A few weeks ago, the first of 3 Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest events came and went in sunny Anaheim, California, and with it, confirmation of the future of FFXIV beyond Dawntrail. We get a new expansion in Evercold, releasing in January 2027, and that expansion features a frozen world (that is also conspicuously not very frozen-looking in game!) set on the Fourth reflection of Etheirys. We have confirmation of two new jobs in a physical ranged DPS and a tank, that the level cap will be increasing by 10, and that there will be some fundamental changes to combat. Today, I want to look at my engagement with FFXIV, my trip to Fan Fest adjacency (didn’t have a ticket but went to the event to meet friends and hung out for a bit), and my take on the community and game over the Dawntrail years, a topic which I have not broached much since the expansion initially launched nearly 2 years ago now.

To start with, I need to make a controversial statement that a lot of people will hate but that I will explain…

Dawntrail Has Been FFXIV’s Version of World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands

Oh yeah, spicy.

Okay, but how?

So, as someone who was in the trenches on both, let me first say this – this isn’t necessarily as bad as people will gut reaction it to being. Shadowlands was a controversial expansion that many people disliked and put WoW into a tailspin that took a solid few years and multiple expansions of demonstrated effort to dig out of – but it had some good points. Dungeon design was excellent overall, raid design was a mixed bag although Castle Nathria was one of WoW’s best raids, and the overall world design of the zones was great and captured some interesting visual depth. What got in the way for Shadowlands was story, gameplay design via required tasks to remain up to par for the content you wanted to do, content release cadence being unbearably slow and letting things sit for too long, and Blizzard’s perception as a company and responsive developer during that era. Now, of course, those qualifiers mean the overall package of Shadowlands was weak, because who cares if the dungeons and a raid were great if you had to do 2 hours of Torghast and 3 hours of weekly story and gameplay outside of them to keep your Renown up and get your legendaries rolling while the story is retconning bad things into Warcraft III and shitting all over the legacy characters it brought in? It still stinks.

This is where I think Dawntrail suits in, almost largely in the same ways. Dawntrail’s story has been poorly received, and while patch stories have been better, the launch story feels compromised and rushed due to the unfortunate merging of two complete story ideas that shortchange the Turali story by hastening the finale and the Alexandrian story by rushing the exposition and initial development leading to both sides having underdeveloped characters and world building. Dawntrail on a gameplay basis has been excellent in some ways – the evolutions to encounter design and meaningful difficulty create some much-needed friction in a game that is largely too easy and simple outside of difficult high-level content, but the insistence on a bland formula that dictates how dungeons flow and how gameplay and story progression work continues to be a weakness that weighs down the improved elements of the game’s design. This expansion has also been one where faith in the development team has been tested – there were some bold promises by Yoshi P in the leadup to Dawntrail that largely felt empty in execution, like a Dragoon rework, and while he has waxed philosophical about evolving the approach to the game in Dawntrail, it has largely rung hollow as the game has stuck doggedly to its stale formula to the point that someone I raid with has a spreadsheet that has nearly perfectly predicted every launch date and the rough outline of content in each. All of this while the expansion has also gone on to live a longer life than I think many of us expected – by the launch of Evercold, Dawntrail will have been out for about one month longer than Endwalker, the prior record-holder, was. The game has seen, at least from external tools like the Lucky Bancho census, a player dip in enthusiasm as active player counts were on a steady decline until the latter half of the expansion cycle, yet another similarity with Shadowlands on the other side of the fence.

But what has defined this era for me is the way the FFXIV community, at least the corners I am in, have reacted to Dawntrail, critique of the expansion, and the overall mood of the game since it launched. Firstly, to be quite clear, FFXIV as a community has what I like to call “little brother syndrome” when it comes to WoW. It comes up, unasked, in conversation around FFXIV a lot. People in my alt’s FC talk about WoW in spite of quitting it altogether 5-10 years prior, and many of them, in spite of never playing it ever, have nothing but vitriol for it and blame it for anything and everything bad that happens in FFXIV. Is the game getting DDOs’d to death? Well, it’s probably some WoW players mad about their expansion (did you know according to these brain geniuses that Midnight is actually just as bad as Shadowlands and everyone is quitting the game? I was quite surprised too given that I see over a hundred people in eyeshot in Silvermoon on most nights and even dozens milling about at crackhead hours). It reminds me of the reverse reaction from WoW fans during Shadowlands, where even mentioning FFXIV would raise hackles and make people roll eyes and moan if they were still playing WoW. It’s a lot like the little brother syndrome that a lot of Classic Andys (I fucking hate that term but it is the best encapsulation so here we are) have towards retail WoW, where they hate it and don’t play it but also it’s bad sight unseen and everything wrong with modern gaming.

