Sliding into its 11th birthday during 2024, the mostly-critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 had a big year. It dropped the 7.0 expansion, Dawntrail, which brought not only a new story, but a major graphical overhaul, as well as the usual littering of new content. 

But if you’ve been paying attention, you know 2024 was also rocky for FFXIV and its community, thanks in no small part to Dawntrail itself. With a middling story but fantastic duties to delve into, players on social media often squabbled among themselves: was Dawntrail good, or the scourge of the MMORPG genre?  

There’s a lot to remember from this year, so let’s retread what happened—and what needs to come. 

A Rocky Trail

The woes for Dawntrail started even before it launched. Players were excited to get their hands on the Benchmark, which was essentially necessary for everyone thanks to the hotly-anticipated graphics upgrade, as everyone needed to see if the game would still run on their PCs. More than that, we were also, indeed, seeing some degree of the new upgrades, as well as the new female Hrothgar race. 

Thus launched Dawntrail’s unique tech debt unveiling, as Endwalker once had, when players realized the character creator lighting was not as expected—because it was the 2.0 version of the character creator. There was also a ton of feedback on how races looked, and so the team set to work on releasing a second Benchmark, which fared far better. 

Dawntrail’s actual launch went smoothly! As I noted a few days into Early Access, players were able to log in smoothly despite the biggest concurrent players count in FFXIV since A Realm Reborn's launch, and the graphics update was stunning. However, it introduced a new congestion system that left players stranded away from friends, specifically on Aether, which seems to be North America’s most popular server. It’s unsurprising, given if you ask nearly anyone where to play to do content, they’ll tell you Aether. 

But once they finished, the tides of criticism rose as players started to discuss the game being okay. Not good, not bad, but severely okay. However, with discourse about media being what it is today, Dawntrail was the death of storytelling to a lot of players, and it got to the point where Naoki Yoshida had to tell everyone to stop harassing staff over it. 

After simmering on the story for those months since, I’d also like to add that it feels like the team was trying to emulate older storylines and techniques without letting their own voice and ideals shine, but with the latter still developing, they needed to hark back to the former. Plus, Dawntrail just tried to do a lot. I won’t entirely get into my reflections, but many of my original criticisms still stand. A lot of my new and old criticisms are just Stormblood critiques too—though one of our other columnists thinks it shows FFXIV should take a new direction. 

At least there was more than a glimmer of hope from the Creative Business Unit 3 team, which knocked it out of the park with the dungeons and other combat content included so far. The team admitted in a Live Letter that they wanted to up the difficulty, and they did in a fair way, as attacks from bosses are swift and require wit and vigilance to navigate around, while still keeping true to FFXIV staple “choreography” styles.

I’m personally still a fan of the last boss of the Skydeep Cenote, which required attention to animation and spatial awareness through knockbacks, even though it kicked my party’s ass about eight times before the clear. And myself as well as other columnists have been enjoying the return to fresh high-end content, including Extreme Trials and Savage Raids. 

Still, it feels like there’s an incurable wound in the vibes after Dawntrail, and I wish people would get it’s not that deep. Stop being annoying in the social media team’s comments, they literally did not make the game’s plot. 

Oh, and DDoS attacks. There were a lot of those. 

Beyond the Game 

As controversial as Dawntrail itself was, it won’t possibly achieve the infamy of the Meister Quality Figure of Hydaelyn and Zodiark, which was a massive statue at over a foot at all dimensions. Unfortunately, a lot of them saw quality issues, including questionable painting and breaking-off wings. It’s technically not Square’s fault directly, as I presume they’re not going to quality-check every statue, but we can only hope they find another statue company… 

And equally as rocky was the release of the Xbox Series X|S edition of FFXIV. As it stands, you still need the Game Pass Core in order to access the game, which also still requires the FFXIV subscription from Square Enix on top of that. Plus, there were wild issues of Xbox’s censorship interfering with the chat, and quite a few bugs that made it past the testing phase. However, it’s still going strong—and to be fair, it seems many players already have the Core pass already, but it’s still odd. 

We did get more nifty World First races, which, obviously, came with a slew of drama in one case. Thankfully, there wasn’t much in the Arcadion Savage raids, but it arrived in the Futures Rewritten race, when the first team out was revealed to be using mods thanks to a little red dot on the screen. Oops. 

Thankfully, the international Data Center Travel feature did make it out alive, letting players with half-decent internet connections jump over to Oceania worlds. The question is now whether they’ll actually lift that restriction to more centers—but my money’s on no, so there isn’t just a flood of Americans nagging Japanese players. 

There was also the frighteningly successful Mountain Dew collab, which I, for better or worse, feverishly participated in. I got a real-life thing, so I won, right? 

Where To Build 

FFXIV has gone past the ten-year mark, even ending its ten-year celebration this very calendar year. As it stands, the MMORPG is carrying a lot on its back, as its parent company’s most reliable product. 

There’s a push and pull here from both players and the Creative Business Unit 3 team, at the moment. As I’ve noticed in the community, Dawntrail’s story left quite a few players jaded, but for veterans, that was on top of the real perpetual content in Endwalker’s patch cycles. Mixed with the outstanding year in multiplayer games drawing players elsewhere, players really had no reason to stick around. It feels like the buzz behind FFXIV has died a little bit and the mood has soured. 

Granted, while FFXIV’s story has admittedly faltered a bit here, I’m still taking in how much of a bizarre moment it was for Dawntrail to get torn apart in a genre not only known until recently for its stories, but more so known for having content beyond the story, with the main plot as a vehicle for getting a player ramped onto the endgame. That’s not to excuse the bad story, but more so to further point out how insanely wild the vibes were once people started wrapping up Dawntrail. Anyway… 

On one hand, Naoki Yoshida himself has expressed that players should be doing other games, having even joked by playing Tears of the Kingdom as he entered a stream and giving players a week to get through Shadow of the Erdtree before Dawntrail. In fact, part of FFXIV’s philosophy as an MMORPG is to remove some of the addictive mechanics that make other games frustrating—dailies are good, but they limit dailies, and have no records for “consecutive” completion of regular activities. 

But generally, FFXIV tends to leave its players with something to tinker with, by way of an open-world combat (or crafting) area, or just something to grind that feels rewarding, such as a Relic Weapon. We unfortunately didn’t get much of that in Endwalker’s patch content, as one could earn Relic Weapons, for instance, simply through endgame currency. 

Based on what’s been promised, Dawntrail’s post-expansion content is, well, promising. We’ve been told new “Field Operations,” as they’ve called it, are incoming in the Shade’s Triangle—and hopefully, it’ll improve on some of the past content’s criticisms. We’re also getting more casual content via “Cosmic Exploration” and more roguelike Deep Dungeons. The new Beastmaster limited job is also supposedly on the way, which will give players content to unlock and collaborate on. In addition, we're getting promised a lot of quality of life changes.

Unfortunately, that’s still quite a few months away; going with the 4.5 month pattern they’ve had, we’ll be seeing 7.2 in mid-March, and chances are we’ll only see a piece of two of major content, besides the MSQ and continuation of the Arcadion raid series. The team needs to stick the landing here for its content, lest more of its veterans shy away after they clear out their Savage raids. 

Conclusion: Hope for the Year Ahead 

My hope for 2025, in short, is that CBU3 continues a promise Yoshida made at the media tour this year: to re-center FFXIV towards its MMORPG roots. There has to be a balance struck between FFXIV’s philosophy of not needing to be there all the time, and giving players a reason to stay subscribed. The joy of online games is being able to drop in and out, join friends, and explore the virtual world being showcased at a reasonable pace. If even at a slow pace, that exploration grinds to a halt, then players will absolutely start looking elsewhere. 

None of what I've said was to say FFXIV is bad at all, especially for new players who still have the whole “theme park” of content to tackle. But the MMORPG is in a slow spot right now, and everyone’s hoping to see the pace pick up—especially if it hopes to last the ten years it keeps promising. 

In the meantime, 7.1 did a solid job of patching things up better (no pun intended) as the writing team started trying to take away lessons from the 7.0 main story. The characters continue their themes of learning to live with the culture, while the stakes go up across the board. The teams are separate, of course, 

I’ll just keep partying up, when I have a free moment, to tackle the game’s first 24-player high-end content—a type of fight players have been asking for for a while. That’s been a great, optimistic start to the future so far.