Hopes and Fears for Dawntrail

PAX East is this weekend, and the Final Fantasy XIV team is going to have a global livestream from the show that will, in all likelihood, include the start of pre-orders and the availability of the Collector’s Edition boxes. The patch 6.58 data from this week includes the pre-order incentives, other pending news items like the full release of the Xbox version of the game have been resolved, and we stand likely 3 months and change out from the actual launch of the expansion.

Dawntrail is going to be in an interesting spot, as it will demonstrate what the vision of the FFXIV team is for the future of the game, both in story terms with the resolution of the long-term Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga but also in gameplay terms as the expansion will have to show how Square Enix intends to integrate Variant/Criterion dungeons from launch of a new expansion, how they plan to handle progression for new players, and to demonstrate the evolving philosophy in design for group content, release cadence, and overall approach to difficulty and design in the game. There’s a lot we’re waiting to see, and so I put my actual big news prediction up top so I could discuss some things I want to see and things I fear we’ll see in Dawntrail.

Hopes

Savage’s One-Week Delay Permanently Codified – for the Abyssos and Anabaseios tiers in Endwalker, SE delayed the launch of Savage difficulty by one week, giving players a week to do their normal raids, farm up the new timed nodes to craft raid gear, and to enjoy the MSQ without the push to Savage. In the past, while launch tiers have traditionally had the one-week delay, all post-launch tiers prior to Endwalker launched both Normal and Savage on the same day alongside the patch, and since that is patch day with MSQ and a ton of other things to do, Savage raiders had a lot of decisions to make. You want to do MSQ, you need to do the normal raid and its story quests so you can unlock Savage, you wanted raid prep gear crafted but the timed nodes and recipes both also drop on patch day and the material requirements can be steep, and so in the old model, patch day was a clusterfuck. In Endwalker, the pacing has been so much better for the delays to Savage in follow-up tiers – plenty of time to enjoy the game, do the more normal content at your own pace, work on crafting, and then be raid-ready on patch day. For the enjoyment of content alone, it’s a big draw! It does also have some positive effects to raid gearing, since you can get a tomestone piece prior to Savage, which is a big boon, and a designated DPS player can save tomestones to buy a raid weapon immediately after clearing the second fight of the tier. Overall, I think it’s a win.

Expansion of Variant and Criterion Dungeon Systems – Over the course of Endwalker, V&C dungeons have been introduced and seen one major change to rewards, with the Savage Criterion for Alo Alo Island offering player power in the form of an upgrade token for the augmented tomestone weapons from the final raid tier of Endwalker. This is an overall positive trend I would love to see continue, as even the weapon upgrades each tier are neat without offering excessive power, and as an overall system, I really the V&C dungeons. Sure, they’re not quite what I initially had hoped for, but they’re overall enjoyable as an activity and all 3 versions offer something fun to engage with.

More Interesting Dungeon Gameplay – I like that FFXIV’s dungeons are very turn your brain off mode once you get them, but I also wish that the mechanics on display offered some modicum of thought or challenge. Wall-to-wall pulls of big mountains of trash aren’t exciting when the trash just attacks – I like small variants like the mob in Vanaspati that can petrify or the need to use interrupts on certain spellcasts. I don’t want a WoW level of trash density or trash mechanics, but if each pack has like one skill check that can make it substantially easier, that would be neat. Likewise for bosses, I want to see better integration of mechanics the game often doesn’t introduce until Extreme trials or Savage raids – Protean spreads, role-based mechanics, maybe even the simplest DPS check to ensure the group is staying on target. These things can be tuned to work, and in the case of the EX/Savage mechanics, adding markers that don’t normally exist on those higher difficulties would make engaging with them suitably easier. V&C dungeons do get closer to this target, but still feel like a different optional thing and I think that FFXIV needs to start working towards integrating a smoother ramp into higher-difficulty content.

Quick Rollout of the Engine Update – The changes to graphics the team has shared in the Fan Fest cycle have been great to see, but there’s been a sort of vague timetable on how long it will be before the game is fully and comprehensively updated to the new engine and updated assets. I’m looking back at the WoW character model updates in Warlords of Draenor, which took the entirety of the expansion to roll out, and that was decent but I would like to see the FFXIV team move maybe a bit faster. At the same time, though, the game is doing a lot more than just character model updates, and my hope is that the progress we’ve already seen (covering essentially every playable race) should mean that progress on world content will be similarly speedy to make. Bigger than that, though, is the hope that armor and weapon updates will be done fast enough to avoid the dissonance of a smoother and better character model wearing gear with absurd normal maps and a lack of detail. It barely “works” in WoW when that still happens, and I think FFXIV isn’t quite as visually flexible in that same way.

A Two-Toned Story Without Whiplash – Dawntrail was initially premised as our “summer vacation” episode. And okay, fair enough, Endwalker in both launch and patch stories was fairly serious and at times, quite dark. It’s fine to want a little more levity after all of that, for sure. I think the Japanese Fan Fest gave us an indication that, perhaps, we’re not getting as much summer vacation as we might have thought, and I was delighted by this. Simply put, while I like the levity in FFXIV more often than not, for me it serves more as a palate-cleanser and less as a viable full meal unto itself. I like the tonal variety of saving the Thirteenth from total voidal collapse and then going to pull Hildibrand out of the dirt to stop an alien attack. My hope is that the back-half of Dawntrail’s narrative puts us onto a clear track to an actual antagonist and serious threat after we establish characters and early stakes in the front half of the content. It’s great if the first 3 zones and their stories are lighthearted adventure of the sort we were promised back in 6.1, but I don’t personally want a whole story of that and I think that it doesn’t play to the strengths of the FFXIV narrative team. I trust that the narrative structure the team will come to will ultimately be a good balance and it is what I hope to see.

A Better Relic Grind – I’m not actually sure what I want here, because at the time, I disliked Bozja, and I dislike the current system of level-capped only play just for the tomestone cost of materials. I think I’ve identified a few things I want from the content around Relic weapons for next expansion as this: a better story arc told through the weapon quests, more integration of world content, and tomestone or material grinds that can be done on non-levelcapped jobs so that you have room to level new things and play how you want. Integration with a trial or even the raid series would be neat, and I generally like the idea of relics being more connected to the main storyline of the expansion, as opposed to a separate thing that sits off to the side. Because I am avoiding a prescriptive answer here, my hope is that the relic series in Dawntrail considers player feedback carefully and plays in some new and some established territory. Also, getting back to a model where weapons past the first are easier and faster to make would be quite nice.

Fears

Dawntrail Plays It Too Safe – FFXIV has a formula, and I have mixed opinions about that formula, as I’ve shared in the past. It is nice, on the one hand, to have a predictable and expected set of content for your monetary investment into the expansion – when you buy the box in modern times, you know you’re getting an expansion with 12 raid fights on Normal and Savage, 1-2 Ultimate raids, 13 total normal dungeons, 3 sets of tribal quests, a handful of Custom Delivery NPCs, a Relic Weapon quest chain, 6 world zones, an MSQ of around 25-40 hours in length that doubles with patch content, and like hey, that’s great. On the other hand, this content docket is released with such consistency that patch cycles and the overall flow of things are so predictable as to be pre-plannable in near full detail – you know that you’re going to have new tomestone farms on every even patch, Alliance raids on the odd patches, Normal and Savage raids on even patches – it just starts to feel a little unexciting because it is so predictable, even if the content itself is stellar. This can also be exacerbated by the fact that a lot of the content added to FFXIV plays to the widest possible audience, which often means it is far simpler than you might like, and that is where dungeons become dull runs that feel the same even if the environmental art and bosses are great, world mobs for hunts are consistently pushovers if you play with even a modicum of basic competency, and the gameplay formula of a lot of content is very straightforward. To separate this from any difficulty discussion, I think I just want to see them vary the formula some more. Go back to Stormblood-era where non-raid series patches have two dungeons, add a V&C every patch or more regularly, create some new world content or hell, even a new world zone we discover as we wind through patch MSQ. Maybe even vary up the raid series formula – more bosses, different bosses, different ideas – all of these would be great, even if they’re not ideal, because at least they’d be a bit of a tweak and make things more dynamic and interesting. That’s maybe just a me thing (and I can see the case for why my complaint of “formulaic” is someone else’s “outstanding consistency”) but hey, it’s my blog!

Increasing Prevalance of Rapid Body Checks and Puzzle Mechanics in Savage Raids – I’ve only done Savage in Endwalker, but I have a basic understanding of how a lot of prior tiers worked, and something I find rather bothersome about raiding in FFXIV is the cadence of a mechanical check with instakills followed by a body check, meaning you need all 8 players to survive the initial mechanic in order to survive the next mechanic. This might be okay in some cases, when there’s enough room for a skillful and coordinated group to get a swiftcast raise off and get people into position, but in Endwalker, so many of the Savage fights do back-to-back mechanic into body check with a pacing that means there is no recovery. And, to a point, that’s fine! It is okay if sometimes a mechanical check failure means a delayed wipe. I just don’t like when so many of the mechanic checks roll into exactly that, where there is just never a chance for a skillful healer or caster DPS raise to impact things or create a salvage situation.

