FF14 Dawntrail might have divided opinions with its slightly lower-stakes story and the sideline role for its core cast, but there's one aspect everyone seems in unison on. The combat content in the MMORPG's new expansion – dungeons, trials, raids, savages, and extremes alike – has all been incredibly well received. It combines the inventive and flashy designs seen during Endwalker with more unique and challenging mechanics, and it's a ton of fun as a result. At Gamescom 2024, I sat down with game director Naoki Yoshida to ask about his plans for the patches, which include the FF11-adjacent alliance raid and new 24-player savage content.
While the story is often cited as the biggest reason why FF14 combat content was too repetitive in Endwalker.
His plan, then, is to increase the variety of mechanics players see, and hopefully push us all to think a bit more and build our own strategies to respond to fights. Dawntrail has certainly delivered so far, especially with its extreme trials, the endgame expert dungeons, and the first raid tier of The Arcadion. But that's just the tip of the iceberg in of that push for 'a more fulfilling gameplay experience' as the team builds towards the 8.0 expansion. As such, I ask Yoshida if the positive response to combat in Dawntrail has given him confidence in his plans to test players more.
"Of course when the expansion first released, the level cap was raised, and that's really just the starting line. I have to say that the players' response to the new mechanics is more positive than I was expecting – there were more players who liked the mechanics [than I anticipated]," Yoshida tells me via translator. "And so now, as we are creating the raids for 7.2 (the second part of The Arcadion), we are going to be working on incorporating more unique experiences and surprising things. So I hope the players will enjoy that."
There's more to come before we get there, of course. "In patch 7.1, we will be having the [FF11 crossover] alliance raid Echoes of Vana'diel, and we are also creating a 24-person savage which is shaping up to be really good. So I hope players will look forward to that." Yoshida's mention of a 24-player savage has sparked much discussion, so I ask whether it will be tied into either the alliance raids or the new Bozja-style large scale multiplayer content the team is working on, and whether Yoshida specifically wants to respond to concerns that Endwalker's alliance raids are a little too low-peril.
"So firstly, with regards to the alliance raid, it is designed as usual so that players can enjoy the experience," he responds. "But, having said that, we have received that alliance raids are getting too simple and so we have designed it in a way so that it's not going to be a walkthrough."
"Currently, what we would say about the normal alliance raid in of the difficulty is that it is quite standard. In the development team we always have this discussion and it's tough to decide on where we should draw the line in of compromise. We always need to consider what the average item level of the gear that players have is going to be, and it's really difficult to predict."
Sometimes that average item level can be above what's expected, Yoshida explains, but sometimes it falls below. "When we are testing content, we include of our marketing and PR teams, and we found that there are some times where we just wipe and wipe, and there are some times where we just end up running through it and it's a super easy clear. So it's really difficult to decide where we draw the line – we are really torn all the time.
"However, this time when we were making the alliance raid, we decided very clearly what we wanted," he continues. "When a player goes through on their first playthrough they will probably wipe three times – this was what we felt was a good line to draw. It's not that we want to make it difficult, but we want to provide an exciting experience for the players. So I hope they will experience that."
"On the other hand, the 24-person savage – this is going to be a completely different boss. So it is going to be completely different content, okay?" That's certainly an exciting prospect, and it'll be interesting to see how the team has developed mechanics for a larger group to handle at once. Past alliance raids have incorporated some really fun ideas, even back as far as the Crystal Tower, but many of these mechanics aren't as noticeable today due to the sheer power of the average player and their familiarity with the content.
In closing, I ask Yoshida about the response to the recent savage tier for The Arcadion. It was certainly a delight, but players across the board found it was cleared relatively quickly, in particular due to very light DPS checks meaning that there wasn't as much need to optimize your play once you'd learned how to approach each fight's mechanics. Was this intentional to help players get into savage raiding, I query, or did it fall more on the DPS balance changes that landed on the same day?
"Whenever we release a new expansion, in the first tier of the raid series we always lower the difficulty," Yoshida remarks. He does, however, address the DPS balance: "The Pictomancer stood out above the other DPS jobs, but when we took into that players are really enjoying playing it, we didn't want to nerf Pictomancer. For that reason, we took the decision to power up the other jobs."
"So when it came to the DPS check, we had already done the balancing and that happened before we powered up the other jobs." The DPS check tweaks are very last-minute, typically right before a patch releases, Yoshida explains. "We could have potentially adjusted the DPS checks – however that could have led to a situation where the value adjustments might have been too high and players would not have been able to clear the content."
This is a situation we saw in Endwalker patch 6.2 with the savage variant of its eighth raid fight, where Yoshida himself wrote an apology post to explain that "a miscalculation on our part resulted in the boss's HP being roughly 1% too high in comparison to previous fourth-stage savage raids." This led to many players struggling to clear it at launch, and certain 'weaker' jobs being discriminated against in party finder – a situation that's rarely seen even among the highest tiers of play in Final Fantasy 14.
That's not the only potential issue, however, Yoshida tells me. "There was also the possibility it could cause a bug and that the server could go down. So when we took that into , we thought, 'Let's just keep it the way it is so players can enjoy the raid.' But of course, I do know very well that players in the community really look forward to the World First raid race, and they had expectations of a really tough encounter. So in that regard, I do think it is a shame that the tier wasn't as tough as they were expecting."
"Having said that, in patch 7.1 there will be the 24-person savage content, and there will also be the latest ultimate encounter [Futures Rewritten, based on the Eden raid series from Shadowbringers]. And in the 7.2 raids as well, we are creating the DPS check so that it's not going to feel as loose. We will take into what we've done so far and do a good job of creating content moving forward."
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