So FFXIV’s EU Fan Fest was held last weekend, introducing a fair bit of new content for Dawntrail and setting up the hype cycle that will continue with JP Fan Fest in January, media tour in the spring of 2024, and finally the release of the expansion next summer.

My predictions were…well, shattered is probably the right word, and so I’m here today to admit as much out loud and then take a look at the things we did see at EU Fan Fest and how they’ll maybe shape JP Fan Fest and the expansion to come!

Viper – The New Melee DPS Job

Corsair, it turns out, was a mix of wishful thinking and masterful bait on the part of the development team. Instead, we get a fully FFXIV-original job in Viper, a dexterity melee (likely Scouting left side/Aiming right side like Ninja) job that uses dual-wielded swords, which can be combined hilt-to-hilt to make a longer twinblade. Viper is a mix of the aesthetics we mostly expected for Corsair (long blades, weathered leather coat and armor) and some unique stuff (no pistol or pirate-adjacent stuff, hooded armor, the whole twinblade thing).

Viper is confirmed to start in Ul’dah at level 80, requiring only that you have at least one level 80 job and the Dawntrail expansion purchased on your account. The small gameplay preview hints at a combat flow that will likely be similar to Reaper in a way – built around the two minute metagame, it will likely have an opener ability to quickly progress to the twinblade glowy state for a sick combo, fill the odd minutes with dual-wield rotational gameplay, and then burst on even minutes with the twinblade form. I’m sort of guessing here, but unless they drastically change the combat flow of the game as a whole, this seems the most likely. I’m interested to see how the twinblade phase is entered (a job gauge feels very likely here) and also to see if they are a selfish DPS or if they, similar to Reaper, can enter twinblade phase more often than every two minutes based on resource generation and their contribution to an even-minute burst is some kind of raid buff or self-buff that feeds into a twinblade phase.

With that done, we are in uncharted territory as we have few hints at the magical DPS job and no new shirt teaser to guide us, unless the Las Vegas TMNT shirt was the hint for caster DPS and they just went out of order to be interesting and unpredictable. Green Mage still feels pretty likely, but there’s chaos afoot now!

A New Limited Job?

While it won’t be out at Dawntrail launch, at some point in 7.x, we will receive the game’s second Limited Job. For those out of the loop, a limited job is a job that has weird and unique design that means it cannot be used in standard group content through queues, so you have to form parties with other players of that job and then enter content with a full premade group. This lets them do wacky things with balance – Blue Mage is the existing limited job, and it has full role flexibility through Aetherial Mimickry as well as some powerful abilities with goofy downsides like being able to do big attacks that kill the player as well like Final Sting or Self Destruct.

During Shadowbringers, particularly in Bozja, the speculation was high that they’d add Beastmaster given the popularity of that job in FFXI as well as the actual hints to it in that content, and while it seems pretty likely, Puppetmaster has been high on speculation lists as well. There’s also the chance they completely swerve everyone and go in a very different direction, so it is hard to guess just yet, and the mid-Dawntrail release of this job means we might see some story content to come that will set this up for us ahead of time!

New Zones

We have now seen 4 total zones, two via video, and the game is looking very good in these new places. The new aetheryte art for Dawntrail looks fantastic and the graphical updates, as expected, really shine in the new zones. Shaaloani, a sort of wild-west styled mining area that was shown as one of the new overworld zones, had some stunning vistas and is a fascinating point of comparison for what the new engine updates can do for a desert area when compared to zones from Thanalan in ARR – the upgrade is apparent.

One thing I did predict fairly accurately is that we have only seen 4 zones to date and two via video, which raises my suspicions that like Endwalker, Dawntrail will be hiding two secret zones that will be major plot movers.

Graphics Update, Details Big and Small

In Las Vegas, we got to see the broad strokes of the graphics update, with stuff like early character art in the new updates, the new auto-foliage and how that will be an instant upgrade everywhere, and some of the details of materials and shaders for things like metal being more properly represented with better specular lighting and reflections. In London, we have now seen some far more detailed bits of work – many of which are smaller details than you might have expected, but it is actually pretty cool to see the level to which they are chasing this update. To my eye, FFXIV is already visually a very good-looking game, but a lot of where it does start to look weird and even bad at times is in those small details – the normal and bump map quality on gear showing jagged and strange lines, the fuzzy pixelation of hair on characters, the environmental textures often feeling too shiny and shimmery, and the updates they shared target all of these actually, which I was quite happy with!

