As expected, this week was rather barren with regards to MMORPG news.  Luckily enough Square Enix gave us a surprise by giving us a plethora of new information.  I hope you're still enjoying your Christmas break and that you're having a nice time relaxing and preparing for New Year!

Final Fantasy XIV: Character Customisation!
This week a ton of news was released regarding Final Fantasy XIV.  Let's dive in and see what new facts were announced!

Character Creator

Among the news this week were screen shots and a little bit of information regarding the character creatior in Final Fantasy XIV.  The newly released screen shots are designed to show how advanced the character creation tools are, especially in comparison to Final Fantasy XI.  Once again this information was revealed through Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu (and translated by FFXIVCore.com), before being posted on the game's main website. 

I still find this procedure of announcing information to the Japanese audience first, before telling the rest of the world, incredibly interesting.  Are they aiming at the Japanese market too much? I digress; here are some of the images we've gotten of the new character creator:

Now there are two things that are shown off here, one is the degree to which you can customise your character's face and skin colour, the other to show off the power of the new Crystal Tools engine.  Allow me to explain the latter pointEach of the girls in the picture above has the same revealing costume on.  Correct?  However what's different is that each girl's clothing is made of a different fabric.  Let's take a closer look:

Now as you can see in the image to the left the character's clothes are made up of a leather like material which is shiny and wraps itself tightly around the wearer's body, where as in the image to the right the character's costume is made up of a wool like material which appears looser and softer.  It also looks as if it's knitted by hand.  If this is a true showing of the engines power, these images look like they were taken using the in-game engine, then we can expect a truly beautiful gameThere were also a host of other images released: