Authors Saving Throw / Final Fantasy XIV

Over the years, the game has received many updates addressing criticism players had.

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• The entire game's development story is a tale of a massive saving throw. The original game (referred to these days as "version 1.0") had a dismal reception among both fans and critics, to the point that the original game's release is considered one of the worst MMO games of all time. As pointed out in a 2014 GDC panel by producer Naoki Yoshida, the game had an unhealthy obsession with graphic quality over gameplay ^note The most notorious example: a single, noninteractable flowerpot that was only meant as a background object had as many polygons dedicated to it as the detailed, customizable playable characters, a surprising lack of MMORPG knowledge amongst development team members ^note who were also struggling to program the game with Crystal Tools, an engine that was not only designed specifically for single player games, but was the same engine that contributed to the Troubled Production of the Fabula Nova Crystalllis project, and the mindset that every problem could be fixed or patched in a future update as long as it got out the door on time. Since A Realm Reborn hit, the game has been getting glowing praise, singlehandedly took Square Enix from losing money to being profitable, and surpassed Final Fantasy XI's subscriber figure almost immediately. Additionally, nobody and nothing from the game made it into either Dissidia Duodecim or the first Theatrhythm because Square barely wanted to acknowledge the game even existed. Come Theatrhythm Curtain Call? Y'shtola's on the cover, songs are in, and according to Square reps at Tokyo Game Show, this is as a matter of course. And Lightning Returns had its crossover costume with XIV promoted very heavily. The game's continued growth and expansions have increased popularity and playerbase to the point where the game is going toe-to-toe with the only other lasting juggernaut of the MMO genre - World of Warcraft - a major showing of how the game went from a failure to a success over the years since its relaunch. A feature-length documentary by Noclip recorded much about the game's history in extensive detail can be viewed here, if one wanted to get an in-depth look at what went wrong.
• While the initial release of A Realm Reborn (aka "version 2.0") was met with a lot of praise, players grew critical of the characters in the main story quests, including the Warrior of Light. Common complains were that major characters spent most of their time ordering the player around, and that the player character just did what they're told without much effect on the plot. Heavensward tackles both issues by having the major characters be a lot more proactive and having the Warrior not just emote more often, but also form bonds with several characters to flesh them out. Also, the issue of the Warrior of Light having Chronic Hero Syndrome is deconstructed by showing the Heroic Fatigue that the Warrior goes through and how it's affecting their psyche. This fatigue even becomes a plot point in the Dark Knight story, culminating in a battle with this inner rage as an Enemy Without that the Warrior of Light has to defeat.
• For all of the times that Minfilia says "Pray return to the Waking Sands", one would think that there would be a way to access the Waking Sands quickly. But for the longest time, there wasn't one. The nearest aetheryte shard is quite a trek away from the Waking Sands, necessitating a long walk to get there. You're going to have to do this multiple times throughout the game, since the Waking Sands serves as the Home Base for the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and the Warrior of Light. Even after the Scions leave for a bigger base, the Waking Sands is still narratively important enough to require a few more trips before you can truly leave it behind. The characters even do some Lampshade Hanging in-universe about how much of a pain it is to get to the Waking Sands, which just feels like a gut punch when you've gone back and forth so many times. Future expansions would take note of this, making the home base of each expansion much closer to aetheryte towers or shards for easier access. Also, aetheryte tickets which teleport you directly to the Waking Sands for free were eventually added as rewards for three different main scenario quests, including the quest that tells you where the Waking Sands is. These quests drop far more tickets than necessary to complete the MSQ of A Realm Reborn — it was thirty tickets before patch 6.57, with that patch bumping it all the way up to 99 tickets. By the time you complete the MSQ of A Realm Reborn, if you want to go back to the Waking Sands to do optional content, you'll almost certainly have plenty of the instant-teleport tickets left over.
• The moogles in the Churning Mists side quests and main quest during 3.0 were met with massive backlash. The moogles off as lazy and having the player do everything for them while also forcing them to search high and low for certain moogles when called for. 3.3 makes up for it by having the moogle beastmen quests make moogles eager to work while only asking help from the player when necessary. The other quests involving the moogles let everyone get their revenge on them by either forcing the moogles to gather an absurd number of materials, find other moogles in the same way that the player was forced to find them, or even giving the player prompts to say "Piss off, kupo!" or literally slap a moogle for mouthing off at them.