A lot of care is being put into enhancing details through new rendering paradigms, which led to a big surprise for the hobbyist 3D artist I am – FFXIV does not currently use physical-based rendering (PBR), which uses materials (a composite of a texture image alongside a normal map, shaders, and properties like reflection and specularity) that are given properties intended to mimic real life objects in terms of how they interact with the scene and especially with lighting. PBR rendering is most commonly used for photorealism, but it can be used stylistically as well – the very same properties that define how something looks in the real world can be exploited and adjusted to create neat effects and interesting tweaks. This change alone is exciting to me because it means the environmental materials should gain a lot of visual splendor, mostly by shifting away from being shimmery and shiny textures and towards more properly managing how the environment around the materials interacts with them. Stone should look like stone, dirt should look like dirt, and these small details should go a long way towards making the game more visually appealing when these materials are seen close-up.

A lot of what the team showed was these very small details, along with some updates from what we saw in Vegas, like the de-shinying of Au’ra horns and scales and updated normal maps for Lalafel faces that bring them to a better, if only slightly, level of detail. Taken in-aggregate with the changes we’ve seen so far, there are a lot of tweaks to the gamne’s visual appearance (the development panel estimated over 100 individual changes) and these add up to a fairly substantial shift in quality. It still looks like FFXIV, but the fidelity is definitely higher.

Story Hints

The story details remain vague as ever and mostly the same as we had heard previously in Las Vegas. There’s going to be a fight for succession and the Scions are going to end up on opposite sides of that conflict, although we know precious little about how that happens or why. The rough alignment of sides seems to put the Leveilleur twins, Erenville, and possibly Krile on our side with the rest of the Scions, perhaps, making up the other, although we don’t exactly know for sure here.

I’m going to end this post with speculation, but while some people are opposed to a Scion-centered storyline, I think it will work given some other info and inferences we can get from the details we’ve now seen.

Alliance Raid is Final Fantasy XI?

Our Alliance Raid series for Dawntrail is confirmed to be Echoes of Vana’diel, a series crossover with Final Fantasy XI to help commemorate that game’s 20th anniversary. FFXI is an interesting case for the FFXIV fandom, as I know 3 camps of people in the FFXIV base as it concerns XI – they played XI and loved it and that’s why they’re playing XIV (brand loyalty mostly because of course the two games now are quite different), people who played and disliked XI and like XIV for all the ways it isn’t XI, and people who’ve never played XI and enjoy XIV.

Ultimately, all that preamble was meaningless from me, because a raid series in XIV is going to be XIV-style and with mechanics and gameplay that largely suits the XIV audience. I fully expect the XI tribute to be symbolic and very surface-level on gameplay, much like how the NieR Alliance Raid series was ultimately a pretty standard FFXIV Alliance Raid with at least a moment per raid where you had to dodge the signature wine-red energy projectiles in a pseudo bullet-hell. What that moment would be for FFXI, I don’t know, because I’ve never played XI and my exposure to it has been watching a friend stream private server gameplay, so all that remains to be seen.

Waiting For JP Fan Fest

So now, all that is left before the actual launch is two major events and one in-game release – JP Fan Fest, which is early January 2024, patch 6.55 which will be later that month, and then the Dawntrail Media Tour. Sprinkled in throughout are some staples of the FFXIV expansion hype cycle, like a new benchmark (which will actually be worth running to see how the new engine enhancements change performance for you), a job action trailer showing the abilities to come, the final cinematic trailer for the expansion, and my favorite, the launch trailer, which has more in-game footage and music and usually at least one juicy story tidbit/flase death flag for the content to come!

If all you wanted is my take on EU Fan Fest’s unveils, I can say this – I’m excited overall. There’s still not a lot of meat on the bones of the hype beast yet, but what is there is interesting and Viper’s gameplay visuals at least have me excited enough. I’ve been in a pretty big streak of FFXIV gameplay lately and so new content is always going to be exciting, especially since the FFXIV team does a good job of sticking to their design paradigm without huge, cataclysmic shifts.