However, the tricky thing here is that for the retail WoW fans, FFXIV anger was contained to Shadowlands – nowadays, almost no one mentions it within WoW at all, none of my WoW communities have anything to say about it in any direction, and the most it gets mentioned is to speak on mechanical similarities or how WoW might move in encounter design with the reduction of in-game addons. However, in my FFXIV communities, they were simultaneously so welcoming of the “WoW refugees” while also cursing their existence and marking it as the canon event on which the entire game declined (but also don’t say FFXIV declined, don’t you dare fucking say it!). Many of them dismiss critical videos and writing about FFXIV as “if you hate it so much then stop playing” while also uncritically parroting many of the same ideas and critiques without ever reconciling those two contradictory positions. And like, whatever, sure, fine – it’s understandable to a point to have an investment in a hobby and to care deeply about it, and it’s also wise at times to be cautious to filter online feedback for trolls and to be on guard in that way (and there are a lot of bad faith actors trying to ragebait and act in poor taste!) – but also, it’s not like a lot of these critiques are coming from fairweather fans or even fly-ins from Shadowlands era – it’s coming from established and deeply-rooted FFXIV fans and creators, people who are sharing their takes because they are also passionate about the game and want to see it do better, be better. There is a layer of parasociality to it as well – many of my personal experiences with unreasonable and hypocritical “fans” are coming from the same FC Discord that I wrote previously spent an afternoon thinking about how it would be if they were spanked by Yoshi P with his rings and hand jewelry on, so I mean…this is hardly the first time they’ve been exemplars of the “GCBTW” meme and I strongly doubt it will be the last.

Through those lenses, however, I can see the similarities to Shadowlands in Dawntrail in terms of community reception and thought patterns, and I don’t like it. It makes the community more hostile and less worth engaging with, and while these are discussions I would enjoy having in my circles if I felt like they were prepared to handle them maturely and thoughtfully, a lot of what I see mimics the WoW fans I knew in Shadowlands, who are only deepening their entrenchment and defense of the game in response to rightful and valid critiques being levied at it. And to be fair, as I said up top, I think Dawntrail has a lot of good elements and still actively play a few times a week! I just think that people love to fake nuance while actually just holding defense of the game, because I think we all know that unapologetically defending the thing is a bad look. Also, I think it deserves to be said that while I think the parasocial relationship people form with Yoshi P and the development staff is not a good thing, it is also obvious that while I make the Shadowlands comparison that CS3 at Square Enix isn’t anywhere near the hole that Blizzard was outed as being in during Shadowlands – so at least they’ve got that going for them. Either way, it’s not an optimal place for any live service game’s community to be – you never wanna be Shadowlands, so how does Square Enix dig up out of that hole?

Evercold’s Fundamental Formula Shifts

The biggest news out of NA Fanfest (which was similarly light on details as all NA Fanfests have been) is that the game is changing its formula in a ton of different ways, nearly all of which sound promising.

First up is a move away from random roulettes as the main vector of character improvement, moving towards a weekly activity list that rotates tasks in and out. It seems like there will be a fixed track on these, with the option to complete a prior week’s list in full before moving on to the current week activities. This sounds great, because while the Roulette system has some major wins (particularly for populating content for new players), it also means that vets get burned out on frequently being shuffled into old content they’ve done dozens or even hundreds of times (I don’t think there has been a single calendar year since 2015 where I have not done Sastasha in a leveling roulette at least 5 times lol). With the effort put into rolling out Duty Support for activities new players need to do (sans most trials), I think there’s a safe way forward to reduce the amount of time players spend in old-to-them content without it negatively impacting the new player experience. This is something I stand firmly in support of – I think giving players a more flexible framework to do the things they generally want to do to keep current and progressing their characters is the right approach, and the flexible, activity-based mechanism allows players some amount of agency instead of just dealing with old content for the sake of efficiency.