On a similar note, one thing that has become kind of a cluster in Savage that I personally dislike is puzzle mechanics, more specifically the ones that involve everyone getting a boatload of debuffs to read through with a short amount of time to respond. Pangenesis is a great example of where this is iffy – you get 1-3 debuffs with a timer, and need to use the debuffs to align positions to towers, which have a small randomness of initial spawns and patterns and require all 8 players to parse their own debuffs and arrive at the correct towers in the correct sequence. It is an interesting challenge in small doses, but so much of Endwalker’s difficulty was tied up in mechanics vomiting debuffs onto players and then adjusting around short timer/long timer or aligning debuff colors in a specific pattern, and a lot of times they’re just not particularly fun, short of the joy of overcoming them. And that’s a part of raiding! – but when it happens too much, it can dull the joy of it. Varied designs win for me, and while the ways in which so many of the puzzle mechanics are solved end up being different in execution, a lot of the mental burden and cognitive processing of them boils down to the same basic stuff.

Too Much Time Rebuilding The Main Story – Endwalker’s big marketing push and big impact was the finale of Hydaelyn and Zodiark, bringing both oft-mentioned characters into the fold at last and then seeing them off, resolving a fair number of plot threads that have been woven into the game since 1.0 and especially ARR. My fear for Dawntrail is that the standalone story, while it seems to bring a great hook, isn’t going to be enough, and that the overall story will fall into a hole of needing to build up plot threads and get things ready for future storytelling. Some of this is just inevitable because of narrative structure – a new story arc means new things need to be established – but the concern is more that the story will lean too heavily onto setting up future plots and not enough onto presenting a sound plot of its own. In ARR, this was at least understandable since the game was new-ish and the world needed to be established, but I think Dawntrail needs to have a solid standalone narrative that has some hooks built into it aside from the base plot, but doesn’t go too heavy on setup. I worry about this because…

Teething Pains for Narrative Team Changes – The past two expansions have hit really well on story with Natsuko Ishikawa in that main writer’s chair, with Banri Oda overseeing things and a team under him working alongside on aspects of the story. Ishikawa is now a story supervisor (I don’t have a precise title but she’s discussed the idea in interviews) and so my fear here is that a lot of the writing style that brought heart and intrigue to FFXIV’s past several arcs is going to be lost or dulled with her less directly involved. I have some faith that the team can make it work and that having newer voices in the mix will also lead the story to some interesting new places and stylistic touches, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t apprehensive about the switch.

Job Overhauls Leading to Too Much Simplicity – Dragoon and Astrologian were both on the table for reworks in Endwalker, but those were stalled to wait for Dawntrail, and now here we are. Both jobs are interesting in that changes made over time have kind of softened the rough edges, but Astrologian in particular has also suffered because the complexity and interesting interactions made so much of the job fascinating to play and master. I’m not even a fan of the old card system, but I felt kind of disappointed in the removal of the Sect system and felt it could still have had a place in the modern design. The most recent full reworks have simplified jobs a lot – new Summoner can be very simple to a point of being braindead, new Monk is still tricky but has a flow that can be learned and is easier than Shadowbringers Monk, and I like Paladin’s rework, largely because they didn’t decrease the kit but instead made the kit make more sense and play more fun (sorry if you liked spamming Divine Spirit 4x in Requiescat windows, but it was a bad design). If these two jobs get reworked in a way that hews closer to what happened to Paladin, I’m probably onboard. If both jobs get the Summoner treatment, I might play them more as a function of them requiring less derusting, but otherwise, my excitement would be down.

No Release Date at the PAX East Panel – My opening prediction here was a simple one – we get a release date tomorrow. I hope that’s true, and it feels like the right time to unveil the Collector’s Edition, preorders, and launch date – but it is very possible they could choose not to share that information, in spite of all the buildup to a panel getting a global livestream and some vague hype. I’d be disappointed the most if this news isn’t shared, honestly, because I want the date so I can start planning and getting things ready. Especially since both my MMOs are launching expansions this summer, I NEED TO KNOW.

Either way, I am very excited that we are about to enter the homestretch on Dawntrail hype and hopefully it won’t be long now before the finished product is ready for us to play.