(Edit after the EU Fan Fest Opening Ceremony – putting predictions to paper is fun, even when your list gets totally shot to pieces! I’ll be back to write up the actual announcement here shortly when it’s not nearly 4 AM local time for me!)

Final Fantasy XIV’s European Fan Fest event for the 2023-2024 cycle is this upcoming weekend, and with patch 6.5 story on the table, we can now start to speculate just a bit more accurately about what is likely to be unveiled to us this upcoming weekend, with another 90 minute Yoshi P keynote dedicated to unveiling a revised Dawntrail trailer with more content and giving us some likely first actual glimpses into the expansion to come.

There are some trends we can use to analyze this on top of wild speculation and theorycrafting, and so I’m going to spend my post today looking at what I think is likely to happen and then spend a bit of time throwing in my own speculation and hopes!

New Job One Unveiled, Job Two Teased Further

Back at NA Fan Fest, I was certain the unveil coming at EU Fan Fest was an easy layup to be Corsair, given that it seems to be the job that the Warrior of Light is in the trailer and there’s trickery with missing weapons in the cinematic that gives a fairly obvious saber/pistol combo. However, with the deployment of a Green Mage charm in the ending of the current 6.5 main scenario quests, it being shown via Krile, who is a character that Yoshi P has been promising an expanded role for in many interviews, and the obvious tie-in to the NA Fan Fest hint T-shirt of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it seems all but confirmed at this point that we’ll see Green Mage take the stage this weekend. Green Mage is a sort of left-field pick, but that means that there is room to interpret how that job might play in the context of FFXIV better. We should see a basic teaser trailer of the job, some basic discussion of weapon choice and a likely preview of their Artifact gear set, and that will allow Krile to be a part of the cinematic trailer in full job gear glory, in much the same way that the Endwalker trailer peeled back layers at a time to add Alphinaud as Sage and then show Zenos with the Reaper scythe.

This also means we’ll get another t-shirt tease and it’s likely to set off another discussion storm of sorts!

Pre-Order Details, Collector’s Edition Details, Bonuses Unveiled

Normally Fan Fest 2 of 3 is when we get the drop of purchase information and either immediate availability or a date within a week or two of Fan Fest of when we can purchase the expansion. This is usually a three-fold punch of info – pre-order bonus, digital collector’s edition goodies, and then the physical box you can buy. I expect that we’ll either be able to preorder immediately during Fan Fest or on launch day for patch 6.51 near the end of the month, and that pre-order goodies should become available with that patch either way.

I also expect the Endwalker model to continue here – digital-only game licenses and the physical Collector’s Edition instead being a platform-agnostic box with no game key that you can buy separate from any game purchase. Cost-wise, I expect it to keep the same pricing, mostly. While current-gen games are the first generation since the Xbox 360 era to increase box prices, MMO expansions are a precarious business that does not absorb those increases as well, and I would have expected Square Enix to already try this at the same point when Blizzard was nudging WoW expansions up in $10 incremements, but they didn’t and I don’t expect them to now. If any price increase is to be seen, I expect it fully on the collector’s box – it was $130 in Endwalker for a decent roster of tchotkes and I think that audience is the one most receptive to being squeezed a little bit more if the offering is decent enough. Not that I want this to happen, mind you – but we’re in the era of companies hiding price increases behind inflation and given that the lion’s share of Square Enix’s revenue and profits both come from FFXIV, well, I imagine they’ll want to capitalize on that with the biggest purchase a lot of fans will want to make.

Zone Trailers

We got very basic zone previews at NA Fan Fest with some basic screenshots and a rough idea of the themes and atmospheres of those zones we got to see. I expect that EU Fan Fest will show more detail, with trailers showing actual gameplay footage of the staff riding through the zones they are willing to show, which is likely to be the same couple of zones we got early peeks at during NA Fan Fest. These previews have also included the zone music in the past, so I expect that trend to continue.

I think we’ll get details of up to 4 zones, although I’d expect to see some holding back for later on videos and such. My suspicion is that we’ll get two new zone previews with still images and details, video flybys for the two zones we already were shown, and then JP Fan Fest will hold the remaining video previews while leaving two zones in hiding. Why? We’ll get to that later when I start wildly speculating.

Gameplay Details

EU Fan Fest should be the point at which we start to get a sense of the general, very vague direction that actual gameplay will go in. What I mean here is combat, more specifically. Endwalker’s Fan Fest cycle, while abridged, had the hints about the two-minute meta, item squish, and the stylistic consolidation of healers into pure and barrier camps. We’ll likely see some indications of the combat changes to come at EU Fan Fest, at least in a vague sort of manner. I fully expect they’ll start to confirm which jobs are getting partial or complete reworks going into Dawntrail (Astrologian and Dragoon were both mentioned as needing one in Endwalker but they kind of pushed that off into the future and now the future is coming), and I expect some kind of general statements around gameplay flow in combat designed to throw a bone to the people who start frothing at the mouth when the two-minute meta is mentioned (for what it’s worth, I think the two-minute meta is fine and a good test of a group’s ability to burst together properly as well as a good test of individual skill in PF for how competent you are at your opener but I also get why people don’t like it and my opinion is skewed by EW being the first expansion I’ve done current-content Savage in).