Another major shift is in the works with how FFXIV handles alt jobs on the same character. Sure, right now, your one character can be all jobs and play them all, but in terms of gearing, you are limited by a per-character top tomestone and weekly Savage raid drop restriction, which means that if you want to actually play two distinctly different jobs in different roles (or even in the same role with different stat priorities), then the correct way is with a second character or to play it with poorly-matched gear that is not at parity with the level of content you are doing. In Evercold, the promise is that you’ll match item level across the board, so your highest job can carry the torch to empower all other jobs you have at max level…and that sounds really great! There are complications as yet unexplained though, like how Materia melds and substats will be handled, and how much of a winner this idea will actually be depends heavily on the answers to those questions.

With this, Square Enix is also joining the “season” gang and referring to each two-patch cycle as a Season. What this means in actual practice is very blurry, because the truth is that this is already how the game functions at a base level with Tomestones, gear progression, and content structure. If this means that players coming in later have an easier time spinning up to current content, that could be neat – but there’s just no detail to go off of other than the brief mention that this was happening.

All told, these changes are promising, but much remains to be seen on if they shift out of the shackles of the formulaic bits actually holding the game back, like dungeons being unique encounters between copy-paste linear trash encounters on identical pacing and cadence, or content release structures that hold out tiny morsels of content and then spread them thin over an elongated cycle of mini patches – but it is a good start.

Evercold: Combat Evolved

The biggest shift, and one where I have a hotter take, is in the evolution of the combat system. For all the existing, non-limited jobs, players will be gaining a choice between two combat styles – Reborn (the current structure with, presumably, small updates from leveling progression) and Evolved, a newer and more modern take on job design intended to be more flavorful and with new gameplay wrinkles to explore. New jobs going forward will only have Evolved style, starting with the two new jobs in Evercold, and the promise is that both styles will be balanced such that content up to the top end can be completed with either.

Firstly though, for both combat styles, Square Enix is eliminating most, if not all, synergistic buffs, particularly those that enforce the current two-minute metagame. This is a huge win because I think that the current encounter design in Savage and even Ultimate is defined around hassling players to juggle at even minute marks while also making the opening 15-20 seconds of an encounter a dull sprint where everyone does as much damage as possible – and it isn’t exactly the best design. I don’t buy the opposite hype that it is the worst thing in the world or the worst thing to happen to the game, but admittedly, I didn’t do much past a couple of EX trials until Endwalker, where the two-minute meta became a thing, so I haven’t seen the contrast in current content and could very well be missing something. It has been, even from that perspective, a limiter, as the game hasn’t really balanced interesting design choices around it and instead it just becomes a forced structure where you really wanna send cooldowns but also have to do some dance to resolve a mechanic or create uptime in which you can use those buttons – and because of how ingrained the two-minute cycle is to many jobs, having to hold cooldowns (as happens this tier on M10S for the healer jail) makes your job feel extremely strange to play.

Coming back to the Evolved system, however, one thing that is clearly happening is a simplification of jobs. Yoshi P walked right up to calling it the Street Fighter 6 easy mode, but then walked it back vehemently, although from the examples provided at NA Fanfest, it is difficult to not see some clear parallels. The emphasis is on less keybinds, simpler combos, and freeing up cognitive load for mechanics – the buttons in Evolved mode are often context-sensitive, reducing or removing the need for multiple binds for similar actions, combos appear to flow on a single button (finally bringing the XIVCombo functionality into the base game and out of that grey plugin land), and some of the verbiage used suggests that with fewer actions, the actions that remain are higher potency, which is…interesting. There’s also some attempt in Evolved to codify the jobs into more stringent roles, like defining main and off-tanks through differing mitigation capabilities (an effort which will see all current tanks save for Paladin designated as off-tanks), and to push a development vision of how certain roles should play (damage spells for healers no longer have casting times in an effort to make GCD healing less punishing, although it is very unclear if this means that damage spells will be off-global cooldown or just instant and trigger the GCD anyways, which is an important distinction!).

For my take, first, I think that some sort of overhaul is needed. The current state of the game has been stale and let a lot of problems fester, like how healing can feel to play in high-level content, tank balance across modes of content, button bloat, and general lack of distinct, flavorful gameplay across jobs in the same role (I think homogenization is overstated for sure, but at the same time, it can feel quite similar to play a Warrior versus a Dark Knight in EX or Savage content), and gameplay distills to managing the increasingly-difficult and low-affordance dance routines that comprise high-end mechanics while also doing a rotation that has ballooned in complexity, at the same time as the game has largely lost some interesting friction by having too many wall-bosses or large hit boxes reducing the engagement of melee players (something they have made an effort to improve in Dawntrail!). Moving away from the two-minute meta makes the entry level less punishing, as DPS checks in Savage content could be incredibly tight and for some jobs, remembering how to properly manage your even-minute windows is tough (a struggle of mine with Scholar is knowing that I need to use Chain Stratagem for the party but it doesn’t flow well into any other part of the kit which makes it easy to miss when managing your core role and healing). However, I think there are some practical challenges with the limited window into this gameplay divide we’ve been given.