• A narrative example in 3.5: at the end of 3.3's story, a lot of players criticized the Warrior of Light and Alphinaud for their actions, necessitating further fixes later down the road. The two of them throw Nidhogg's eyes into the Sea of Clouds, where the Ascians reclaim them for their own purposes. At first it seemed stupid that they'd literally toss such dangerous things off the side of a bridge, but in 3.5 it is explained that the bottom of that ravine, and of the Sea of Clouds in general, is a constantly destructive torrent of eternally clashing wind and water aether that no mortal creature can survive in. What may make it a throw is that apparently the characters knew about this well and beyond it being actually stated (though Aymeric, who made the call, has lived in Ishgard so he would be the one to know), though either way it makes their quick disposal of the eyes seem a little less stupid. In Stormblood, when Aymeric shows up in The Lochs, many of the words out of his mouth are regret and self-deprecation for how stupid it was of him to tell you to toss them in the heat of the moment when it lead to Shinryu's birth and this whole mess. At the end of the 4.0 story, Estinien looks over the eyes and notes they have no aether left in them, but decides to take zero chances and destroys them on the spot, rendering Nidhogg Killed Off for Real and removing the eyes as a Macguffin from the plot.
• With the announcement of Stormblood revealing new housing districts would be open on the new continent in the Far East, many people were concerned that everyone would be fighting over the limited space, including free companies that want to move there. The developers would put this fear at ease by announcing that the new housing zones would not be available until some time after Stormblood launches so that people can enjoy the new content without worrying about grabbing a house. They also announced a housing transfer program for free companies to help them move into the new homes.
• A few days after the housing districts dropped, Yoshi-P appeared to personally apologize for the failings of the housing zone transfer, not realizing how popular it would be and failing to adequately prepare the servers for such a response. He promised that, with Patch 4.2, more wards would become available not only in Shirogane, but also in the starting zones and bolstering their servers for the possible rush.
• Despite being highly promoted as a new race in Heavensward, there were a notable lack of Au Ras within the main story (only seen in Side Quests and Job storylines). Stormblood remedies this by providing world building for both Raen and Xaela Au Ras, the latter serving a major role within the main story.
• Before, you had to grind FATEs to unlock the Crystal Tower series of raids. This was so unpopular that none of the Alliance Raids or Normal Raids made after it required FATEs to unlock. Taking things a step further, patch 4.4 removed the FATE step of the Crystal Tower unlock, changing it to finding the item(s) in question somewhere and simply completing the quest.
• In a cross-game example, the Return to Ivalice and Save the Queen storylines were created with Yasumi Matsuno, the original director and writer of the major Ivalice Alliance titles in Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII. For years, the ending of Tactics had intentionally been left ambiguous as to whether or not Ramza and company died in the aftermath of Ultima's Defeat Equals Explosion, although he made statements that their adventures continued off-screen. In adapting the world of Ivalice into the XIV setting, Yoshida and Matsuno reworked the story so as to actually create an extension of the ideas behind the game's ending, creating an Earn Your Happy Ending scenario, and working to meld both versions of Ivalice more comfortably together by working in the buried legacy of the Tactics history with the modern Dalmasca in XII compared to it being far ahead in the timeline previously, while still feeling like it fits the XIV setting.
• The accuracy stat was changed in Stormblood, as players derided it as a Scrappy Mechanic. Originally, accuracy would determine whether an attack would hit, similar to the stat's use in previous Final Fantasy games. But that meant that players would randomly miss attacks for no reason at all, which was needlessly frustrating. To make up for the change, and so as to not make the accuracy-boosting Heaven's Eye materia useless, a new kind of attack modifier called a Direct Hit was added in the same patch. Direct Hits are based on accuracy, hurt more than a normal attack, and appear more often than Critical Hits, but don't deal quite as much extra damage as Critical Hits. However, both can stack to form a Direct Critical Hit, indicated by damage text with two exclamation points where both a Direct Hit and a Critical Hit occur at the same time. So not only did the developers get rid of a much-maligned mechanic, but anyone who loaded their equipment with Heaven's Eye got a free upgrade that boosted their Direct Hit rate. The response to the change was very positive, and accuracy has remained this way ever since Stormblood as a result.
• The death of Emperor Varis, the Greater-Scope Villain and leader of the Garlean Empire which has caused so much misery during The Stinger in Shadowbringers had many players upset that they would never get the chance to confront them directly. Patch 5.25 rectified it by having this character as a boss fight at the end of the relic quest as well as a stand alone extreme trial for players who wanted to take a swing at them.
• Relic weapons are known for being very grindy and it's a common consensus that the first step of any relic tends to have a lot of grind. The base relics in Shadowbringers were made much easier to obtain by simply giving you a free one for your current job once you've completed the story quests related to it, and extra relics could be bought via materials with Poetic tomestones, which take little time to grind for.
• For years, one of the biggest complaints of A Realm Reborn was the sheer amount of quests one has to do in order to reach Heavensward. Just completing the 2.0 MSQ is over two hundred quests, and it's another hundred quests between ARR and Heavensward. Many new players have admitted to outright quitting the game due to both the amount of quests and the constant back and forth travel that makes it feel like Padding. The devs announced that patch 5.3 would cut 13% of the quests in A Realm Reborn (about one out of every eight quests), and other quests that couldn't be cut would have the number of steps to complete them reduced.
• Patch 5.3 would roll previously optional content into the MSQ for A Realm Reborn: "My Little Chocobo", a sidequest for Grand Companies that unlocks access to a chocobo mount and the ability to use other mounts; and the Crystal Tower raid questline, for plot-related convenience in regards to events in Shadowbringers heavily revolving around the Crystal Tower.
• Flight was introduced in Heavensward and later expansions, but A Realm Reborn never got flight capabilities. Even with increased mount speed from both story progression and riding maps, many have complained about how annoying it was to travel to certain places in the ARR zones due to their more closed and linear nature. Patch 5.3 would allow flying in the old areas once the 2.0 MSQ was completed, without having to find Aether Currents or complete any additional sidequests.
• Blue Mages were originally seen as incredibly frustrating to 100% complete due to the random nature of their skill learning, which was especially bad for primal spells which had a less than .1% chance on Extreme difficulty that could only be increased up to 7 times by having other blue mages, not to mention they were seen as being underrated to the point of being pitiful instead of the Purposely Overpowered Master of All that the developers used to justify them being a level-limited job. Patch 5.1 rebalanced Blue Mage heavily and gave them multiple new skills that made them as overpowered as they were envisioned as being, while changing the rules on learning so that it's a 100% chance as long as you're in a synced full party, regardless of what the other roles are, making it significantly easier to complete the spell tome and get ready to tackle the Masked Carnival. 5.4's level cap increase to 70 also came with multiple extremely powerful spells, most notably Basic Instinct which can buff a Blue Mage's healing and damage to the point they can outperform a level 80 when they're alone, which puts Blue Mage at a point where nobody can doubt their efficiency at clearing old content.
• Raid drops have been a point of contention since its inception, due to being locked on a weekly clear basis. On Normal Raids, it would drop four tokens from a set loot pool, forcing players that have been shafted by RNG to go through it again just to get one, especially when having to fight up to seven others for one important token. Savage raids have even stricter loot rules, dropping the gear pieces themselves and giving everyone a clear token. This also means that an unlucky player can go for weeks without getting the gear they want, even with the clear tokens ensuring they get one piece every few weeks. Shadowbringers would remedy that by having their drop tables give eight tokens, expanding the choices and ensuring everyone can walk away with one token for gear. Endwalker follows up with dropping gear coffers for Savage (and Extreme) raids, removing the randomness entirely by giving job-appropriate gear when opened. In the case of weaponry, it ensures one person gets a weapon, and potentially two since it's accompanied by a weapon drop.
• The Bozjan Southern Front, a field operations multi-player arena introduced in Shadowbringers, is an instanced open area, but one that improves on the faults of the Eureka field operations arena.
  • The area is synced to level 80, at i430 minimum, but also has the unique feature of syncing up classes, allowing players to level up classes 71 and up (and make up for the lack of a new Deep Dungeon in Shadowbringers).
  • Mounts are available from the start, relieving the slow hike from one point to another. The area is also more condensed in comparison, further shortening the traveling distance.
