Calculating the Wait FanFest/Patches -- Next Expansion in 2027?

[Voidmage]

No offense but I'll believe this when I see it for myself. The DT patches have been absolutely horrid since the alleged "humbling". The game is dying and the only "course correction" I've seen is them pulling the emergency lever on glam restrictions which while great comes too little too late. We need sweeping changes to design philosophy and more content and there's been zero signs of this being in the works.

No offense as well but that's your opinion.
For me the last patch was far better than in a long time with an improved story, a very good deep dungeon and qol though I also see still lot's of room for improvement.

Their entire communication tone has shifted from "play other games" or "play ultimate" nowadays and i can see changes.
It's fine to not like the state of the game right now (I am also partly there) and think otherwise but I am personally of the opinion of giving credit when I see things improving and the patches were that for me.

[Kunzite_Lockhart]

Whatever date it ends up being, it’ll probably be too late.
The game’s losing players at a rapid pace, and some people might be coping — I was doing the same, but I just couldn’t anymore.
Everyone just left… FCs, friend lists, linkshells. Everything is empty. Literally everyone’s gone.
And if we’re stuck in Dawntrail for another whole year, honestly, that might be the final nail in the coffin.

[Daralii]

I really don't know what they can do to offer a skip to 8.0 but it would be welcomed. I wouldn't mind if the level cap stayed at 100 and there was just a whole new story that you could play in 8.0 from L91 to L100.

Dawntrail really is the worst content they've ever put out and it's a shame. The FF9 references are mid at best for a game as good as FF9, and the story wasn't worth the trouble.

Dawntrail is a sore that will never go away, otherwise. People will have to play it to enjoy anything past it, and it's just going to be a really difficult slug to push through for all players current and years down the line. I see this killing a lot of subscriptions in the future.

Given that the promise to new players used to be "The story improves and becomes one of the best among MMOs if you can put up with the first half of 2.X", the new addendum of "But later on you'll have to go through a story that's much worse than ARR" is probably going to do a lot of damage that can't entirely be measured.

[Selsix]

I really don't know what they can do to offer a skip to 8.0 but it would be welcomed. I wouldn't mind if the level cap stayed at 100 and there was just a whole new story that you could play in 8.0 from L91 to L100.

Dawntrail really is the worst content they've ever put out and it's a shame. The FF9 references are mid at best for a game as good as FF9, and the story wasn't worth the trouble.

Dawntrail is a sore that will never go away, otherwise. People will have to play it to enjoy anything past it, and it's just going to be a really difficult slug to push through for all players current and years down the line. I see this killing a lot of subscriptions in the future.

At this point I think we need another ARR style catastrophe. Keep the existing expansions as NG+ options for people who want to experience those stories or revisit them (I love the story of 5.0 and 6.0 and don't want to see them disappear), but I feel we need another big calamity to wipe the slate clean and start a new story from there that goes from base to level cap. Quality of 2.0 and 7.0 being as unanimously bad as they are aside, the story is also getting too long for new players to want to sit through to play with their friends and as they keep adding expansions it's only going to get worse. Funneling everyone through to pay for a skip is a horrible fix for this as well, so eventually it's going to be the only real option if they want new players to stick around. Once we hit something like 10.0 it's going to be hundreds of hours of story content through dead empty zones with varying quality before you can reach endgame, that's a huge ask for any new player and even now it's pretty ridiculous.

[Veritas-Ancora]

At this point I think we need another ARR style catastrophe. Keep the existing expansions as NG+ options for people who want to experience those stories or revisit them (I love the story of 5.0 and 6.0 and don't want to see them disappear), but I feel we need another big calamity to wipe the slate clean and start a new story from there that goes from base to level cap. Quality of 2.0 and 7.0 being as unanimously bad as they are aside, the story is also getting too long for new players to want to sit through to play with their friends and as they keep adding expansions it's only going to get worse. Funneling everyone through to pay for a skip is a horrible fix for this as well, so eventually it's going to be the only real option if they want new players to stick around. Once we hit something like 10.0 it's going to be hundreds of hours of story content through dead empty zones with varying quality before you can reach endgame, that's a huge ask for any new player and even now it's pretty ridiculous.

That's the difficult part of all of this: Final Fantasy is, first and foremost, a story-centric game. To start over would mean losing a lot of the story.

I imagine elemental levels would be the best way to move forward. Give us something new while keeping the old content fresh.

[Kisshu]

My own guess would be early access November 27th 2026, with official launch December 1st 2026.

They still need to release some information, media tour inpressions, job trailer and such between JPFF and release. Unless they have this before the JPFF, but then they might not have a lot for the JPFF and it could feel like a let down in information.

[FeyFavilla]

That's the difficult part of all of this: Final Fantasy is, first and foremost, a story-centric game. To start over would mean losing a lot of the story.

I imagine elemental levels would be the best way to move forward. Give us something new while keeping the old content fresh.

I did mention this somewhere before but you can absolutely do a calamity without losing old content. WoW has done this stuff for years at this point via zone phasing. We already have that system in FFXIV, it should not be hard at all to have different maps and keep the old content. The only thing stopping them from crashing another shard into ours is the effort it would take them to actually develop the feature. Something I am not holding out hope for after Joshi told us in very direct language that the more simple mobile market is what they are currently looking at for inspo.

[Hyperia]

I did mention this somewhere before but you can absolutely do a calamity without losing old content. WoW has done this stuff for years at this point via zone phasing. We already have that system in FFXIV, it should not be hard at all to have different maps and keep the old content. The only thing stopping them from crashing another shard into ours is the effort it would take them to actually develop the feature. Something I am not holding out hope for after Joshi told us in very direct language that the more simple mobile market is what they are currently looking at for inspo.

As much as this would solve so many problems, thy do not haven’t financial resources or time to pull this off.

[Xieldras]

Something I am not holding out hope for after Joshi told us in very direct language that the more simple mobile market is what they are currently looking at for inspo.

Seeing how long it takes for them to update a single system in this game doesn't fill me with confidence that they'll be able to give out enough content to satisfy mobile users. And with new competition popping up every month, it seems foolish to attempt trading MMO for Mobile, but that's just my take.

[RedLolly]

Hey, now that the devs are almost finished with Duty Support system updates, I would start requesting them to truncate some of the DT quests in the same way that ARR was. Make it a SHORTER series, without losing the core of it, so that those that do enjoy DT can still do so, but newer players and those replaying don't have the same slog.