The biggest issue I see is simply one of MMO standards. Two basically completely different jobs with different actions under the same umbrella means that the math has to be absolutely airtight on both to ensure there isn’t a correct and incorrect choice, and human error means that this simply won’t happen and thus one style per job will always win as the correct choice for high-end content and tough DPS checks. The way they discuss Evolved makes me apprehensive that they will drastically overshoot on it, making Evolved de facto stronger in every scenario simply by virtue of having fewer actions and folding the potency of the missing actions into the ones you retain. Even if they balance out across an equivalent timespan, the problem is that higher-potency actions mean there is a high probability of Evolved jobs having better potion windows (more potency per action done enough times could mean higher potency per potion window which means Evolved would simply win) and that could also mean better alignment depending on kill times, where you might be Evolved if you expect a fight to go 7:15 but if the fight stretches to 7:45 or even 8 minutes flat, maybe Reborn wins? It’s a tough, multivariable problem and there are more than enough nerds on the case that the math will be done and community expectations will be drawn in a given way based upon it. The flipside to this same problem is that balancing so that both modes are viable for clearing content also, likely, signals that fights will be easier on average, because the tuning will invariably have to bias to be doable by the lesser version of each job, whichever one that may be, and so if you are a superstar of the harder gameplay mode for your job or playing the stronger version of that job (based on the math), then you have a means to overpower the DPS checks that doesn’t currently exist in the game.

My next issue as a healer main in Savage is that I fucking hate the way they discuss healing and their vision for it with the Evolved mode. I do think that current healers in Savage are too basic in terms of what you spend the majority of your time doing (hitting a two-button DPS rotation that is functionally one button for 27 out of 30 seconds but then adds a third or forth button every 60-120 seconds, ooh! The GAMEPLAY!) but the healing puzzle is a fun part of the job – planning out cooldowns, lining up oGCDs, and also making the decision in prog or at lower gear of when GCD healing is required is a fun puzzle to solve for your group, and it has lots of variables with cohealers (my cohealers in both my raid teams are my opps and that makes it fun at times), failure damage to mechanics, and planning around movement and total mitigation needed to solve difficult checks – and I think that simply tucking a ton of power into GCD healing and trying to push healers to use GCDs more by force (rather than by choice) is a wrongheaded approach to how the game ought to work. Can the planning and puzzle solving be too complex at times? Sure, plenty of players have mit spreadsheets and hard plans on every tool, but you can often succeed by having a loose plan and structuring according to gameplay feedback beyond that, and I think that the way you make the design more interesting is to perhaps limit some oGCD tools and create meaningful friction where healers have a big heal check to meet but can’t just use woven oGCDs to overcome it – it is an encounter design problem. Further, I think the way you lean into the FFXIV house style for healers is to make the damaging abilities more interesting and multifaceted by adding more situational damage abilities or even using damaging abilities to feed resources for healing – I wanted Kardia on Sage to be like Discipline Priest in WoW with Atonement spreading and damage to healing conversion but instead it is a more complicated and yet limited version of the Scholar Faerie, which is…not ideal!

My disdain for this blinkered approach also rolls into the tank role and the forceful divide of main and off tanks. Giving tanks different niches is fine – great even, but doing so along such forced lines feels a bit bad, especially because it signals some possible difficulties in queueable light party content. If a Warrior is not meant to self-mitigate as much but instead to support the main tank, then what happens in a dungeon where the Warrior is the only tank and how do you balance that so that it plays well in both modalities? Right now, Warriors can still use Nascent Flash as a supporting mitigation but gain something from it, while Bloodwhetting is just the self-only version, and it feels like you’d have to take Bloodwhetting away to make Warrior off-tank but then Nascent Flash is relatively weak on the Warrior themselves in dungeon content. Obviously, Evolved mode tanks are likely to be basically new jobs as the examples we saw tended towards, but balancing this in a way that upholds these distinctions while also not making them suck ass in one or more modes of content is a difficult task! From a flavor perspective, it also feels a bit weird – Warrior, Dark Knight, and Gunbreaker don’t exactly strike me as jobs where the flavor is “team cheerleader and supporter” which just makes the gameplay division being drawn feel forced and foreign to the jobs as presented. I don’t think this is an impossible problem to solve, but it also feels like an unforced error to even put it on the table in the first place, especially when so many modes of content have a single tank and thus need all the tanks to be reasonably capable of doing all the tank role responsibilities. In much the same way that the healer role is strained in weird ways by the divide of Regen and Barrier (when the Regen healers both gain shield abilities in Dawntrail and the Barrier healers both gained Regen abilities at the same time!), main and off-tank feels like a distinction struggling to create a difference.