Raid and Alliance Raid Series Details

Neither will likely be fleshed out much, but we should get a title card/concept art one-two punch for either or both raid content series to come in Dawntrail. I have zero guesses on the Alliance Raid series, and that tends to push boundaries with crossovers or big in-universe pulls lately anyways, but I do have a hope for the main raid series – I want Sin from FFX. The expansion has zones that mix in a vaguely Southeastern Asian artistic style that matches really well with Spira from FFX, Sin was presented as a giant whale who spent a good amount of FFX in the water (thematically appropriate for Dawntrail), Sin was also the final zone of FFX and thus a good candidate as both an overarching enemy and location for a raid, and we already have a new Tribal quest race based on Final Fantasy X coming in Dawntrail as-is. While we’re a few years past it, FFX just recently celebrated its 20th anniversary (oh god time is doing that thing where stuff I liked as a younger person is getting old) and I think an integration of Sin in-line with how they handled Eden from FFVIII back in Shadowbringers would be a good way to go.

Expanded Trailer With Chopped Final-Version Music

With the unveiling of Green Mage, some more zones, and more time to commit, I expect we’ll get the second version of the cinematic trailer to kick off, complete with the full song sung by whomever will ultimately sing the final version of the music. It will still be carefully edited to remove any last bits of hints that are in the wings for JP Fan Fest in January, but this version of the trailer should hit much closer to the final version, full content unveiling than the NA version did.

Speculation and Wishes Time!

Sage Gameplay Changes

The job I can speak most confidently about at the Savage level is Sage, as it is the job I have played the most in high-end content in FFXIV and I think it has some interesting opportunities to expand.

Firstly, I expect healers in general to get some tweaking coming into Dawntrail. The current playstyle is something that borders on boredom for the highest-end of players outside of progression and Ultimate environments, while even in general play, the best healers can typically ignore GCD heals short of a couple safety casts and then lean on off-global abilities to heal between DPS casts. This is a fine enough playstyle to some (I still actually kind of like the process of optimizing a healer in this model), but it has problems at both extreme ends – learning to heal in FFXIV is counter-intuitive because in all modes of content, the role tends towards learning when not to heal while at the high end, it can be perceived as too easy (or simple, at least) because you just plan your oGCD usage per encounter and hit buttons on schedule between a too-simple, 2-3 button DPS rotation.

What I expect them to change is the challenge, and I still don’t fully know how they’ll go about it. I think if the current direction is to remain, adding either an additional DPS rotation button or something for all the healer jobs akin to White Mage Afflatus Misery or Sage Phlegma would be a start. Part of why I like Sage is that DPS optimization also involves proper usage and holding of Phelgma charges to try and maximize damage under raid buffs, and a part of the challenge of learning White Mage in high-end play is ensuring you keep your lillies turning over so that you get your one Misery per minute every time it’s available. Scholar and Astrologian don’t really have something like that, since they both bring two-minute burst buffs (Chain Stratagem and Divination) and both have weirder side-DPS options like Energy Drain and Lord of Crowns that could use some rework.

For Sage, I want to see an ability at some point in the 90-100 curve that allows Kardia more usage. My sort-of ideal would be the level 100 capstone being a cooldown that applies Kardion to the full party for a limited duration in special form so that it stacks with your existing Kardion buff and allows you to full-heal the raid through DPS solely, while piling two Kardia heals per damage cast onto your current focused Kardion target. It’d be cool to have that and for it to work with Soteria so that you could have a spot oGCD that allows you to literally heal the whole party through DPS and creates a nice comfy pocket where even a big multihit raidwide like Styx from P11S or Harrowing Hell from P10S could be DPSed through with relative ease and a good mit plan.

Buff Meta

The two-minute meta is a hot topic that a lot of players point at as a bad sign or omen that the game is too homogenized now, that every job plays the same around even and odd minutes. There’s some point to that – burst piles into the even minutes, dying near an even minute in a fight feels really really awful, and it does place a greater emphasis on the team play of raiding – if someone misses or delays their two minute window badly, it can cause a cascade that makes DPS checks harder to meet and makes things feel bad. To that end, I sort of get it – I get frustrated that my main static’s Astrologian almost always delays Divination to a point where it almost misses the other raid buffs and I’m sitting on Phlegma charges until I hear the stars go off, and DPS tuning in Endwalker has been pretty tight for the earlier tiers and both Ultimates because the fitting of burst windows into even minutes means that you can expect and push DPS checks relatively higher for it. It has also been a design challenge that the team has largely met by making every even minute window in a fight annoying with mechanical resolution, forced downtime, and other general annoyances that push you to hold or delay burst around mechanics.

