So it's looking like the Rising just doesn't get short stories any more?
To recap, the Rising 2024 came and went with no new short stories. I made a thread about this about 10 months ago but there have been some notable updates since then that warrant mention:
- Beginning in late November 2024, four additional short stories were added to the Tales Under the New Moon category. I'll come back to this in a sec.
- Chronicles of Light vol. II was announced in June 2025, and is due for release in October (in digital format) and December (in physical format). It contains all of the hitherto unpublished stories from the side stories site, as well as four additional exclusive stories.
Now, here we are at the start of the Rising 2025, with no short stories in sight.
Since the last regular Rising that included short stories (2023) there have been a few notable irregularities.
First, a story was released out of cycle, on December 7 2023, months after that year's Rising ended, and was done to commemorate the two-year anniversary of Endwalker's release.
Second, the aforementioned short stories in Nov-Dec 2024 were also months AFTER Rising 2024, but still housed under the "10th_anniversary" address. That in itself isn't really a surprise, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that releasing short stories centered on Dawntrail in August/September when the expansion had just released in July might have been too soon. But it DOES seem notable that this second half of the New Moon collection happened roughly a year after the out-of-cycle release of "Days Gone By, Days Yet To Come." Unlike that story, however, nothing is mentioned in the releases of these four stories to indicate why they're being released at this time. It's not the Rising, it's no longer the 10th Anniversary, they're not related to any other seasonal events taking place at the time. So the timing is a mystery.
If the decision-making is that short story releases are a December thing now rather than being part of the Rising, I suppose it doesn't make much difference. And when I brought this up before in other communities, I got responses ranging from "I never knew there were short stories" to "of course they'd stop adding short stories, they don't care about the story any more"... which I mention to indicate that the community as a whole has a questionable track record when it comes to recognizing when this kind of content is added at all.
At this point, I guess I am again requesting if anyone has seen any official commentary from the devs (in any language) about why the stories were shifted away from the Rising and whether or not we can expect more short stories in December, since that appears to be the new pattern.
