A New Chapter Begins: Dawntrail Expansion
Final Fantasy XIV is in a strange place in its history. Despite much of the community being less-than-thrilled about the post-launch support for 2021’s Endwalker expansion, the game is still gaining in popularity, hitting thirty million accounts this year. The release of Patch 6.55 (essentially a prologue to the next expansion, Dawntrail) came with a massive wave of fan support for new party member Wuk Lamat. The hype is huge, even if the game is coming off a bit of a rough spot.
The Impact of COVID on Development and Expectations
Dawntrail itself is coming a bit later than usual, as the effects of COVID threw a permanent wrench into the game’s development cycle, and releasing a full, numbered Final Fantasy title by the same creative team probably pushed it back even further. This expansion has some pretty heavy expectations to fulfill to maintain the momentum of the game’s increasing player base…but if my short time with a preview build was any indication, I think it will be a good summer.
For those who don’t understand how this works, each expansion cycle for the game has featured a “Media Tour” event, where journalists and content creators have a chance to get a small taste of the full release over a few hours. I got to experience a set of three zones: the city of Tuliyollal and two of its surrounding areas, which were populated with the usual monsters, hunts, and FATE events but no story content at all. We had the chance to experience every job at the new level cap, including the Pictomancer and Viper, and play through the first dungeon of the expansion with our fellow creators.
Despite much of the community being less-than-thrilled about the post-launch support for 2021’s Endwalker expansion, the game is nonetheless still gaining in popularity.
While others focused on areas of their expertise, I decided to try and see a little bit of everything, starting with the city of Tuliyollal. It’s the new primary hub for those who have not yet completed Dawntrail‘s story, similar to Old Sharlayan in Endwalker or the Crystarium in Shadowbringers. Like those cities, it’s a pretty large area spread out over different elevation levels. It visually reminded me of a mix of Sharlayan and the villages surrounding Stormblood‘s Ruby Sea. All of the NPCs were placeholders, so I had to give it an aesthetic look-over, but it shows off the game’s new graphical update well. Most exciting for me was that this elevation gave me plenty of opportunity for my favorite idle-time activity, jumping off of tall cliffs.
Exploring New Zones and Hub City Tuliyollal
The two zones were pretty typical affairs for early-game areas, but I was excited to come across several A-Rank Hunts that let me team up with folks around me. The first one, which we beat with only one not-quite-full team, was a massive bee that would alternate between telling players to stay away and come close, with the added twist of forced movement timers in random directions. Failure was punished by instant death, but that made it all the more fun. The “dance,” as I call it, felt high-stakes, and a huge cheer went up between us in the room as we downed it. Unfortunately, we got particularly unlucky with the second Hunt we located, and even though we (and by “we,” I mean my seat neighbor, YouTuber WeskAlber) figured out the mechanics of the fight on the first pull, we seem to have accidentally found it as it was about to despawn. As soon as we wiped, it was gone.
This gave me a bit of a break to start figuring out the two new jobs introduced in Dawntrail. Pictomancer gear looks absolutely ridiculous on a considerable male Hrothgar, but the job itself is a bit of a beast. It effectively features two skill rotations that weave into each other, with its main two combos being supplemented and tied into the gradual combo of painting pictures and unleashing their abilities to grant buffs and paint in your gauge. You can consume part of the gauge to change the spell colors, powering them up, and this also affects the combo finisher, turning it from Holy in White to the even more powerful Comet in Black. It feels a little like the resource building and management of Red Mage, but with significantly more complexity, something that Red Mage is notably lacking (mainly since the only update they get in Patch 7.0 is that they got yet another finishing move, albeit one that requires you to use Manafication first). Pictomancer is visually exciting, looking like absolutely nothing else in the game, and that makes me very eager to learn it from the ground up once Patch 7.0 launches.
Dawntrail is here to raise the bar even higher with a wealth of content for fans to scratch whatever itch they’ve been craving.
Viper is more of a traditionally flashy affair, with single-target and area-of-effect combos that look much more difficult than they are to execute. The player essentially wants to get two different buffs that lie at the end of each combo path, and this allows them to seriously pop off with one of the most satisfying finisher combos I’ve ever used – it alternates global cooldown abilities with off-cooldown ones, basically meaning you get to hit button after button as badass dual-blade slashes fill the screen. I think I got the basic hang of it, but I would not be surprised if there were hidden complexities that a more expert-tier player would enjoy discovering.
The final piece of the puzzle was the first dungeon of Dawntrail‘s story, which excitingly was the one we saw in the sizzle reel that involved a boat chase. It’s not ultimately much different from sequences like the train fight at the beginning of the Tower of Babil. Still, it is a fun way to lead into the first boss fight, which established quickly that Dawntrail would be sticking to the pattern of a steady increase in base-level content complexity. I know better than to spell out mechanics verbatim, but they were appropriately easy to follow and fun to maneuver as things began to pile up on top of each other.
Of course, one of the most fun aspects of the game’s dungeons now is playing them with the Duty Support system, allowing you to be joined by the characters that canonically participated in that story beat. The Warrior of Light is accompanied here by Alphinaud as usual, but also Krile (for the very first time) and Dawntrailnewcomer Wuk Lamat. I didn’t learn a ton of new information about either, as the combat banter the party shares is pretty lightweight. Still, given that none of the field NPCs were feeling talkative in this preview, I looked forward to the touch of personality I got from hanging out with the Scions.
New Jobs: Pictomancer and Viper
The other bit of fun I had was trying on all of the new job gear and taking in the environment to look at how much the game’s visuals have improved in this expansion cycle. Remember that A Realm Reborn celebrated its tenth-anniversary last year, and the original, long-dead 1.0 version of FFXIV was even older than that, so the game was beginning to show its age. But even with the update not finalized (the new benchmark with the updated character models was not yet ready at the time), I could easily see many of the improvements for myself.
I frequently poke fun at the “yarn-hair” look of Final Fantasy XIV, which has undoubtedly gotten overall flashier in the last few years, but it’s mainly through more detailed and massive foes and environments. Now, we finally get an all-around glow-up, and I wanted to look at several more elaborate outfits. First, the Red Mage gear is made mainly of velvet that now beautifully captures light from every angle, perfectly representing its real-world counterpart. The Samurai outfit features many metal pieces that shine more realistically in the bright sun. The Machinist gear has many leather pieces that significantly improve the game’s texture quality, looking as rough as the real thing.
Excitement Builds for Dawntrail’s Release
Dawntrail is now only a few short weeks away from launch, and given what I’ve gotten to experience here, I might be even more excited than I was for Endwalker as a baby, first-year game reviewer. Where the last expansion was a grand finale to everything that had come before, Dawntrail looks to be precisely the refreshing shake-up the game needs to shake off its cobwebs and push into the modern generation. It seems like my summer vacation…is just beginning.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail will be released in Early Access, available to all preorders, on June 28th for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox Series consoles, with a full release on July 2nd.
