Another game with even worse issues releasing content on a timely basis was World of Warcraft. The existence of content droughts became acute during the Shadowlands expansion when Blizzard launched the game on 23 November 2020 and did not release patch 9.1 until 29 June 2021. A 220 day dearth of content did not go over so well with a lot of WoW players. I experienced the wave of "WoW refugees" migrating to Final Fantasy XIV during that time. Many reasons were cited, but do the WoW players even give FFXIV a glance if all was well in Azeroth?
FFXIV Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida believes in providing content on a predictable basis. Back in February 2022 the man fans fondly call Yoshi-P provided a roadmap for the release of the 5 main post-expansion patches following Endwalker. He also announced a slowing of the release cycle to every 4 weeks, with a .5 patch released approximately half-way through the cycle. Players can expect patch 6.3 released on Tuesday, with patch 6.4 to release in May and patch 6.5 in September. Patch 6.55 should release sometime in November.
New WoW Executive Producer Holly Longdale decided to introduce a roadmap herself and did so two weeks ago.
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| WoW's Roadmap for Dragonflight |
I think her words brought some joy to players.
A WoW expansion is not a single moment in time but a journey —we know that the merit of an expansion hinges on the sustained quality of its entire arc. Years after its release, Legion is remembered fondly as much for the 11-week content update cadence that served as the framework for its first year as it is for artifact weapons or Khadgar's brilliant dad jokes.In planning out the road ahead following the release of Dragonflight, we've been mindful of the duty we owe our players to nurture this living world and, frankly, the need to do better than we have at times in the recent past. Our goal for Dragonflight is that there should always be something right around the corner, with a new update hitting our test realms shortly after the last one is live and in your hands.In total, we are planning to deliver six content patches, fairly evenly spaced, over the course of 2023. This will include two major updates, the traditional pillars of our expansions—with new zones, raids, and seasonal rewards—but in between those, we want to keep expanding and evolving our world with new world events, updates to systems, and evergreen holidays, new dungeon experiences, new narrative chapters and cinematics that can serve as epilogues or as prologues to the next major step in the adventure, and, most importantly of all, more opportunities for us to respond to feedback and change or add elements based on what we're hearing is most needed by our players.
During the WoW refugee crisis of 2021, I heard many talking heads on YouTube and Twitter speculate about a competition developing between WoW and FFXIV for which was the top game. Some foresaw a future where players could bounce between the two games. Run though the content of the latest patch? No problem, the other game just released something, so run over there for a month.
Is 2023 the year we see WoW's and FFXIV's schedules align? Here is the tentative schedule for the two games this year.
- January - FFXIV patch 6.3
- February - WoW patch 10.0.5
- March - FFXIV patch 6.35
- April - WoW patch 10.0.7
- May - FFXIV patch 6.4
- June - WoW patch 10.1
- July - FFXIV patch 6.45
- August - WoW patch 10.1.5
- September - FFXIV patch 6.5
- October - WoW patch 10.1.7
- November - FFXIV patch 6.55
- December - WoW patch 10.2
Schedules could change and patches could launch in the same month. But will we see the two companies take turns launching content throughout 2023? I really hope so.
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