But if you want my story speculation, let’s go a little deeper. Spoilers for Endwalker, Shadowbringers, and some general speculation which may or may not be correct is to follow!

My Crackpot Theory of the Dawntrail Story

In my EU Fan Fest preview post, one of the things I pointed out, that I felt was crucial to say, is that for as different and left-field as Dawntrail’s story seems to be, I think it is very out of character of the FFXIV narrative team to create a new story that strays so far from established beats and setups. Shadowbringers was a departure in setting, sure – but it was very much in-line with the story being told to that point, about the Ascians, the Ancient world, the nature of the Garlean Empire, and how these things interrelate and are leveraged as parts of creating calamities and causing rejoining. For as much as Shadowbringers is about the First, it is more about the Ancients, about imbuing the Ascians with meaning and purpose and taking them from their early, moustache-twirling comedy villian nature to serious, understood villians. Crucially, they are still villians – we do not find the Ascian’s desire to be worth entertaining – but we find common ground and understanding of how they got to be that way and we can better reconcile their place in the world alongside our own as we then spend Shadowbringers through Endwalker dismantling what remians of their order and finding the peace we needed – in the process discovering that we ourselves are a sundered Ancient soul and also coming to terms with that.

I bring this up because I think that ARR introduced two major factions that need that treatment – the Ascians are first, obviously, but the second is the Allagan Empire. The Allagans are sort of the scapegoat of the fusion elements of sci-fi futurism into the setting of FFXIV – technologically advanced for their time and beyond, ruined by their overambition, portrayed very one-dimensionally within the story to date. In Endwalker, we get our first real glimpses at the Allagan Empire through the sundered Fandaniel, who was Amon of the Allagans in the time of Allagan ascendance. In so many ways, the parallels to the Ascian story are made more clear through Fandaniel/Amon/Hermes, who gives us a peek into what motivated the Allgans and particularly Emperor Xande. We also have been hinting for two expansions now at Allag stuff through Emet Selch, whose less-touched on bombshell is that he was involved with shaping the Allagan Empire as well. Couple all of this with the increased role of G’raha Tia and the Crystal Tower, and there is an awful lot of Allagan story on the table waiting to be connected…

And I think, in truth, that what Dawntrail will be by the end of the base MSQ is a story about the Allagans. “Allag did it” is a sort of slam of the writing and the way that the Allagans are so often just handwaved into plots as explanations for why something farfetched and weird happened, and to me, that is part of why I think it should be about Allag – because, like the Ascians, I think that you could explore the space and add more depth to them, give that ancient empire a motivation and meaning that explains and contextualizes why they were the way they were. As with the Ancients, this detail could go a long way towards making the game’s overarching story interesting and be useful in removing the easy dunks on the game’s storytelling that do exist.

Now, however, there also needs to be a practical aspect to it, which is that I cannot just think that Allag is the story of Dawntrail without some evidence, and well – this Fan Fest event gave me some ammo for this argument. Not a lot, mind you, but I think I can reasonably connect the dots here without seeming too much like I have a corkboard and yarn.

Firstly, my theory going into the weekend was that our capstone MSQ zone for Dawntrail would be the Golden City of legend – but that it would be an Allagan ruin or active Allagan facility of some sort. My assumption here is that it generally fits with how such fabled sites are handled in other expansions, like Azys Lla in Heavensward. If a site of some significance is a legend that few have seen, that generally fits the MO of the Allagans and how their various great works are hidden in these ways. For me, that’s a decent point, although it is still very much in the realm of speculation.

With the unveiling of Shaaloani, the “secret” art of the art, and a piece of dungeon concept art, I think I can now say that the idea of Allagan ruins and an Allagan-centric story being part of Dawntrail is pretty likely.

Shaaloani’s unveil at EU Fan Fest came with two components that gave me the thought that Allagan stuff was likely – firstly, the giant “SECRET” text obscuring a big part of the zone art, but then secondly, the mention of ceruleum being present in the zone and being a big part of the focus of the area. While ceruleum is a big part of Garlean magitek and not so much Allagan anything, I would not be surprised if we discover the Allagans also knew of it and used it to their advantage. Likewise, given the common ancestry of Allag and Garlemald tied to Emet Selch, it’s hard to simply ignore the presence of ceruleum or think it a mere conincidence.

