Too Early To Get Excited About Dawntrail

On Friday, Final Fantasy XIV's Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida announced the next expansion for the game, Dawntrail. The 7.0 content drop will occur sometime in Summer of 2024. Hopefully early in the summer. Yoshi-P's words, not snark coming from myself.

Final Fantasy XIV breaks down its expansion announcements into three phases, thus giving the staff subjects to talk about at the three company sponsored Fanfest events in Las Vegas, London, and Tokoyo. So, for example, players learned that two more combat jobs will appear in Dawntrail. a melee DPS and a caster DPS. But we don't know what the jobs are yet, although Yoshi-P's Mutant Ninja Teenage Turtles tee-shirt did provide a clue to one. The developers will announce the first class in London in October and the second in Tokoyo in February.

That steady drip of information over the course of 6-8 months probably helps build up interest. Players like myself will struggle to complete the content they wish to finish before the launch of the next expansion 10-12 months away. For example, why do I care about new jobs when I have only levelled 4 out of 21 jobs to the maximum level of 90? And as Archanist splits into two jobs (Summoner and Scholar), I really have only levelled 3 out of 20. At this rate, I'll never catch up.

Don't get me wrong, the idea of travelling to the New World is fascinating. But as we found out on Saturday, Zero somehow made it to The First. Does that mean Y'shtola was able to travel worlds also? Is everyone's favorite cat girl going to find Runar again and live happily ever after? Future plans are nice, but I still have questions about the Endwalker 6.x storyline I want answered in patches 6.5 and 6.55.

One last example. Yoshi-P teased some sort of Island Sanctuary quality-of-life feature coming in Dawntrail since Island Sanctuary is so popular. But before I can move on, there is the little matter of levelling my Island Sanctuary to the maximum level in 6.5 and turning my island into a passively generating source of exotic dyes and Hi-Cordial gathering potions. I've already achieved "The Wolf of Easy Street" title, I foresee one more I just have to have before the next expansion.

Yes, the fact that we have an expansion announced for next summer is good. But I still have a lot of content to get through before then. A lot of the content I probably won't finish. If anyone wants to see excitement, talk to me after Tokoyo Fanfest. Until then, I'm too busy to get excited about something 10-12 months down the road.