  • Instead of an Elemental Level and Elemental EXP, you have Resistance Rank and Mettle, which has no heavy bearing on your strength in the instance and requires much less grind to raise.
  • Players under Resistance Rank 5 are able to respawn without penalty, easing up the early-game punishments. Even with the existence of a death penalty, it amounts to a minor slap on the wrist, and can be easily made up so long as you don't respawn back to base and take the even bigger hit to mettle.
  • Lost Actions, the successor to Logos Actions, allows players to carry as much actions as they can within a weight limit, and can quickly assign actions to slots by preference. Previously, players could only carry up to three sets of actions at a time, and there was no way to break paired logos apart. Lost Action Appraisers are also stationed in more places, so players don't have to warp back to the main base to appraise actions.
  • Though the Southern Front is also intended to be the place for Resistance Weapon progression, players that are not interested in the Front's contents can still obtain resources via FATEs or Alliance Raids.
  • After the awfully-executed stat customization on Eureka Weapons, the Augmented Law's Order weapons goes back to giving the player choice on what stats they want, down to the exact point per stat. There's still a hard limit on how many points can be allocated, but players are otherwise given absolute freedom and flexibility for even the most hardcore number crunchers.
• Healers have starved for a new job, only having the one healer addition in Heavensward, while tanks and DPS have been obtaining new jobs for their roles in Stormblood and Shadowbringers. Healers had only three to work with, and it stood that way for a full six years until Endwalker gave much-needed love for the role in the form of Sage. It was also telling they were aware of the drought by making it the first job reveal in the February 2021 Announcement Showcase.
• Another narrative example was done in 5.4 regarding the Sorrows of Werlyt storyline, involving the gross implications of Wife Husbandry between Gaius and Livia. As a villain, this helped make Gaius seem a little more disturbing, which is why it remained, but in 5.4 it was discussed by a friend of the Werlyt children that Gaius actually found Livia's romantic advances creepy, and starting keeping her at arm's reach well before the XIV'th legion's assault on Eorzea in 1.0. This helps make Gaius as a protagonist a bit more likeable by removing the bizarre and gross implications around this type of relationship - albeit by making Livia look even more insane.
• After the rather polarizing decision to gender-lock Viera and Hrothgar to female and male respectively, there was considerable rejoicing among the fanbase when it was announced during Fanfest 2021 that Viera would be getting male counterparts with the launch of Endwalker, whilst there was similar rejoicing when female Hrothgar were announced to be added with Dawntrail at Fanfest 2024.
• While there was nothing inherently wrong with Triple Triad itself, the deck building was fairly limited: while there were no restrictions for cards up to 3 Stars rarity, players couldn't put more than one 4 or 5 Stars card in a deck; on top of being generally restrictive, this made 4 Stars cards redundant, as most of them were slightly worse than 5 Stars cards. Patch 5.5 liberated the deckbuilding some, allowing players to put either two 4 Stars cards or one 4 Stars and one 5 Stars card in the same deck.
• Shadowbringers' Role Quests fixed the class/job questlines. By the time of Stormblood, the plotlines had worn out their welcome due to inconsistent writing quality and/or being out of place for the respective class/job. The level 60-70 Warrior questline in particular was a romance arc that came right out of nowhere and reset an NPC's progress in his own personal struggle back to square one just to do it, which caused a lot of frustration. Even questlines that were considered well-written all the way through (like the Dark Knight questline, which gave the Warrior of Light a more personal stake) were criticized for having no story impact outside of their respective questlines. The Role Quests fixed these issues by focusing on telling a single storyline per role, all of which had a decisive ending and led to a finale if you did all the other Role Quests. Due to the positive feedback, the Role Quests more or less have replaced the original Class/Job Quests; Endwalker launched with only its new jobs, Sage and Reaper, getting job-specific quests, both of which only go across ten levels and tell stories with decisive endings before letting you move on to use them in further Role Quests.
• 6.1 restructured many of the A Realm Reborn dungeons to better fit the game's current dungeon design. Most generally consisted of larger corridors to better compensate for the camera, but to also give wiggle room for pulling mobs. Other details include...
  • Copperbell Mines revamping the first boss fight, which more or less was nothing but mooks you could kill in one hit spawning in waves for several minutes before a less-than-durable boss finally showed itself.
