On the whole, I can thoroughly say I liked Dawntrail. Oh sure, I have huge, critical thoughts about its story, but as far as Final Fantasy 14 expansions go, Dawntrail brought a lot to the table on its opening night. A massive graphics overhaul, zones with a far bigger visual scope, and some of the best battle content we’ve seen out of the team in years.

I’m also excited for what’s to come. In terms of stuff to do, FF14 is going to be stacked with a ton of it by the time the expansion’s over. Variant dungeons, a new limited job, a new exploration zone, savage versions of alliance raids, whatever the heck planetary exploration is. I’m hyped! But I’m also barely playing the damn thing.

That’s because most of what I’m excited for is half a year away, bare minimum. See, back in 2022, Square Enix made the decision to slow down its patch releases—not by a huge amount, necessarily. Two weeks were tacked on to the original three and a half month cycle. Reasonable, I remember thinking. I’ve got faith in these devs, I like this game, I’m happy to wait.

This was back in Endwalker and, alas, those extra two weeks made things feel sluggish—combined with a dearth of midcore content, there just wasn’t much to actually do.

Dawntrail won’t have that problem eventually, given that the midcore content I missed is making a return—but it’s going to be absent for a while. Assuming the exploration zone, Shades’ Triangle, will be coming with patch 7.2, that means Dawntrail’ll have the exact same content drought for non-raiders until March 2025. If it comes in 7.3? That’s June, almost a year after the expansion’s release.

This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if FF14 was free-to-play or something (not that I’m advocating for that), but it’s a game with a monthly subscription, yeah? Around $13 (£9) a month goes towards this game if you’re playing it and, for the past four months, your average non-raiding subscriber has paid an extra $52 for:

• The normal mode raid series, which is a few hours of story with four boss fights.
• A new repeatable treasure dungeon.

Okay, to be fair, there’s also the launch content! The MSQ takes a while to clean away, your average player’ll level up some alts, there’s the crafting quests to do on your alt jobs, FATE grinds if you’re masochistic… all of which really doesn’t add up to four months of entertainment.

With Patch 7.1, those same players are getting some new main story quests (which’ll take a few hours to tidy away), some Allied Society dailies, the first entry in a new alliance raid series, a new Custom Delivery contact, more Hildebrand quests, and the role quest finale to keep them busy. On the face of it, that sounds like a lot, but for four months? With the exception of purposefully time-gated stuff like Custom Deliveries and Allied Society quests, you can knock all that out in a couple of weekends—one, if you’re hoofing it.

Raiders are going to get to feast on the new 24-man Savage raid, as well as a new Ultimate, but your average baby casual will get through their toys quickly and then just have… well, nothing to work towards, beyond levelling other jobs or tackling older content they’ve not done yet.

That’ll change with the exploration zone, but, again, we’re talking six months to a year—if anything the schedule seems backwards, under-serving the majority of players until 2025 while the comparatively smaller raiding scene gets prioritised first. I’m not saying this to be bitter, it’s just a head scratcher.

Especially since—ugh, look, I hate to do this. Twelve knows this comparison is one that’s been done to death. But it’s a direct competitor, and its subscription costs the same—I hope you can forgive me. I am about to compare World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 on the internet.

WoW’s got momentum

If you’re a seasoned WoW player, you’re probably reaching for your pitchfork—let me explain. Yes, the game’s had big issues with its delves. Yes, it had a wonky balance patch and dropped a $90 dinosaur on the store for some reason. But from where you guys were back in 2020? You’re eating good.

Since The War Within came out in August, you’ve had a three-section raid, a bunch of new story quests (bite-sized, but nonetheless), and a bunch of mechanical stuff to grind through like Delves and Mythic plus—and you just got a big stonking anniversary event with a bunch of goodies to grind. That’s all while your average midcore player has actually had stuff to do: Reps to up, gear to get, little gubbins to grab.

