New trailer shows off Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood's gorgeous environments

Everything we know about Stormblood

Stormblood, Final Fantasy XIV's second expansion, is shaping up to be a sizable addition to the MMO. There's two new jobs, a whole new continent to explore, underwater environments, and a lot more. To learn about it all in detail, check out everything we know so far.

Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood is two months away from its June 20 release date. But if you're itching to get a small taste of its eastern flavor, Square Enix has released a benchmark tool along with an in-game trailer showcasing its new environments and jobs.

The benchmark tool is a great way to see how well your computer will handle FF14, which you might want to run because this expansion introduces some nice graphical upgrades that necessitated Square Enix dropping support for the PS3. Looking at the in-game trailer (which is just a video capture of the benchmark) there's nothing that stands out as remarkably different, other than a lot more happening on screen at one time during some of the fight scenes.

Even if performance isn't your concern, the trailer is worth a watch as it's one of the largest chunks of in-game footage released for the new expansion so far. On display is not only the gorgeous locales of the new continent of Othard, but also Stormblood's new jobs, the Red Mage and Samurai. Both are DPS roles, which Final Fantasy XIV already has a lot of. It'll be interesting to see how they fit in and what they bring to the table. And hey, if cat-ladies in bikinis are your thing, Stormblood's got a lot of that too. A big feature of this expansion is being able to dive and explore underwater zones.

We're going to have more coverage of Stormblood later in May, but Final Fantasy XIV has been one of the most consistently excellent MMOs in years. Hopefully Stormblood keeps the good times rolling.

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.