It blows my mind how “quiet” FFXIV development seems!

[Omedon]

Coming from other games that would have all their story points spoiled months in advance, and its new classes/jobs “solved” and slotted into their place in the “meta,” long before expansion launch, it’s just so refreshing to… be “allowed to not know” these things! I don’t know if there’s just a crust to this information that I intentionally haven’t even looked for to punch through, but holy damn it’s like night and day to walk into a 10 year old game that doesn’t have an encyclopedic 3rd party “shameless black market of secrets” fansite somewhere in plain sight!

I know there are people that feel they need more info, damage meters and the like, out of a sense of perfectionism or self improvement (or either of those as a front for something perhaps less altruistic) but please believe me when I tell you, as an MMO veteran of many games dating back to early EverQuest that you are blessed to have this seeming wall of… of trust for the devs on the other side of what looks like a thick curtain!

Trust me when I tell you that overthinking “optimal play” with information “not really intended for the audience yet” is where fun goes to die! Never change, FFXIV community!

PS: Your respectful anti-spoiler discipline is also a godssend that I hope you never tarnish!

That’s all I wanted to say here, thanks again!

[KDSilver]

Media Tour and combat/jobs adjusment live letter is for Septembre.
That's why it looks quiet now, but new info are coming before expac launch.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Media Tour and combat/jobs adjusment live letter is for Septembre.
That's why it looks quiet now, but new info are coming before expac launch.

It still won't be full exposure. Things will still change even after that with jobs, and they don't spoil the story at all so...

[Jeeqbit]

One of the reasons there are no story spoilers is in part because there isn't a test server.

The other reason is because they know people mine for information so they make sure that the patch files don't hint at it in any way until release day. They know their community and construct the files accordingly.

That's not to say we don't have an idea of what will happen. If you follow the story and the lore carefully you probably can tell some of what will happen. If you watch the live letters they give away some hints and pictures of what will happen and a trailer. You can choose to ignore these if you want no spoilers.

I have a good idea of a lot of events of the next expansion just because of what they chose to tell us in live letters, but the story is so intricate and deep that there will still be plenty of surprises. What they try to do is spoil enough to make you excited but not enough to spoil the whole thing.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/endwalker/

[Ayuhra]

It still won't be full exposure. Things will still change even after that with jobs, and they don't spoil the story at all so...

Yeah OP seems to be talking WoW.

WoW we know what the story will be outside major cutscenes, what the dungeons and their bosses will be, what loot those bosses drop, how the classes work etc both due to public testing and an extremely robust community of data miners.

By the time new content came out people had already theorycrafted every class's meta and were actively chasing it.

[Omedon]

Media Tour and combat/jobs adjusment live letter is for Septembre.
That's why it looks quiet now, but new info are coming before expac launch.

See, this is part of my whole sentiment of “never change,” that that’s what you think I’m talking about.

I didn’t use this term in the OP, but for “other games,” we would know pretty much everything already via the D-word: Datamining. Story text, progression systems, optimal dungeon paths, raid boss knowledge, ability names, full class functionality, monster models, item models, all of it… before an official release. Oh sure, the game might say “you will battle this boss,” but the community dialed in to the easy to find datamining discussion will know how, what they will say what loot they will drop, what that loot looks like and how much most of it isn’t “BiS” (best in slot).

A press tour is just standard first party hype! What it seems you guys are spared are multiple fansites that host both discussions among the community and literally ALL the spoilers! It’s ubiquitous! You (well, “us” now) guys don’t seem to have that problem, and I am here to tell you: Treasure that!

[Jeeqbit]

We won't know story text or raid boss knowledge (although veterans will know how to figure out most of the mechanics because some of them are reused in new ways, repainted or intended to be obvious).

We will know the progression system because that almost never changes, dungeons are linear now, we will know ability names and optimal rotations from the media tour.

These fansites do exist. There will be people getting all this information on release day and items and monster names even end up on the SE's lodestone so you can establish BiS, but you probably are not going to bother looking those up until after you have gone through the story.

[Neoyoshi]

Welcome to Japanese media in general; a lot of exposure happens over in it's native audience base; Nico-Nico for example, and Japanese magazines and press junkets.

We westerners just get trickles of information until SE does a big live stream where the global audience gets information that the japanese audience reviewed before us.

EDIT: But I feel like the OP is referring to media outlets like WoWhead, where patch data is mined and pretty much everything is spoiled in advance. FFXIV having no PTR pretty much eliminated data-mining entirely.

[Ranaku]

Yeab no ptr testrealm for you. No unpaid testing via the community. No spoiled raidcontent. Or other new jobs. Or story.

It's not WoW where Blizzard lets people test their game so they can fix stuff that shouldn't be a problem in the first place. But then i can understand it tho, Blizzard is a small indie company so they actually have to rely on their players as guinea pigs.

[Raikai]

Media Tour and combat/jobs adjusment live letter is for Septembre.
That's why it looks quiet now, but new info are coming before expac launch.

Even with the media tour... it's so vastly different than for example, with WoW's open betas/PTRs where people either experience things both in classes and also plot spoilers fully in advance and datamine a ton of strings with more information.

And ironically a game that allows so many to actually go and test and experience stuff in development phase, the final product always came very flawed lol. Not sure how the current expansion went out, since I left in the very beginning of the previous one.