I should also point out that, even just looking at the main game, this has all come on a shorter schedule, too—just one month and 26 days, if we’re using the anniversary event as a milestone. That’s compared to FF14 taking over four months to get to patch 7.1. In terms of content pacing, WoW is shoving FF14 in a locker and taking all of its lunch money. It’s not even close, it’s doing laps around the dang thing.

For that same subscription you’re also getting access to several classic versions of the game and Season of Discovery, too—not to mention the wild seasonal events they keep throwing out there, like Plunderstorm and MoP Remix.

I’m trying so hard not to just cape for WoW here. Doing so makes me feel like my inner catboy is being betrayed, and it’s by no means a perfect MMO—but the simple, straightforward fact of the matter is that Blizzard’s spent the last couple of years in a herculean effort to stack more and more value onto that price-point, and it’s objectively succeeded. If you’re a WoW player, you’re goddamn busy.

From a development standpoint, I’m being harsh on Yoshi-P’s team. Blizzard got bought by Microsoft for billions of dollars. It’s Microsoft’s biggest investment—and thus, it’s where a lot of the money’s going. It likely has a larger and more flexible squad and better backing. But if you’re looking where to spend your cash, then none of that matters, does it?

It’s more than just pound-for-pound content that’s got me fretting, though. It’s the feeling that we’ve been set on the same course for years with no end in sight.

Spare some change

Final Fantasy 14 is sort of like a big cruise liner that’s been stacking up its itinerary for 10 years. It’s utterly massive, and if you’ve just got on board, you’ve got floors and floors to explore—and over a decade’s worth of bingo nights to catch up on. What’s more, those bingo nights got lore. Those bingo nights can make you cry.

But it’s also just as predictable and unwieldy. It has a rigid list of ports it visits every year, and no amount of hollering will change the captain’s mind on that. More importantly, though, if it’s about to run into a coral reef, it’s not going to be able to pull off a hairpin turn. You’re all just going to have to grab something and hold on.

This predictability can be charming—it was even actively a plus when WoW’s Shadowlands went through its obscene content drought. But if you’re all caught up on your endgame chores, if you’re a seasoned player that’s been there for a while? You’re going to be eyeing up those lifeboats.

If you’re familiar with FF14’s update cadence, you know exactly what content is going to come and when, what the rewards structure will be like, and how it’ll be delivered. Every Savage tier, you get your crafted gear. You go in. You trade the same books for the same incremental boosts in the same numbers. You finish your BIS. You wait for six months. You do it again.

It doesn’t help that certain secondary activities haven’t changed in years. Treasure maps are more or less the same with a different coat of paint every expansion. FATEs are still mind-numbingly tedious to grind through. Hunts are the exact same zerg rush. You could map an expansion’s secondary features to a bingo card and it’d still feel like you’re doing paint-by-the-numbers.

That’s not to say Square’s not made an effort. One of the big positives from Endwalker was Creative Studio 3 knuckling down and completely redesigning a lot of the old dungeons—not to mention adding duty support to the lion’s share of them. There’s going to be a new Hall of the Novice with 7.1, even. They are doing tune-ups, but it’s all coming at a downright sluggish pace.

But Harvey, I hear you say, what about the new content types we got in Endwalker? Ah, imaginary reader, I reply—they’re actually a good example of what I’m talking about.

It’s infuriating and more than a little counterintuitive, but this unwieldiness shows the most when Yoshi-P’s team actually experiments. Everyone knows that if an MMO does something new, it’ll mess it up the first time. WoW had to pull the emergency lever on its pre-expansion event earlier this year when its reward structure stank up the room.

The issue is, when Creative Studio 3 makes a foundational mistake with a new piece of content, it won’t be able to get off the doomed railroad it’s made for itself in time to deal with it. Endwalker was a great example of this with both Variant Dungeons and Island Sanctuary—both novel bits of content I was very excited about.

