Tonight marks a big benchmark on the road to the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Dawntrail. The last event of the 2023-2024 Fan Fest cycle is in the Tokyo Dome (just days after Wrestle Kingdom, my fandoms crossing!) and it is the most substantial Fan Fest we will receive.

So let’s talk about what is safe to expect, what I think is likely, my dark horse bets, and then discuss the rest of the journey from now until June/July when the expansion goes live for all.

The Sure Bets

Right off the bat, we will get the entire, fully-complete cinematic. For NA and EU Fan Fest, we got truncated versions designed to carefully conceal key details, like how NA Fan Fest showed the stand-in Warrior of Light as the Viper job without showing the weapon or detailed attacks, which was then present for EU Fan Fest. We should see the new caster job in some form in this final cinematic, as well as some indications of additional content and potential easter eggs for plot to come in the expansion. We should also get the final version of the expansion theme song, which may or may not change slightly. In the past, this was less of a thing, but the early trailers for Endwalker used placeholder music with mumblecore lyrics from Soken before we got the final version sung by the Architects, and I expect that with the game’s increased popularity that bringing in more mainstream artists for work like that is going to be a thing again.

We should see the caster job unveiled, on the note of other unveilings that are assured. There’s no tradition for holding that unveiling for later and given the cinematic progression, it is inevitable. Who the featured NPC will be in that role is an interesting question – my bet is still on Krile, but every possibility exists that we see someone else, like the NPC who the disembodied legs of 6.5’s story belong to! We may not get a ton of gameplay details at Fan Fest, but we should get a similar preview video to what EU Fan Fest had for the Viper job, designed to show the cool visual effects and overall kit without too much detail.

We should have some revelation about the normal and Savage raid series for 8-player raiding in Dawntrail. For the past two expansions, we’ve gotten very threadbare details, usually just some art of a single NPC and a series name, with Gaia being shown for Eden alongside some very basic landscape concept art and the half-mask Lahabrea being shown for Pandaemonium in Endwalker. Just about anything is on the table for now, since Pandaemonium broke with the tradition of each raid series being named for and based on a summon from the history of Final Fantasy games. If we kind of assume a loose theme of summons and/or dungeons, the possibility space opens a lot, but my hope and guess is still kind of sitting with Sin from Final Fantasy X. FFX’s cultural theme and visual kit both have strong crossover with a couple of the zones in Dawntrail that we’ve been shown, and there is already a tribal quest coming in Dawntrail based on some characters from FFX, so there is a pretty strong point in that direction as-is. Sin is both a summon (in a way) and a dungeon (the final story one in FFX, in fact) so the crossover of themes seems to be pretty fitting, all told.

We should get some additional zone previews with video, I suspect the remaining two zones that were announced but not shown on video to get that treatment here. I am sticking to the Endwalker-inspired two secret zones theory, so I think that two more zone previews are all I would expect.

A dungeon preview video is a likely appearance, but don’t expect much detail. It will likely be the zone-in flythrough that you get when you first enter a dungeon, but played in sequence with a random collection of music from the dungeons playing in the background as the clips unfurl. We might see a couple preview trash packs or first bosses, but I wouldn’t expect anything more than that.

The Speculative, But Quite Possible

Female Hrothgar have, quite curiously, been left out of the early previews, being saved instead for this late juncture, and while I suspect we will see them at the keynote tomorrow (and potentially in the cutscene as well), it’s not altogether guaranteed. They could be held for a future point and there is every possibility, even minor, that they get looped in to the tail end of the expansion hype cycle as a motivation for last minute sales and preorders. I really expect them to be seen, but it isn’t a guarantee by any measure. I’ll undercut my own trepidation on this one by pointing out that they’ve never done that with a race before in a traditional Fan Fest cycle and since the mystery legs NPC is likely to be a femhroth, it wouldn’t make any real sense to hold out given that we should see this NPC by the end of the month in game for ourselves.