  • Haukke Manor adding a portal back to the main entrance after the fight with the Manor Steward and Jester, eliminating the need to climb the stairs back up or use Return to do the same.
  • The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak eliminating the slimy flooring that inflicted Heavy when traversed upon. It also did away with the web walls and Photocell hunting that barricaded several doors.
• The removal of Cape Westwind as a Trial and splitting the Ultima Weapon and Lahabrea encounters also led to a revamp of their respective fights since before then, players could easily curb-stomp them and call it a day, something the dev team commented on during a Live Letter. As a result, the new encounters made these fights as dangerous as the narrative makes them out to be. In particular...
  • Rhitathyn powers himself up with Dynamis, introducing the concept to the story well before it's properly touched on as well as becoming overall more damaging. He even makes a last ditch effort to kill you by binding you with Holmgang while in a fiery napalm field. If he's going down, then he might as well try his damnedest to take you with him.
  • Lahabrea actually kills the Warrior of Light! Hydaelyn doesn't let it stick, but it makes Lahabrea out to be every bit of the threat an Ascian overlord should have always been.
  • The Ultima Weapon finally gets to show off its entire might with a slew of mechanics borrowed from its Ultimate Trial incarnation. Not only that, Hydaelyn uses the last of her strength to give a 4-person Light Party a Level 3 Limit Break. Since all the content up to this point was nothing but Light Parties, this will most certainly be a new player's first time seeing an LB3, showcasing the awesome might it can bring.
• After introducing new features to the housing lottery system in patch 6.1, the lottery would sometimes display a winning lottery number of 0, which was impossible to roll. A patch in May 2022 not only addressed the problem, but said the people who actually won the lottery would get to keep the land they won in the lottery for no cost. However, the patch also added an NPC to let these lottery winners pay the fee they would have been assessed, even though they no longer had to pay it.
• Despite the stumbles the housing lottery had in its implementation, the system as a whole is far more equal-opportunity than the first-come first-serve system that was exploited by bots to the seven hells and back. In addition to that, measures to prevent players from scalping plots with Free Companies were put in place to ensure everyone is on the same play field.
• Two late-game dungeons in A Realm Reborn — Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium — left newbies with a Sadistic Choice because of the large amount of cutscenes in those dungeons. Either they could skip the cutscenes to stay with the group but rob themselves of any emotional payoff, or watch the cutscenes and get left behind by other players who wanted to complete the dungeon as efficiently as possible. This issue was solved by making the cutscenes in the two aforementioned dungeons unskippable, even if a player had seen them before. While there was some grumbling about this among the playerbase, it's been generally accepted as the only plausible solution to the problem. As compensation, the rewards for these late-game dungeons were doubled because of how much longer they took to complete, and the bonuses for completing them with a newbie in the group were also increased. Patch 6.1 would later streamline these dungeons by trimming a lot of the backtracking and unnecessary cutscenes which were seen as Padding. The boss fights were also revamped with more modern encounter design; Livia and Gaius in particular got the lion's share of new moves to make them feel as threatening as their military standing makes them out to be. All of this both allowed for emotional payoffs with the storyline while rewarding players who stuck with it.
• Patch 6.2 modified a scene during Heavensward to address a longstanding issue regarding how the game's mechanics and story interacted. Why couldn't the Warrior of Light try to heal Haurchefant during his death scene as a Healer-type class? The updated cutscene inserts Alphinaud into the mix, who immediately tries to heal Haurchefant after he's wounded. However, Alphinaud states that his healing magic isn't working because Haurchefant's wound is too deep and it refuses to mend. This means that even if the Warrior of Light could use healing magic, the damage was too severe for anybody to fix, and Haurchefant was going to die no matter what.
• Patch 6.2 also modified Paladin swords and shields so that they roll as one item, in a consumable package that'd give you both pieces. Beforehand, getting the best gear for a Paladin required rolling for both the shortsword and the shield to fill in both slots whenever a Paladin rolled for loot or purchased items. It was hard enough finding one piece you wanted when clearing some of the harder content, much less two of them. This change also made crafting them more convenient, instead of having to craft them separately (and potentially losing materials for crafting essentially half a weapon).