However, having said all that, I think my opinion might be controversial to some players here – I think the two-minute meta is an interesting tweak that strengthens and solidifies teamplay within FFXIV’s raid environment. Coming from WoW, people rarely sync up cooldowns or even care about a burst window because cooldowns are all over the place, so short of optimizing around Bloodlust or certain encounter mechanics where you might want to hold a burst cooldown for later, everyone just kind of sends their own cooldowns when they can and it’s a part of individual optimization. In FFXIV, raid gameplay is predominantly about teamplay – meeting body checks, performing intricate puzzle mechanics as a group, and I think that the two-minute meta is a good extension of that which brings rotational gameplay into focus as a thing you also need to manage as a team and play to a high level. Does it add a little bit of a feeling of homogeneity to the gameplay? Perhaps – but I think there’s value in that if the jobs otherwise play uniquely, and I think that short of a couple of tank jobs and the healer role in general, DPS have good rotational variance that makes each a unique experience such that having a common buff and burst window isn’t really a bad thing.

Given that, I expect there to be some vague overtures to tuning around this a bit better, but I don’t think I expect them to pivot away in the course of one expansion.

Item Squish

Tanks right now have nearly 130,000 hit points, and we squished in Shadowbringers when tanks just barely crossed 200,000.

Is an item squish, strictly-speaking, necessary? I don’t know. In WoW, the first squish came around the point where a lot of players had over one million health and where DPS figures were measured in the hundreds of thousands. The second WoW squish hit when I, a not-peak player, had a tank main with 12 million health. Item squishes boil down to a couple of basic questions – how large of a number is readable to a player with ease and how large of numbers can the game engine handle before problems emerge? The first of those points is subjective and depends on the players, while the second is objective and based on how the engine is built. I don’t have meaningful speculation about the engine of FFXIV (it’s old and has large technical debt from FFXIV v1.0 that represents quite often as jank in the current game), but the first point I can speculate on.

To me, personally, I think things are fine as they are and a squish isn’t necessary. Sure, it’s possible now to critical strike for over 100,000 damage, and that will likely grow to over 200,000 in Dawntrail sans a squish, but that isn’t a bad thing. FFXIV remains pretty easily readable because it makes stylistic choices that pace out damage events to be simpler compared to WoW, where combat text can turn into soup real fast. At the same time, FFXIV’s gear scaling is also relatively lower than WoW’s, so it doesn’t suffer the exponential inflation that WoW does. While we don’t know the full specifics of how item level scaling works in FFXIV, DPS totals have climbed about 50-60% from level 90 at the start of Endwalker gear to now in BiS, and that is a gain that crossed 100 item levels of growth, from artifact and baseline level 90 dungeon sets at 560 to full current BiS at 660. Health totals have, similarly, only increased by about the same margin, so they’re still pretty easily readable and straightforward. WoW, meanwhile, sees health and damage often double or even triple in the span of a single expansion’s worth of item growth, so frequent squishing there makes much more sense.

Now, at the same time, I do think more will need to be done with itemization in the long term, involving either a second squish or a retuning of the original squish. Like WoW, the FFXIV team’s first approach was to squish old-endgame power creep by flattening the curve, which results in a weird item level distribution where the actual raw value of an item level of power changes over the course of leveling due to the value of that item level being flattened out before it is allowed to pick back up at the current endgame. I’d like to see them smooth the curve by retuning the early levels of gear and adjusting things into a more gentle climb, rather than a steep jump followed by a plateau sloping gently upwards before a final big jump of value. In WoW, this resulted in the second squish where item level was fixed to a 1% increase in item power, which means that it remains both relatively flat but also climbs since a 1% increase in value itself increases in value the higher up the curve you are. I don’t know that the same solution would work as well in FFXIV, but I think there isn’t a great explanation within the game for why item level climbs so much in value as you level, even as the natural structure of the game’s MSQ and first-time leveling systems puts you on a relatively clear path through each expansion of content. But for readability? I don’t think FFXIV is anywhere near unreadable yet, nor was it in Shadowbringers for that matter, which leads me to believe that the stat squish is more about backend handling of numbers in their client and/or server code, and if that remains the constraint, then we might very well be due for another squish already.