Then, the dungeon concept art.

This art, to me, SCREAMS Allagan involvement. The patterns, the technological appearance and sci-fi nature of it, all of that in this one piece of art is to me, a gigantic proclamation of story to come – Allagan, to my mind, story to come. It could just as easily be a ceruleum processing plant, but that aesthetic doesn’t match with anything we’ve seen from the Garleans for handling ceruleum to date and the technological aesthetic of it doesn’t seem to fit the more rugged and naturalistic vibe of the rest of Tural. I could be pretty happy with that, until we saw the unveiling of a fearsome enemy we’ll face – the Eliminator.

This creature, to me, also is a gigantic Allagan flag just blowing in the wind. It doesn’t look like a natural creation, or a deity that the locals might worship, but it does very much look like a construct to me, something made to defend an installation or outpost. All of it, to me, has that Allagan look – technological, mighty, full of strange energy from an advanced, long-fallen empire.

Now, of course, I am just spitballing here, and I could very well be wrong that the aesthetic of these is all super-neatly tied up as “Allagan” but I think it feels pretty straightforward to me as them. The idea of Allagans being on every corner of Etheriys is very much in line with the lore to date, and by introducing a more detailed look at Allag in Dawntrail, we can set the stage for Meracydia to come in, perhaps, 8.0.

However, within Endwalker, we have some additional clues about Allag making an appearance on the main stage soon, which is the number of references to it we get throughout Endwalker. Consistently, we are given new insight into the Allagans through the eyes of Fandaniel as Amon, the identity he most enjoyed and aspired to. Through his presentation, we have an interesting contrast – Emet-Selch, who helped to create ancient Allag but whose allegiance always rested with the Ancients and Ascians, and Fandaniel, whose sundered memories were given to Amon, and Amon still preferred Allag over what the Ascians wanted, upholding the goals and will of Emperor Xande until his death, redeath, and banishment to torture via the spirit of Asahi. The difference in these ideals is a theme that could be explored, relating the Ascian-heavy stories of the last 4 years of FFXIV to the untold story of Allag and creating a new narrative thread that provides us with deeper, foundational understanding of the setting of FFXIV.

I just replayed Shadowbringers on an alt, and one of the things that stood out to me with the knowledge of Endwalker beyond it is how many obvious setups there were, that when things are mentioned, they are brought around and often fairly soon thereafter. It was no coincidence that the story of 5.5 takes us to Azys Lla and deals with the Allagans, directly mentioning anti-tempering research that was shuttered by Amon, because all of that becomes pivotal in Endwalker. Likewise, I don’t think that we’ve seen more Allagan stuff in Endwalker and talked about it more just for the sake of flavor – I think it is pivotal and very likely to be a central thread in the plot of Dawntrail. With that same alt now past Endwalker as well, the number of times we talk about Allagan stuff is clearly hinting at something to come, and it very much fits in the same vein as how we started peeling back the onion of the Ascians. Layer by layer, we add new understanding and concepts to the lore around the Allagans, and it won’t be long now before we end up with the raw truth of the Allagans.

What’s more, I think that the fifth zone will be Corvos/Locus Amoenus. Why? Well, this is definitely more in the realm of pure speculation, but for the sake of story structure, the way I see it is this: we know that Corvos has some form of Allagan population, given that it is where G’raha Tia hails from, and it has overarching story significance both to Garlemald, the nation on the mend that we’ve helped get on their feet in patch 6.4 as well as the Allagans, and like Allag in general, the island was named far, far too often in Endwalker without being seen for it to be coincidental. It’s an island nation we could sail to and it would fit the general theme of the expansion as presented – hell, the Garlean name for it, Locus Amoenus, is Latin for “pleasant place!”

But I guess the next thing I need to contextualize is this – why these two places and what is the narrative throughline that connects these disparate elements into a cohesive whole? Now I can put on my tinfoil, get out my yarn, and really start on speculation!