• It's possible to save arrangements for waymarks so that you don't have to spend time putting down the same marks in duties that you play all the time. However, for the longest time, a player only had five such save slots. This meant that players either had to save these waymark slots just for duties they ran all the time, or have people in a Free Company that had different waymark slots for different raids in a set. Patch 6.3 increased the number of waymark slots per player from five to thirty, allowing a lot more freedom for these slots and a lot less working around which player had a slot for which raid.
• For quite a while, cooldowns on certain skills did not reset after the party was wiped out in an 8-man raid. This meant they would either have to wait for their used skills to recharge, or go into battle with only a few of their skills ready to use. This was particularly brutal with certain abilities like the Paladin's Hallowed Ground (several seconds of invincibility, but a seven-minute cooldown) and the White Mage's Benediction (fully restores one player's HP, but a three-minute cooldown). The problem was eventually addressed in Heavensward by having all skills fully reset upon a Total Party Kill.
• For the entirety of A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, the only way healers could deal damage was by using the Cleric Stance skill, which swapped the player's Mind and Intelligence stats since the Intelligence stat was what magic damage was based on. Cleric Stance created a problem with lesser skilled healers where they didn't get the hang of stance dancing (swapping between Cleric Stance being on or off) and screwed up their healing, which could cause serious problems in the heat of battle. Stormblood would make healer damage be based on their Mind stat and Cleric Stance was retooled to be a flat damage buff for a few seconds, allowing healers to dish out damage and swap to healing when needed without having to press a button for it. Cleric Stance was eventually removed by Shadowbringers.
• Relic weapons throughout the game's lifespan since A Realm Reborn were easily one of the biggest highlights of the excessive grind one has to go through to even hope to get their final forms — which mostly just serve now as a cosmetic Bragging Rights Reward if you're not doing it mid-expansion. This is most infamous with the Zodiac and Eurekan sets in particular, though all of them were notorious. Combine this with the Tomestone Gear grind and it was often more efficient to just bother with Relics after their expansion had passed. Endwalker opted to save the pain of numerous Savage runs or RNG FATE hunts in favor of (so far) mostly just relying on the second-highest tomestone currency to supply the first three forms of the Manderville Weapons, which is far easier to acquire while still keeping players relevant in Item Level, and by tying them to simply progressing the Hildibrand questline, which are mostly story-driven batshit-insane comedy segments with a few fun Trials along the way. While some have complained that it's too easy compared to the Relics of previous expansions, most players prefer the Tomestone grind to the utter frustration of what getting other Relic Weapons was like. The more controversial question is whether forcing players to go through hours of quests in the prior expansions (sans Shadowbringers) and making said comedy content mandatory (if scene-skippable) for these Relics was the right choice.
• The Duty Finder: Alliance Raids roulette was notorious for giving the first three raids — The Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower, and The World of Darkness, AKA the Crystal Tower series from A Realm Reborn — and pretty much nothing else, due to Loophole Abuse in the duty-finding mechanics. Players looking to get their daily roulette bonuses as quickly as possible cheated the system by removing gear until they were below the item level for everything except the Crystal Tower series, since those raids take the least amount of time. But this meant players who didn't do this would just get the same raids over and over again. As a result, Complacent Gaming Syndrome set in, and players rarely queued in for it. This also left players who needed to complete the Crystal Tower series after it was made mandatory with very long queue times, because there were few players coming in to fill the slots. Patch 6.5 changed this so that a player has to meet an item level requirement in order to queue in, with higher job levels needing higher item levels. This was done both as a way to increase the duties that high-level players would see, and to bring a decisive end to players who were cheating the system at the expense of everyone else. In addition, new rewards were added to the roulette in the same patch to make harder raids offer greater rewards, also as a way to incentivize people to do the later raids.
• The Final Boss of Endwalker is faced in the trial "The Final Day", and it's meant to be the culmination of the entire storyline that started in A Realm Reborn. However, due to ever-increasing item levels as new gear was introduced, players were skipping parts of the fight. The trial features what are essentially mid-fight cutscenes, and players rapidly gaining strength meant that the boss started skipping phases to try and keep up with how much damage the players were doing. This inadvertently ended up robbing new players of an emotional payoff through no fault of their own. It was possible to go into this trial with Minimum Item Level through the Party Finder, but the average player experiencing this trial for the first time naturally wouldn't know they had to do that to see everything. Patch 6.5 added an item-level sync to the Final Day in order to cap the party's power at around what would have been expected at the end of 6.0, so that new players wouldn't miss anything during the climax.
