Are we destroying "our own" game?

[Nasigno]

Don't take this personally, but I'm so tired of seeing this argument. ARR set up the ongoing conflicts with the Ascians, Empire, beast tribes(as well as their internal issues), and ongoing political tension between the city-states as well as political tension within them. DT has nothing like that, and by the end of it everyone is completely unified behind Queen Wuk Lamat and peace and love for everyone. The hourglass/key resonating with Azem's crystal means we still haven't moved on from Amaurot and the slate hasn't been wiped clean.

Of course, no offense taken.

It did, and don't get me wrong it did start a good storyline for them to start from here to now. It did not however mention threats they had no intent or otherwise imagine up in say Endwalker with talking with Metion. But as said, I did not like the introduction of Meteion being that late that we had no inkling or idea that set why it got from ARR to EW.

Could it of done better, of course. I'm not crazy enough to believe DT is peak story telling or did not have its faults cause it did. But I'll say its better than Endwalker for me.

Citation needed. Looking at Steamcharts, really the only place we can get numbers, Endwalker peaked higher than DT on release and DT has not been out long enough to compare to longevity. DT is in all likelihood riding on eth success of ShB and EW. Could the endgame be enough to keep more people? Potentially, but that does not mean that people don't think that the MSQ is utter crap, just means they want to get to the good part.

“Hello everyone, this is Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FINAL FANTASY XIV,” started the developer. “I would like to thank you all for your patience and cooperation in dealing with server congestion during the early access for Dawntrail. With your support, we were able to reach a record number of concurrent users we’ve not seen since the release of A Realm Reborn in 2013.”

But beyond the official statement from Square Enix, the only reliable numbers we can go off is Steam Data, least of all unless you have a metric that is something we can base performance off? I guess we could wait for 2025 Financial performance to compare the operational revenue, but for right now that is the only metric we have that is open to the public so I will cite it as such.

Endwalker
January 2022 65,565
December 2021 95,102

Dawntrail
June 2024 91,883
July 2024 91,883