscenes feature voice acting in English, with subtitles provided for French, German and Japanese. 

- Guildleves are the 'quests' of FFXIV. They are used to progress your character further in the game. Rewards vary from gil (money) to equipment or items. Currently, you do not gain experience points nor skill points for completing the leves.

- Each guildleve has 5 difficulties, based on stars. The more stars, the harder the objectives will be and the bigger group you need to beat the leve in question. 1 star means the leve is soloable, 5 stars mean you will potentially need more than 10 players to tackle the monsters. The more stars there are, the greater the rewards will be.

- There are Guildleves for combat classes, crafters and gatherers. Combat & Gathering leves are called "regional leves" and they happen on the field. "Local leves" on the other hand happen in the city or it's surrounding areas and have been created with crafters in mind.

- Regional guildleves have a time limit to them, varying from 30 minutes to even days. The faster you complete the task, the greater the bonus reward will be. 

- Leves with time limit are Phased, meaning that you will be out in the open field with everyone else, however the quest objectives are claimed for you and your group and other people can not see them until you engage the monster. This is a countermeasure to prevent the leve from failing just because there weren't enough monsters and you ran out of time because of it.

- Many leves have a surprise element to them. To give you a basic example, let's say that you have to go get 5 pages of papyrus from the nearby areas. Easy enough, right? Well, as you collect the pages suddenly you're ambushed by a bunch of elementals that you have to kill to proceed. To give you another example, the leve objective may tell you to kill 2 Dodo's, so you go out and engage them... and they decide to call for back-up! Now you're suddenly facing against 4 Dodo's.  On top of that, the last Dodo whilst being overwhelmed decides to run away to his friends. If you can't stop him in time he'll run off and you have to chase him. The final battle would then be against 3 more, even harder Dodo's. Those are the basic examples.

- Regional Leves tell you very specifically where you need to go. It is indicated on the mini-map very clearly. That doesn't mean that's all there is to the quest however, as I mentioned the "surprise element", however you won't waste unnecessary time looking for the mobs from the quite massive area wherein the leve takes place. Local leves are a bit less forgiving, and you may need to do some searching around to find the right NPC in the town or it's outskirts.

- Once done with your leve, an Aetheryte node pops up which you can use to restore your HP, MP, and teleport back to camp. 

- Each Leve can only be done once in a set amount of time. To do more leves than that, you need to team up with other people and help them with their leves. You are rewarded for doing so accordingly.

- By completing Guildleves, you gain "cards" that you can use to boost the rewards of the next Leve. You can also mix guildleves together to create "campaigns" with various objectives.

- By doing leves you also generate Regional Influence points which can be exchanged for Special type of Leves called Faction leves. It is not yet known what do these leves do.

- In a set amount of time you also gain Guardian's Favor which can be exchanged for something like "an amulet" of sorts you can use to boost your skill growth for a period of time.

4. Crafting & Gathering

- This feature is still under NDA pretty much so I can not say much about it at this time. However, I can say that the system is much more interactive than usually and not simply a mere side-activity alongside combat. I will edit more info in as the NDA is being lifted.

- To make Crafters more important, there is a weapon degrading system. You can, in an emergency, use an NPC to fix your equipment for you, but a PC crafter will always guarantee the best results. The system may be used to count as a death penalty.

- Currently there are 5 crafting classes: Culinarist, Alchemist, Tanner, Weaver and Blacksmith. There are also 3 gathering classes: Miner, Botanist and Fisher. 

5. Marketplace & Retainers 

- The marketplace is FFXIV's "Auction House" type system. Each marketplace consists of various instances full of player-made bazaars called "Retainers". There is supposedly a search type feature to make looking for specific items inside the marketplace easier.

- The retainer is an NPC you hire to sell items for you. You can customize your retainer in various ways to make it stand out.

6. The World

- There are currently 4 city-states, 3 of them acting as the start town for the players and the 4th being a hub for higher level characters. In addition to this, there are also 2 'fallen' city states and various towns.

- The world consists of 10 large regions (it is not yet known how many are initially available to players). There are small loading times while travelling between these regions.

- You can travel inside the region by using a teleport system. As you explore the world and find more Aetherytes, you can from there on teleport you and your group to that Aetheryte. The further you go, the more it costs to teleport there (not gil, but something else entirely).  Other forms of transportation are Airships and Chocobo's for example.

7. Misc.

- Guilds are called Linkshells in this game, while larger, high level Linkshells are called Companies. We don't know what the difference between these two systems is, but the developers have said that there is a possibility for every company to have their own website as well as every individual player also having their own subpage. It has also been said that Companies can "level" somehow, however what this means is currently not known.

- It is currently assumed that you can have as many Linkshells as you wish, and are not restricted to only one at time.

- There will be player housing, and it is speculated that this ties into the Company system somehow. The developers have said that they want every player to have their "own space" but did not go into details.

- The maximum size of a group is 15. There is no known penalty for being in a group of any size right now. You can decide the size of the group yourself, so group of 2 can function as well as a group of 8 without having to deal with penalties.

- Everyone plays on the same servers. NA, JP, EU, PS3, PC.

- To prevent communication issues, there is an Auto-Translate tool which you can use to easily translate common phrases and words into English, German, French, and Japanese.

- S-E will NOT be using the dreaded PlayOnline system in the game. We don't know what will replace it, but we can only hope it is a significant improvement (which is not hard to accomplish!).

- The pricing is as follows: $12,99 (12,99€, 8,99£) per account, $3 for extra characters and $1 for extra retainers.