• Player Versus Player was, admittedly, never a huge focus of the game, with it being generally ignored or panned - however, the rework that came in Endwalker changed this significantly - every single Job was reworked, their PVP kits slimmed down and streamlined, while at the same time obtaining a stronger indiviual identity with Limit Breaks with unique effects instead of generic role-based ones. Other additions, such as Crystalline Conflict, the quality of life changes for Frontline, and the increased seasonal rewards were also very well recieved, causing it to become significantly more popular within the playerbase.
• The Xbox Series X|S release of the game released initially as an Open Beta Free Trial for new XBOX players to get interested, before offering the required Starter Edition for the first month after launch to all players with Game Pass Ultimate. This ended up allowing former subscribers and new players to get into the full game for free.
• During the 2024 Tokyo FanFest event, Yoshi-P said the reason that Krile was chosen as the champion of the then-new Pictomancer DPS job for Dawntrail is because players felt that Krile had gotten unfairly looked over, a complaint that Yoshi-P agreed with. While many of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn changed classes or were modified to be more useful as combat characters with the Trust system, Krile was subsequently left in the dust as a Conjurer. Starting with Dawntrail, she was added as the Pictomancer job representative and confirmed to be a Trust character starting with 7.0, both to give her more story presence and utility in gameplay.
• The release date of Endwalker had to be pushed back two weeks from November 23, 2021 to December 7 to deal with technical issues to ensure that everything would run smoothly upon launch. During the announcement of this delay in a Letter from the Producer, Yoshida was visibly upset and apologized frequently, adding that this decision was a selfish one, as he had delayed Q&A testing to refine elements of the world and story. However, Yoshida admitted during the same Live Letter that he hated having to delay the game because he knew that people had already taken time off of work and/or school on the original release date, and that it was the first time in his career that he ever had to push a release date back. Come the Tokyo FanFest in January 2024, and Yoshida didn't announce the release date for the then-upcoming Dawntrail expansion, unlike every other FanFest that occurs with the full trailer of an expansion. Yoshida explained this as not wanting to jump the gun and potentially have to delay another expansion, should something come up. He only publicly announced the release date of Dawntrail as July 2, 2024 at PAX East in late March of that year, once he was absolutely sure that the team could release Dawntrail with no delay.invoked
  • If you're a fan of Elden Ring, the release date of Dawntrail might be a saving throw to you as well, in a meta sense. Yoshida mentioned himself that Dawntrail was originally going to release a week earlier than announced... which would put early access on the exact same date as Elden Ring's "Shadow of the Erdtree" DLC. In the release date announcement, Yoshida referenced this directly as not wanting to compete with that game and/or divide players' attentions. Yoshida also insisted that it had nothing to do with the fact that he himself was looking forward to the DLC.
    Yoshida: (translated from Japanese) We figured everybody would be interested in playing the Elden Ring DLC. I'll give you one week! [...] Just want to make it clear, it's not because I wanted to play Elden Ring DLC and then play Dawntrail...
• The release of Dawntrail coincided with the implementation of the First Graphical Update, which was a major overhaul to the game's textures, lighting, shadows, etc. to be better-looking than before while also keeping the same general artstyle. At the 2024 Tokyo FanFest, Yoshi-P announced that every player would also get a free Fantasia — an item that allows players to completely change their appearance in any way they want — when Dawntrail came out. That way, players could tweak details about their Player Character to make them look how they wanted after the First Graphical Update happened without having to spend extra money.
• A point of contention was the Blacklist system, which was so ineffective at protecting players from bad actors and continuous harassment that it was a Scrappy Mechanic. Dawntrail would give a much-welcome upgrade to it, ranging from making blacklisted players completely invisible to you (except in duties for gameplay reasons, but it would redact their name and keep their messages blocked), to kicking nuisance players out of your Free Company property instantly, to making blacklists apply to your Free Company house instantly, which helps players hosting events keep things tidy for everyone. Blacklisting players will also block the player's entire account, so they can't be sneaky and continue harassing you as another character.

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