Okay, so the core story element that binds the MSQ of Dawntrail, as little as we’ve been presented, is the succession battle for the throne of Tural. We understand this in a very limited sense, but the idea seems to be that the Scions, no longer a unified faction in the public eye, will fracture and support opposing sides of the battle for succession. We know that we’ll be on a side with, likely, the Leveilleur twins, Erenville, and maybe Krile, and it seems from the trailer that the other side is likely to be Thancred, Urianger, and Y’shtola, with shaky allusions to the idea that maybe Estinien is with them too. I think these lines are purposefully being left vague, obviously for spoiler purposes, but also to throw an interesting question in there that I think no one is really questioning yet – what side is G’raha Tia on?

To the even minimally-versed in FFXIV lore, questioning where G’raha ends up aligned seems foolish, right? His character, distilled down to the purest and most dismissive essence, is that he is a simp for your player character – he loves you, he wants to be with you and to go on adventures with you to the ends of the universe. However, I find myself thinking that it would add a lot to the storytelling in FFXIV if we took a moment to seriously interrogate that idea. In Endwalker, particularly in the post patch content, we haven’t actually done much with G’raha Tia. We took him with us to investigate the Twelve, but his involvement in the MSQ, our adventures spanning worlds, has been minimal to non-existant. We’ve made promises to take him on our next major adventure, but his involvement has largely been administrative as a member of the Students of Baldesion and not as personal friend to the Warrior of Light, and thus an angle exists where we could question our relationship to G’raha thusly – have we kept our promises, especially the one made at the edge of existence in Ultima Thule? And I think the answer is no – not really in spirit or in letter.

When the stakes are high, this wouldn’t matter that much – surely G’raha, who employed layers of deception in his role as the Crystal Exarch in Shadowbringers, would understand that the mission comes first, but as we’ve moved past the high-stakes, universe-spanning threats and into things where the extra hands would be useful, we’ve left him to sit in Sharlayan, only called upon to come investigate the Twelve or to open the way into Eureka Orthos. Since Dawntrail is explicitly lower-stakes, at least on the surface level we are being allowed to see thus far, it stands to reason that G’raha could, as a way of sending a message, align against us with the other Scions, supporting the opposing side of the succession battle.

Why does that matter, though? Well, if you recall the high-level details of how a lot of Allagan things work, they often use biometric, blood-based security protocols that limit access, not just to Allagan citizens but to those with a specific trait – the Royal Eye of Allag. G’raha Tia has this eye, and it is what allows him to access and control the Crystal Tower, to access the nodes in Azys Lla when we researched primal tempering in 5.4 and 5.5. My suspicion, then, is this – Corvos ends up being the fifth zone because we go there to research, to find what we can to help us gain access to the fabled Golden City, which we would know by that point is Allagan from some prior plot revelation or just being able to see it. Our journey through Corvos also dovetails with the re-establishment of the Garlean nation, and we end up doing some amount of peacekeeping and negotiation there, seeing how our side of the Scion-conflict is likely to have the twins, both of whom were closely involved with the Garleans in Endwalker in helping them rebuild and reform, splitting our focus between the research goal and the political one. As the zone winds down, we get what we need, and find an alternative means to access the Golden City, only to return to Tural and find that the other Scion squad, with G’raha Tia, had easy mode the whole time – the Royal Eye of Allag bestowed to G’raha enabling them to traipse right into the city of fable. Within the Golden City, we conclude the launch MSQ by settling whatever beef is happening between the Scions, discovering the hidden secrets of the city, and setting up for the finale of the succession battle to follow in subsequent patches (assuming we return to the classic FFXIV MSQ patch paradigm, with the Dawntrail launch story having a 7.0 conclusion and then continuining plot threads through to 7.3 before the pivot into the next expansion begins).

And I guess the last question I need to account for is this – why do I like this theory?

I think that it offers a few valuable things to the story of FFXIV and the setting of that story. Firstly, I think the Ascians benefitted greatly from having their tale expanded and motivations brought to light, which adds so much depth and wonderful detail to the story that came before. We know why they did what they did, and crucially, that understanding does not undermine them as villains, keeping them on a dark path while also making that dark path understandable and something we can empathize with, could even envision ourselves in. Allag is so ill-defined in much the same way the Ascians once were now that offering these details would add a lot to the story, in my opinion. I think Allag is one of those few major question marks on the setting that feels sort of ass-pully, like anytime something weird is happening in Etheirys, it was those Allagans – and contextualizing that, giving the full picture, would remove the eye-rolling qualities of that type of storytelling to make it, potentially, very good.