- All the content the game offers can be completed by a single character. There are no limitations in place. 

- As far as music goes, you have never heard anything like it in an MMORPG before.  It can be eíther a hit or miss but I think everyone will find tracks they like. A lot of tracks have a kind of 80's vibe to them.

Well, that's it for now. I'll update it as more info is released. I'll probably edit in "Square-Enix as an MMO developer" part in at some point at least. If you think I missed something or have any suggestions, do tell me.

And if you have any additional questions, I will try to answer them.

Cant jump? wtf thats just lame

Loading times between zones? One of my biggest immediate turn offs for mmo's. It completely kills immersion for me and sadly its the sole reason I dont play AoC.

F this game im waiting for cataclysm

Originally posted by dyermaker714

Cant jump? wtf thats just lame

Loading times between zones? One of my biggest immediate turn offs for mmo's. It completely kills immersion for me and sadly its the sole reason I dont play AoC.

F this game im waiting for cataclysm

 Hey! This person didn't follow the weeding process presented at the beginning of the OP, not fair! :p

Great post Hyanmen, even a couple of details in there that I hadn't seen before. :)

Originally posted by Adric

 Hey! This person didn't follow the weeding process presented at the beginning of the OP, not fair! :p

I can only ask everyone to just ignore those comments. This thread is for information, not arguing. We do not have to prove anything to them.

Added in some info about monster behaviour.

Nice list!

Ps. Any news if they will leave the maps like on FFXI? I mean you have to buy or get them from a quest to be able to see all the map?

Hope they made it into the game it's a great feature that "forces" you to adventure and don't be reckless.

Thanks for taking the time to post this info. Very informative.

Not liking everything, but it certainly looks like a deep system.

I think there was mention of the companies being able to "level" or have housing or something to that effect, but none of that is confirmed... not sure if you should include it or just wait until there is more info

Originally posted by bloodaxes

Nice list!

Ps. Any news if they will leave the maps like on FFXI? I mean you have to buy or get them from a quest to be able to see all the map?

In the beta you have the map of the region you play in as well as the map of the city. 

So we can't draw any conclusions from that yet. 

Originally posted by Laughing-man

I think there was mention of the companies being able to "level" or have housing or something to that effect, but none of that is confirmed... not sure if you should include it or just wait until there is more info

I think I'll edit that in as well. Thanks for the reminder.

Liking this game more and more.  Starting to sound like it has the depth that drew me into FFXI for so long.  Thanks for the info.

I'll wait for them to release more information hopefully they will reveal more interesting features for people that are waiting patiently for it to launch hopefully bug free.

Originally posted by Hyanmen

Originally posted by Adric

 Hey! This person didn't follow the weeding process presented at the beginning of the OP, not fair! :p

I can only ask everyone to just ignore those comments. This thread is for information, not arguing. We do not have to prove anything to them.

Added in some info about monster behaviour.

 It was quite funny to see that the first thing you said was contradicted within seconds is all lol

I just finished reading it and it was very interesting, I already knew most of these things but it's nice to have one great big organized thread listing all this information! Thanks for taking the time to put it all together for everyone.

Originally posted by Adric

I just finished reading it and it was very interesting, I already knew most of these things but it's nice to have one great big organized thread listing all this information! Thanks for taking the time to put it all together for everyone.

Yes, I mostly made this thread for the people who have not followed the progress of this game as much as we have. Now it is much easier to find out about all the features they're going to implement without having to look at random videos and interviews that don't really tell much.

That reminds me that I forgot to mention the grouping system as well. I'll add that now.

You mention that leves don't offer a direct xp reward but I was under the impression that kills rewarded more xp when within a leve. FFXIV Core's latest article mentions it as well. Thought it might be worth adding.

Great work though. Nice to have a single resource to link people to now.

Originally posted by Alberel

You mention that leves don't offer a direct xp reward but I was under the impression that kills rewarded more xp when within a leve. FFXIV Core's latest article mentions it as well. Thought it might be worth adding.

Can you link me to the article in question? That is something new for me as well.

Originally posted by Hyanmen

Originally posted by Alberel

You mention that leves don't offer a direct xp reward but I was under the impression that kills rewarded more xp when within a leve. FFXIV Core's latest article mentions it as well. Thought it might be worth adding.

Can you link me to the article in question? That is something new for me as well.

The article is here. It's focussed on retainers but the fifth paragraph mentions a new feature for aetherite nodes regarding bonus xp during leves.

Originally posted by Alberel

The article is here. It's focussed on retainers but the fifth paragraph mentions a new feature for aetherite nodes regarding bonus xp during leves.

Oh yeah, I thought the NDA applied to that tidbit. Guess not, so I'll edit it in, ty.

Also, I think it's just more like an universal skill boost and not leve specific, not 100% sure though.

Great write-up

I am gonna try the game for sure, tough it might be a little to themepark for me in the end, but then it still sounds like a good place to explore. 

Thank you for the write up,  it filled in a lot of questions for me.

I know your under the NDA, so I understand if you can't anwser,  but my girlfriend plays online games with me and she loves the "flashy" spell classes.  I've played FFXI before and loved it and the immersion feeling of the world.  She never has and has only played games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft.  

In your oppinion,  do you think a class like the Conjurer would have "pretty" like spells and clothing to wear?  Or would she generally be forced to heal in a party and the casting combat might feel too "bulky".  If that makes sence.  

The combat videos I have seen of FFXIV look a bit like that,  but of course it's hard to tell as they looked like new players trying the game for the first time.