Client Technology Updates

We know a graphics update is coming in Dawntrail, it’s already been promoted and shown. What is less detailed is how these updates are being handled in terms of API support or backend code. FFXIV has been running on DX11 for an eternity now, and while DX11 is a fine-enough API for games, it has been long outpaced on new technologies by DirectX 12, DX12 Ultimate, and Vulkan. These newer APIs support a lot of new technologies that can help a game look better (raytracing, advanced shader techniques) but also help performance drastically as well (variable rate shading, low-level code for reduced overhead) and so I would not be surprised to hear that a part of the engine revamp includes support for a more-modern API. Vulkan is cross-platform and would be a likely good candidate, although since Square Enix makes the PC version and then outsources the Mac port, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them go with DX12 Ultimate and leave the choice of another option to their Mac partner. This one I don’t think would even merit a stage unveil, so I guess I’m just in the weeds wishing for stuff out loud, but hey.

Female Hrothgar

They were suspiciously quiet about femhroths at NA Fan Fest, but we know they’re the last new “race” on the plate for the time being. I think we’ll actually see these because the animation skeleton for them was added to the game in the 6.5 patch files (with no models yet tied to it but hey) and it seems likely that the mystery NPC with Erenville closing out 6.5 MSQ was a femhroth, given that the model that character was given in-game is just legs and the proportions of said legs do not match any existing race in the game – so making the model just legs prevents the dataminers from spoiling the surprise while still implementing the model in that limited fashion. Either way, we should see the top half of this new character come January, so if they don’t announce and showcase femhroth in EU, I fully expect a big unveil at JP Fan Fest!

Hidden Zones

I suspect that, similar to Endwalker, there will be two hidden zones in Dawntrail. Why? Well, I think that the Golden City, as our main objective, feels fairly obviously set up as our end of leveling, MSQ conclusion area, but I suspect that one other hidden spot will crop up and it will have something to do with either the dragons or will be Corvos. Corvos has been setup so much and namedropped a ton in Endwalker, and having just replayed the Shadowbringers MSQ, you start to see the trend of how frequently something is mentioned tying in with how likely it is to appear in the next body of content. But why hide the Golden City? Well, besides the mystery of will we/won’t we find it, I will make a prediction that seems very in-line with FFXIV now – the Golden City is going to be an Allagan structure of some sort.

Dawntrail’s story hints so far, on the surface, seem to hint at something totally left-field for FFXIV, but it is not the game’s style to just pivot wholly away from existing plots and development. With the Ascians/Ancients resolved and explored quite thoroughly and the theme of conflict, friendly or otherwise, between the Scions, Allagan ruins feel like the perfect plot point. We can expand the story of the Allagan Empire, focus far more in on it, which makes an excellent transition to Meracydia in 8.0 (perhaps?) where the Allagans were very much present, and within the Scion plot, we have one Scion with the Royal Allagan Eye in G’raha Tia which would setup an excellent plot point around G’raha and what side he’d pick, especially if it gives him more depth as a character. G’raha is, quite literally, a simp for the player character in lore, and giving a conflict where he might not pick our side but instead could be swayed would be an interesting moment of character growth that would fit in so well with the idea of a broader Scion conflict/schism/disagreement, or even a friendly conflict at that. And if Corvos is our fifth of six zone destinations, that allows time for us to setup a G’raha story in his homeland, so there could be a substantial chunk of MSQ given over to telling that tale and setting the scene for the Golden City to be of Allagan creation.

Sure, I’ve probably made some people irritated with the idea of more Allagan stuff and more G’raha Tia, but I think that Allagan stuff is only annoying because we haven’t explored it enough – and I think the Ascian arc proves that once context and life are infused into the story, you can get a lot more out of it. As for G’raha, I think people (rightly in many cases) dislike his character because he’s a very one-note character who spouts generic hero cliches while being absolutely enamored with your character, and I think that exploring a new side of his history in a way that drives a wedge and creates new characterization would be pretty damn cool, especially since I think it would serve the rough idea of the plot to come very well.

Story Hints

I think the cinematic expanding should give us some hints at the story to come, as more characters should be present in the trailer and the interactions shown from that should help to better define the story beats to come. There are some obvious teases in the existing trailer (what job is the WoL? Who is the figure atop the building that Urianger is looking up at? Why can we hear but not see Alphinaud?) and I’m sure that the addition of another minute or so of content will answer some questions but prompt more. Assuming we get Krile as Green Mage, that alone is a big addition (with hopefully some gameplay hints akin to how Alphinaud as Sage in the EW trailer uses Toxikon and heals his sister), but I would also guess some new characters and story hooks will be dropped into the trailer as well.

A Pirates of the Caribbean Shirt

But for the ride, not the movie, because I had a shirt from the ride as a kid and it would be funny for Yoshi P to be stuck wearing one to smash us over the head with how Corsair is gonna be the new melee DPS.