I think the other major question is how these changes affect roles that provide buffs as part of the kit, like the overall Physical Ranged DPS role or Astrologian for healers. Removing the two-minute meta carries the implication that these will also change, and the gameplay we did see of Evolved Bard shows off direct damage buffs being removed, but for jobs like Dancer or Astro, those are much more central parts of the job identity and losing them could be problematic in that context, especially if Reborn mode still represents much of the original playstyles.

Lastly, I think that this is a lot of change management for what feels like an inevitable removal of Reborn altogether. Letting people choose the familiar playstyle is probably nice in some regards, to be sure, but maintaining what is functionally two jobs each per current job feels like the sort of thing any reasonable developer would discontinue as soon as they think they are able to. In that way, I could see Evercold being a testing ground to iron out the kinks and bugs with Evolved jobs before pushing fully into that direction around the time of 9.0.

Theme, Story, and Characters

Evercold is leaning into an interesting parallel of the Final Fantasy XIV formula – after a contentious two-legged story, an expansion centered around actions in another reflection to prevent an Ascian scheme that reveals core truths about the world and history. I’m not saying they’re knowingly trying to do Shadowbringers II, but the parallel is pretty interesting!

I think a strength that Shadowbringers did have is that telling the story in a reflection meant that world building and character engagement was increased as they established these new places and people with the curious connections they also had to the Eorzea we thought we knew at the time. I feel like Evercold is likely to be a better story than Dawntrail just on that basis – by using a premise that should encourage better writing fundamentals, I think we will see a better end result, because one thing I think Dawntrail lacked was taking time to really set up the places it showed off since they’ve already been sort of mentioned until we got to the Alexandria half, where the worldbuilding was cut short due to the compressed nature of the story. Having a full expansion MSQ to tell us about the Fourth and give us a clear idea of what is happening and why should, hopefully, create a better base narrative to build upon.

I do think, however, that some parts of the story aren’t sitting well with me. Firstly, I think the effort (which is quite obviously posthumous or otherwise they would have used this name prior to Dawntrail launching) to make Dawntrail forward a new arc under the name “Godless Realms” is interesting but it feels a little too late for Dawntrail. Sure, yes, Dawntrail was the beginning of a new arc, if you want to be pedantic, but it feels like there wasn’t a clear “saga” direction until 7.2 was in the draft stages, at which point the idea probably coalesced, and that’s fine, but it is also okay for Dawntrail to be its own thing regardless of whether or not you personally liked it.

I also find the nature of the story to be escalating really quickly in a sort of weird way. I didn’t necessarily care for the idea of the “summer vacation” expansion and so I was actually happy that Dawntrail subverted that expectation (as we all kind of expected it to anyways) but I also think the speed at which it shed that illusion was too breakneck fast and pushed to another extreme too quickly. Evercold’s story teasers thus far imply that the speed is staying or increasing, which I am not necessarily a fan of. I also think returning to Ascians so quickly (we basically left them behind for barely an expansion cycle before scooting right back up to them) is a mistake of sorts, because while Halmarut is interesting and the idea she presents is fascinating, it feels too steeped in the legacy of the game, too afraid to tread new ground. Obviously several of them are still alive and there’s a real value to paying off their stories, but it does feel a bit too soon to push in that direction especially given how much emphasis Shadowbringers and Endwalker put on their origins and society, in my opinion.