I’ve already stated it a few times here, but I also think that a couple of trends need to be called to attention one more time here too – the story writing in FFXIV rarely just jumps into a new lore beat altogether with no connective tissue. Ishgard mattered because of the political dealings bringing in the Crystal Braves and the ambition of Alphinuad to create a Grand Company of Eorzea. Stormblood picks up on the existing plot threads of Ala Mhigo and Doma both being subjugated, colonized nations under the heel of the Garleans. Shadowbringers only came to pass once we established the Ascians, turned our full attention to their affairs and with the accompanying context of the shards and previous brush with the Warriors of Darkness. Endwalker culminated a great many plot threads, most of which were woven from the beginning, and while it is quite clear there was not really a day 1 master plan, the writing focused in on a conclusion and led to it as well as could be expected, which was still pretty great.

All of that is to say that while Dawntrail is a fresh start in many ways, it would be highly amiss if there is zero connection to what came before. Indeed, we can already assume that the public disbanding of the Scions helps to lead to the fragmented (can I say sundered here lol) Scion contingents competing in some form, and it would be a missed opportunity if all the other threads are not served here. We’ve talked too much about Allag, too much about Corvos, and too much about the links between them recently for us to not revisit in more detail, to see them firsthand and further build the excellent setting on-offer in FFXIV.

In terms of character development, I think the thing that would most help the Scions for a lot of fans is to visit them in detail and understand what motivates them personally. Thancred in Shadowbringers is often not a good person, but we come to understand why he isn’t and see him struggle and grow against that as he becomes a decent father-figure to Ryne. Y’shtola is presented so often in FFXIV as a comically-capable heroine who can tackle anything, but we can see her soften for her time with Runar and develop further as she works around her growing blindness. One of the scenes in Endwalker I came to most appreciate, especially having just re-run it the other day, is how Hydaelyn, finally face-to-face with her loudest champions, presents each of them with an accounting of their personal goals and missions, recounting how they’ve grown against those goals. It put a very human face on these characters that I wish we got more of, and I think that a split Scion team allows us to do that. In particular, I am somewhat aggressive about G’raha Tia’s character here not because I dislike it (he is ABSOLUTELY simp-level 5000, but it is presented decently in the context of the larger story and totally makes sense through that lens) but because I think it would be fascinating in a very good way to explore his story from the other side – to understand what might turn him against the WoL or at least create tension between them. The story of Dawntrail is set up in a way that would easily allow it and I think if my crackpot theory holds true, it’d be a strong way to tell that story and to weave it into the broader narrative of the expansion as a whole.

Lastly, I think that a Meracydia expansion is obviously brewing, but it should be just that – an expansion, all unto itself. Some people are critical of Endwalker from the perspective that Garlemald feels like it could have and should have been a full expansion, and I think I agree with that overall. It fit well-enough with the narrative of Endwalker, but there’s so much room that could have been explored that we didn’t get to see. Meracydia is the next major thing on the horizon that feels big, substantial, and crucial to understanding the world of Etheirys and our current state. We’ve been dealing with dragons on and off for years now, and Endwalker’s post-patch story is about the Thirteenth – specifically, extracting Azdaja of the First Brood from it, and she ended up in that world because of the conflict between the dragons of Meracydia and the Allagans.

So my overarching theory is this – we start exploring Allag now, in much the same way that we get that first look at the Ancients through the tail-end of Shadowbringers, and then we bring that full understanding with us into the next expansion. So with Dawntrail, I suspect we get our first look at the Allagans in detail, exploring elements of their society and ancient sites with ties to them, before we head to Meracydia, allied with the dragons, and look at what we can do to restore the barren wastes of that conflict (assuming it hasn’t already been restored off-camera and surprises wait in store…).

What happens then? Well, I’m not going to speculate out that far. But I think there’s a good foundation here that could be built upon and I think that Dawntrail is sneaking towards doing exactly that!