Final Fantasy 14 Game Director Yoshida Naoshima says there will be plenty of opportunities to show off our strength in MMO’s upcoming stories, but warns that we may have to read. Our Warriors of Light were supposed to be on vacation on the Daunt Trail so it didn’t pan out at all as we’d hoped, but we still took the back seat to give the characters around us the opportunity to step up and grow. Patches 7.2 and 7.3 have increasingly made it clear that the approach cannot advance, so they sat down with “Yoshi-P” on Gamescom, once again becoming a hero, solving puzzles and focused on Dawntrail’s family.
Jamie also looked into plans to address difficulty in new ways, but also asked Yoshida about some of the more story-driven aspects of the recent Final Fantasy 14 updates, and whether they similarly show a change in MMORPG direction. Without going into any particular spoilers, Patch 7.3 has a climactic moment that puts you at the heart of the action. It definitely cheered me on and I saw a similar response from many people who saw me going through it on my playthrough. So is this approach something the team wants to do?
“We would like to focus more on moving this forward to representing the unique roles of players as heroes, providing a real “hero experience” and presenting some very cool cutscenes and sequences that can showcase the “strength of heroes.”
Part of the joy of the most winning action sequence of 7.3 is getting custom animations based on your work. It’s not the only time that matters in the patch. The new dungeon separates players during a single boss battle and passes different combat tasks based on roles. The healer must cleanse the despair of fate, the tank must interrupt the movement of dangerous enemies, and the DPS player must destroy the machines that cause constant damage.
“Within MSQ, you can’t always provide a unique expression for every patch job,” says Yoshida. However, “We’re working on a major update when it comes to using jobs in combat content and bringing out the uniqueness of each job even more.” Before DawnTrail was released, Yoshi-P had bullied him wanting to counter “class homogenization” with an overhaul planned for 8.0.
As for what it looks like, he said, “People might think of it as an extension of the system we have in the game. So players who already like things can feel safe and feel safe that nothing will change for their own experience.
Yoshida says he can’t share any more about this at this point. I don’t think we’ll get much news about this issue, at least until Fanfest 2026, but “I hope to show off the fullest of the player characters in terms of each job’s personality and that they are heroes in the game, and continue to move forward with these aspects.” If you’re among those who are frustrated by DawnTrail’s more backbench role in MSQ, it’s probably coming as welcome news.
Another highlight of Patch 7.3 is the sequence in which the Warrior of Light and his companions investigate an old lab. Again, I will avoid spoilers for the story, but it is an extended section featuring environmental studies, a few light puzzle elements that need to talk to various NPCs and put together the work to solve. He’s not a blue prince in terms of complexity, but rather a refreshing change in the pace that places you in the thick procedures as a player, rather than feeling like you’re being dragged over while the other characters are talking to each other.
“It’s not always like that kind of experience is always embedded in the main scenario,” Yoshida meditates, but “If the idea is interesting and you find it fun for the main scenario, you could incorporate it,” he says, telling the player’s response:
“On the other hand, there are players who just want to hurry through the main scenario as quickly as possible. And for them, this kind of element is more of a burden on them, and at the end of the day it’s the player’s experience. The story is part of it. New.”
Unfortunately, if you’re a story skipper, it can cause some small progress blockers. “They would normally skip all the text just to get to the end of the MSQ,” Yoshida said. “But this time, you’ll actually need to read the text to clear that part,” he says, “For players who want to be as immersed as possible, as they want as they can, and as they want to play the latest extreme trials as quickly as possible, so it’s difficult for us to tweak it.”
DawnTrail is now finished, so I have one more question. Who has become Yoshida’s favorite character? “We put in a lot of effort into making sure that every story of the character is finished in 7.3,” he says. Nevertheless, he thinks for a while and then points to Gulool JA, the youngest star of the expansion (note that there are naturally light story spoilers here).
“If you look at Gruru JA, he’s still a child,” explains Yoshida. “Of all the characters we portray in Final Fantasy 14, I think he will be the youngest in terms of age. But he is a child, but he has a very strong foundation and strong position, but at the same time he is adaptable.
“But when we came to paint the trajectory of his emotions, I think it was one area that really stood out. Another example is that Ramati and Koana take him as part of their family. Their link and bond was to show that they become family.
With these family ties forged, we seem ready to set out for a new meadow. Where you can’t see it at all: frozen waters of the blind current north of Otard? Merasidia, perhaps? Your guess is just as good as me, but I’ll try to pack the perfect combat gear for this trip.
If you’re looking for something different for months while we wait, we’ve rounded up the best new MMOs for 2025 and rounded up the best fantasy games on PC today.
Want to share with us your wildest FF14 theory and speculation? I can do this using PCGamesn Community Discord Server, so please let me know where you think 8.0 is heading.
Additional reports by Jamie Hore from Gamescom.