I was wrong in my EU predictions to expect the Collector’s Edition and preorder details, but when looking back at the last in-person Fan Fest cycle for Shadowbringers, it was unveiled in EU since that marked 6 months prior to release. JP Fan Fest, this time out, is on the same marker of time (in all likelihood), so I think it’s pretty certain here. Could be wrong (again, dang) but I don’t think it’ll wait much longer unless the game’s release window is being pushed to later in the summer than expected.

While I think preorders are likely to start and accompany the CE announcement, there’s every possibility they aren’t ready to put a final release date on it. After what happened with Endwalker, this is something I’m curious about, because the Endwalker delay clearly bothered the team (perhaps more than any actual fans of the game) and I think they’d be loathe to potentially repeat that situation. That’s the only thing that makes me doubt it, because otherwise I’d be very confident we’ll see both preorders and a release date as some of the keynote reveals.

Speaking of releases, I expect the only major patch 6.55 news we’ll get is a release date. There’s no live letter on the schedule for the event and for a minor patch that is mostly story content, I expect we’ll just coast into it and then patch note day will be the big news drop on that content. I personally suspect that 6.55 is gonna be one of the larger minor patches in the game’s history, given that the lift towards the Dawntrail story is all happening in this one patch, and that’s also part of why I expect it to remain a closely-guarded secret, as it should set the scene for the actual story to come!

Most story details will likely remain tight-lipped, but the last Fan Fest event in a cycle is where we generally get some teases, so I expect that we could see some hints at the direction to come. In particular, I think the Scion conflict story is going to be a major point of interest that we’ll be given some context to, mostly in 6.55 but I expect some light hints at Fan Fest as well, since it’s been a major point of interest for the story to come (and I still think a genuinely good, long-term plot thread that could be pulled upon to make things interesting). Some hints towards the hidden zones would be reasonable to expect as well, much in the same way we got the Elpis concept art in the last Endwalker virtual Fan Fest.

The Long Shots

The Dawntrail benchmark is going to be the most necessary benchmark for long term players given the actual graphics update happening, but I don’t expect we’ll see it until a few months from now, likely around 2 months out from launch. I want it with Fan Fest so I can test my current PC and plan ahead if upgrades are needed, but I don’t believe we’ll get it.

As much as I want them, I don’t think we’ll get any real gameplay changes conversation. The game’s balance is critical to the success of new content but I expect that details will be held until much later, short of the briefest mention of potential reworks to jobs. In that same vein, I do not expect the job action trailer with Fan Fest either – both because it would be odd to be out that soon but also because I think changes are going to be played closer to the vest while the team wraps up the core development work on content.

I really want raid previews with video, maybe a boss or two, both for the 8-player and Alliance Raid series, but I know, with fair certainty, we won’t get that level of depth.

What Comes Next

So for those who’ve never had a proper Fan Fest cycle during their time in the FFXIV community, the big question is to ask what comes after the Fan Fest cycle, in that (likely) six-month gap where we are waiting on content to drop?

There are a few major milestones we’ll cross as we wind towards the launch date. The next major event will be the Media Tour, where content creators and gaming press are invited to an in-person demo of the expansion content, including job changes and some actual gameplay. It’s a tightly-controlled vertical slice of gameplay, so the story is kept tightly wrapped, but expect to see your favorite and least-favorite FFXIV YouTubers and streamers dropping actual gameplay footage of real zones and likely the first dungeon. Some analytical types in the invite list will likely run through ability lists and try to find and identify job changes and gameplay-focused tweaks, but don’t expect any of it to be a full picture, as the Media Tour build doesn’t progress to the new level cap and so the kit will be incomplete and not a look at how we’ll play at level 100.

Alongside the Media Tour, there are generally two major content drops for everyone else that you can view and interact with at your leisure. The first is the Job Action Trailer, which showcases every job playing for a couple of minutes with only a job gauge on-screen. This means you won’t see ability names or have a full picture of the rotation and interaction of abilities, but you can get an idea of the animations and general concepts they’re playing with. For the new jobs, this footage is longer and will be our first real look at an actual gameplay loop with the job gauge available to scrutinize.