With Variant Dungeons, the rewards structure was all borked. For casual players, you’d rinse through twelve routes (quite a few hours of gameplay, to be fair!) and then never touch the thing again. For hardcore players doing the more difficult Criterion version? The rewards sucked, there was no reason to do them once you’d grabbed your mount. Similarly, Island Sanctuary kinda fumbled the bag, turning into a spreadsheet simulator that was a chore to get through despite having a lot of snazzy rewards—kinda the opposite problem.

But neither of them had any real major changes made to them—like, say, siphoning some of the planned Island Sanctuary rewards to the other Variant Dungeons to make them more repeatable—or changing the mechanics of Island Sanctuary to be more engaging. CB3 had decided on how these things were going to go, and it was either unwilling, reluctant, or financially unable to course-correct. This studio cannot swerve when it needs to, which has me fretting.

What am I supporting, here?

I suppose my frustration mostly stems from a feeling that a game I’m vocally a fan of (and still recommend, there’s a hell of a lot of RPG to get through before you inherit my malaise) hasn’t been able to grow its team or up its game because, well, it’s the only thing keeping the rest of Square Enix afloat.

Back in August, an earnings report from Square stated that MMOs (which includes FF11 too, but 14 is definitely the main one) made up 68.5% of its operating profits—and these were pre-Dawntrail numbers, I might add. Meanwhile, almost every other thing the company’s put out has failed to meet expectations.

Final Fantasy 14 is both somehow one of Square’s most successful projects while feeling like its most starved. The company’s current president, Takashi Kiryu, has stated that there’s been a great deal of restructuring going on, as per a financial report, which might mean that Yoshi-P is able to wrangle some more support for the studio: “We have established a regular forum for the heads of the individual studios and myself as president to discuss the titles that we plan to produce, the status of ongoing projects, human resource allocation, and other topics.”

But maybe even phrasing it like that is part of the issue. Final Fantasy 14 has a ton of good will, plenty of which is earned. The entire arc from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker is nothing short of magnificent, and the fact it exists in defiance of the game’s catastrophic 1.0 release is a timeless success story. I even met and interviewed Yoshi-P, and he was the picture of professionalism, even if he was in his rights to split me down the middle with a big sword for the amount of time I’ve spent grumbling about his game.

But if I take a step back and look at the whole? I dunno if FF14 can really justify its current patch cadence, its lack of flexibility, its inability to excite its long-standing playerbase with anything novel and new. I don’t know if I can say it’s fine for 8 months (or even 12!) to pass before a MMO expansion has something substantial for its non-hardcore playerbase. I don’t know if I can say that my current subscription, held mostly because this is where all my roleplay friends are, is worth it. I can’t look you in the eye and say I’m confident my cash is going towards the game I actually love.

Not to get all prophetic or anything, but it really does feel like this is Final Fantasy 14’s next big hurdle—it’s a slower existential threat than a catastrophic 1.0 launch, but it’s just as dire. As PC Gamer’s own Mollie Taylor pointed out, 2024 was the year that FF14 needed to tackle its stagnating formula, and it hasn’t—not really. Maybe it’ll do that in 2025, but the fact it took so long will be a cause for concern, anyway.

In many ways, it’s history repeating itself. The MMO’s apocalyptic 1.0 release suffered from a set of assumptions about game development that caused the whole thing to explode. Back then, Yoshi-P established that cruise ship itinerary, setting up a giga-spreadsheet that had everything mapped out from meetings to bathroom breaks to get it done.

It feels like we’re very much in similar territory, here. WoW’s soaring ahead of FF14 in terms of what it can actually output, while FF14 itself operates on 10-year old assumptions about what MMORPG players want and how much they’re willing to accept. It was brought back to life with a winning formula, but that formula’s grown stale.

Something’s gotta get shaken up, because I want this game to be worth what I’ve put into it—I want Dawntrail to become the glimpse of hope on the horizon it felt like, before these same dogged systems wore me down again. I wanna forge ahead, man. Let’s hope CB3 can manage it.