Where the story hints are treading new ground is in the premise for our player characters, and I really like the idea at the core and conflict it enables. After spending over a decade of real world time fighting against rejoinings, we have a story hook with this and the 7.5 setup so far that calls into question Venat’s goodness and knowledge and makes us question everything we fought for to this point – if we spent so much energy to avoid the rejoinings only to now need to bring them about in our own way, what does that do to our character’s psyche and to the Scions who believed they had the right idea? What does it say about Emet-Selch and the other Ascians who worked to create the rejoinings that did happen, and what will distinguish our way from theirs? It is a massively good hook to hit us with a shoe on the other foot scenario after drawing so many explicit and direct parallels between us and Emet-Selch through the narratives of Shadowbringers and Endwalker, where we concluded (as did he!) that his route wasn’t the right one. It is exciting to consider how they might reconcile these differences and stick the landing on the story presentation. I’m also interested to see how the inter-reflection travel works, because 7.5 was pretty clear that the key only seemed to work for us but the Evercold trailer clearly shows Estinien and Alphinaud also coming through, and that opens up potential other loose plot threads like Y’shtola and Runar or how we handle the parallel characters between worlds, given that Shadowbringers (jokingly or not) gave us First-native versions of many supporting cast like Rowena and Gerolt. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that we could see there and I hope that with that much potential on the table, we get a clear and focused story that tells at least some of those potential tales.

What I disliked about Dawntrail’s story was the disjointed nature of it, the rough edges and jagged teeth of two stories colliding without a lot of grace, and my hope is that focusing on a single new reflection and a story steeped in the local dilemmas of that shard will allow the writing staff to tell a single, well-constructed story without a need to push too many other plot threads through. Shadowbringers having moments of looking at the Source and what was happening with characters like Estinien and Gaius was great, because it kept those elements in-focus without them taking over or needing to push too much screen time away from the narrative on the First – and I really, really hope that model is one the team looks towards for inspiration with Evercold.

Get In The Robot, Shinji

Evercold’s Alliance Raid series is a crossover event with Evangelion, the anime, as it celebrates a major anniversary milestone. This is a really cool idea that I like, but I also need to vent a moment about crossover content in FFXIV, especially as mainline gameplay features.

I generally like the way the team creates a coherent and interesting narrative for why a crossover makes sense in-universe – NieR had a specific setup, Echoes of Vana’diel has had one, Return to Ivalice was so woven into Eorzea that we got extensions of story beats from it as a part of Bozja – and that’s fine. What I dislike, however, is that outside of these setups and content specific to the Alliance Raid series crossovers, there’s just not a lot that really integrates them into the world. Endwalker’s Alliance Raid series was a triumph for me because it was new deep lore that directly related to the setting and contextualized a lot of major events and ideas within it, which was also true in some form with Heavensward’s series and even the Crystal Tower raids in ARR. The crossovers suffer for being contained in optional content, because while they provide enough context for why we’re doing them specifically in that moment, there’s no real crossover into the broader setting even when the details matter to the main lore, like how Vana’diel hinges on a story conclusion for Sareel Ja after his sudden and inevitable betrayal by Zoraal Ja in the Dawntrail MSQ. NieR likewise exists as an island with only a bridge to the main story of Shadowbringers, and my fear is that we’re gonna get some crazy cool Evangelion shit in Evercold that…has no significance or meaning to the Fourth or main story at all. And I get it – optional content means it can’t always be that deep, but dammit, Myths of the Realm in Endwalker was that deep and it provided so much good worldbuilding and context to the nature of religious practice and beliefs in Eorzea as well as the practical lore of how the Twelve even came to be, context which vastly transforms the meaning of lore-significant events like the defense against Dalamud by Louisoix invoking the Twelve.

Look, to an extent, it’s fine that these crossovers just exist and have the attempt at writing they do, because they’re generally things I enjoy! I just really want these to leverage more of the worldbuilding around them in a way that fits like how the original FFXIV raid series’ do, because those have huge hooks that improve the storytelling and add key details in a fun way. Evangelion is a cool setting and assuming our launching point for it is on the Fourth, it can be written however you want to fit, but I’d love to see it as a construct of the world that makes sense within MSQ context and adds fun layers and depth to that story. On a surface level, sure, I like Evangelion, there’s a lot of rich ideas there for bosses and story, so I’m hyped – but I fear it being another bridged-island story that fits but also isn’t crucial or expansive to the story we get in the MSQ and I dislike how often that has been the play for Alliance Raids given that the few times we’ve got original FFXIV stories in those series, they expand the setting in a great way.