The second, and far more interesting content, is the downloadable PC benchmark. The intended point of the benchmark is to run it on your computer and confirm you meet system requirements by seeing a multi-minute, self-playing loop of gameplay in Dawntrail zones with Dawntrail graphics, equipment, spell effects, and all. In the past, the benchmark has largely been perfunctory, as if you’ve been playing ARR, your system likely supported every expansion since then even if compromises may have been required with minor increases in graphical fidelity that have come in the interim. For Dawntrail, this is going to be a fully-useful function to every PC player, as the engine update could actually require some upgrades to hardware or settings tweaks to optimize performance. You can import your FFXIV client settings or use defaults, and it spits out a score (which is only broadly useful comparing to other players with identical settings) that attempts to gauge how well your system will handle the game. The real reason most people play with the benchmark when it comes out? It often has hints of things to come – you can see changing NPC models, new mounts, usually a new job’s Limit Break 3 animation, and it offers a character creator for the benchmark that allows you to make a character of the new race being added, so it ends up being a fun theorycrafting exercise to watch and try to find out what’s going on. Also also, this benchmark will be the first local files we can download of the expansion, which means that datamining some limited hints about story hooks to come can happen (in the Endwalker benchmark, the entire Garlemald zone was present, including state flags for the Garlean citizen graves from the early MSQ questing and for the splattered Garlean flag from much later in the zone story).

After Media Tour, we are basically done until near the launch, at which point our last major checkpoints prior to launch come into focus. The later of the two, but more exciting in some ways, is the full patch notes, which will codify the gameplay changes we can expect to see in Dawntrail’s launch window. These come out on the day of or day before the 24-hour pre-expansion maintenance, which takes place on the Thursday before early-access Friday.

The other item, which is usually up first chronologically and more interesting for story hooks, is the launch trailer. The pre-rendered CG cutscene is a hype piece that attempts to convey an overall tone and idea about the expansion, but the launch trailer is specific content from gameplay of the expansion with a heavy story focus and a lot of hooks that tease and even spoil things to come. In Shadowbringers, the launch trailer was the first time we heard Emet-Selch wax poetic about the true nature of Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the initial cave visual of what we would come to know as Amaurot (and the straight-up dungeon gameplay from the dungeon of the same name), the briefest look at the body horror of the Tesleen transformation, and our introduction to the characters we’d come to know as part of that experience. The Endwalker one was even more brazen, giving us our first listen of the full Close in the Distance song that would later shake everyone’s emotions at the end of the MSQ, the first time Meteion was heard (with no visual or other spoiler than simply the voice), Emet-Selch’s narration (which was itself a suitably interesting surprise), some actual peeks at spoilers with hindsight (Hermes appears in boss form in the trailer, Ultima Thule and the Dead Ends dungeon are both quite clear and distinct, and lines about the plan to leave the planet behind are woven into the montage), and of course, a true-false death flag with Alphinaud’s speech in the closing minute, which takes advantage of how that last minute was used in the Shadowbringers launch trailer to deliver very true and story-relevant info about Hydaelyn and Zodiark. The trailer tends to be around 4-6 minutes and is entirely gameplay footage with only brief title cards and text transitions used in between clips.

Once those last bits of info are in the wild, we simply wait for early access to begin.

After this weekend, expect things to get quiet for a while. Short of the finale patch of Endwalker in 6.55 later this month, we’ll be hanging out waiting for a drip feed of new information to come as those final milestones on the journey to launch are met. It’s pretty exciting, and the contrast of this with WoW is fascinating to me, because you can gorge yourself on pre-release WoW content in a lot of ways, but even as the datamining scene around XIV has grown, the marketing approach to keeping everything so tightly wrapped for FFXIV means that launch day is like unleashing a ravenous fiend onto the new content for all types of players, haha. Whatever the results of tonight’s Fan Fest are, we should have our most complete look at Dawntrail to date after the keynote is over and thus will begin the real, ramping part of the hype cycle. So…brace yourselves, I suppose.