Other Bits and Bobs

There’s a Switch 2 version of FFXIV coming this summer! That’s kinda neat, even if it requires an additional subscription due to Nintendo bullshit, although at least there’s a discount for existing subscribers and no need to have Switch Online for it. In other platform news, Evercold seemingly will be the final expansion supported on PS4, meaning that by the time PS4 support sunsets, the platform will have had a good 15 years of FFXIV support, which is pretty good overall (and it will also be near the PS5’s 9 year birthday, which is actually mental to think about because it still feels like the PS5 is new hardware and not nearly 6 years old as I write this lol).

In Closing

I think that Final Fantasy XIV is at an interesting inflection point in its lifecycle as of this writing. Dawntrail has not necessarily been a bad expansion, but it has been a troubled mess at times in both content and overall idea, and the ways in which it has been weak during Dawntrail are the ways in which the game needs to be strong to appeal to its largely-casual, story-driven audience, while the ways in which it has remained strong or grown stronger have been appealing to a smaller core audience of hardcore raiders. Those who love the gameplay formula or are so attached to the story and existing characters as to be unflappable in the face of iffy quality on that front remain present as well, although for how long remains an interesting open question. The game also retains a community core that embodies negative stereotypes of parasociality towards the game team and a fierce aversion to critique they view as detrimental, even if many people levying those critiques against Dawntrail love the game and want to see it improve to the benefit of a majority of the audience, and that core can sometimes be a rotten apple spoiling the bunch and coloring perceptions of FFXIV as a game with a bizarre, toxically-positive community in a strange relationship with it.

My personal opinion on FFXIV has waned a bit in Dawntrail. In Endwalker, I made a large effort to make FFXIV my main MMO, as I sat out the last half of Shadowlands on the WoW side and wanted to connect deeply with the game, and I found a lot to love about it. At the same time however, I think that a reason that FFXIV did not stay my main MMO for long is that the formula was too stale for me even as a tourist in the game, and as I embedded deeper into it and explored legacy systems and older content I hadn’t previously done, I simply had a smaller list of things I could do that were meaningfully engaging and patches added precious little over a stretched timescale in a way that made keeping the game a daily main play difficult for me. My opinion on the story remains strong – while I am critical of Dawntrail, I did like it overall even if I can identify some gaps where it could have been better, and my rose-colored glasses for the impact of Endwalker has given way to the more consensus opinion – that Endwalker’s strengths were largely in paying off a long-lived storyline more than some of its direct implementations of that payoff. Because of that, my engagement with FFXIV has largely reduced to raid logging – and, to be fair, this isn’t a bad thing as I enjoy my raid time greatly for the most part (I could do for some more skillful play in both of my raid teams, but as a social experience and overall gameplay experience, I enjoy them both), and on a difficult-content basis, Dawntrail has actually been a rather good expansion. However, a lot of the fans I interact with, including some of the regulars in my alt raid team, make me question how great the community actually is and expose some of the more toxic and bleh elements under the veneer of welcoming, inclusive community experiences.

On the one hand, I think the adage that “no one hates WoW as much as WoW players” isn’t healthy because it can lead to a place where the fans seem overly jaded and unhappy even when many are having a great time – and thus I wouldn’t wish it on any game. On the other hand, I think that the inverse paradigm in FFXIV is also unhealthy and bad because I think that a lot of the conversations that are had about the game tend to be overly dismissive of criticism and deflect from useful and thoughtful expression of counter-points that could help the game be genuinely great for a larger chunk of the audience.

All of this relates to what I see with the Fanfest announcements thusly: a lot of the changes shown, even in the basic and limited announcements we did get, are promising and address long-standing and valid criticisms of the game’s model and recurrent gameplay. As a fan, I am excited to see what comes out of the next two Fanfest events on our way to launch in January. However, we also have a deficit of details, things that need to be answered before I can be openly enthusiastic for what is to come, and I think more of that critical feedback needs to be heard openly and thought through by the development team to ensure that FFXIV is on a growth trend that better serves the full audience of the game. I have some hope that we’ll see a lot of what is needed to ensure that, and I am cautiously optimistic that the future Fanfest events will increase my hype as more clarity is given. I don’t need FFXIV to become my main game, nor do I necessarily want it to – but I think it would be great for the game’s health if it makes some tweaks to that formulaic approach to break the doldrums and become a more dynamic and less predictable franchise. I’m not saying I want it to destroy my alt raid lead’s spreadsheets and leave her predictions in disarray, but I also think it would be better for the game if that happened, so I guess I am wishing for that, haha.