FINAL FANTASY XIV Online News

FFXIV Endwalker has a longer story than Shadowbringers

Square Enix is rounding off a story around ten years in the making when Final Fantasy XIV's Endwalker expansion releases in November. If you're booking time off work to dart through it all, though, you might be wondering how long the expansion actually is?

During a recent Endwalker preview event, director Naoki Yoshida hammered home that this will be the most significant expansion yet, comparing its story content the game's last big expansion. "Especially for the story, when we look at the amount of text, cut scenes and so on," Yoshida says (thanks, MMORPG), "I don't want to give such a comparative figure, but there's a lot more here than in Shadowbringers."

Endwalker will wrap up what the team calls the "Hydaelyn and Zodiark Saga", which, broadly speaking, features two groups blessed by different entities, fated to lock horns with each other in a series of near-apocalyptic skirmishes. The story has continued through various expansions over the years, from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward to Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

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"There's no perfect system", but the FFXIV devs want to do more to combat harassment

Square Enix is looking into improving Final Fantasy XIV's social features following calls from players for better protection against stalking and harassment. However, it seems we may have to wait a while to see any such changes implemented.

While issues of player misbehaviour have been raised on the FFXIV subreddit numerous times over the years, one post in late September brought the conversation back to the fore. Some of the ideas the community proposes to tackle the problem include the abilities to remove yourself from someone else's friend list and to make your Lodestone profile private. It's also been suggested that you should be able to block someone's account, not just their character. We recently got the chance to attend a preview event for FFXIV's next expansion Endwalker, so we took the opportunity to ask director Naoki Yoshida if the team has any plans for the update or beyond to implement changes like these.

"We're aware that this is a big discussion in the community, but at the same time, there are various reasons why our specifications are designed as they are," he explains. "It's a very serious topic, so I would like to take a lot of care in how I answer this, so please allow me to explain."

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Why I'm maining the Reaper in FFXIV Endwalker

When I first came to Eorzea, I felt like a stranger. Like many others, I started playing Final Fantasy XIV's free trial during lockdown, and have since moved onto a full subscription, partly to play with friends, mostly for a new outfit.

After a year of continuous play I still feel like a stranger; I've missed out on ten years of changes, tweaks, and community stories. Your character is also a stranger to FFXIV's world of Hydaelyn - a curious soul with a mysterious power that you learn more about across a mammoth main quest line. One of the quickest connections I made to them is that we are both surrounded by people who have inhabited our respective spaces long before we arrived, and it's this connection that inspires the roleplay I love so much about this MMO. But that'll all change when Endwalker releases.

While its story and accessibility to solo players got me through the door, FFXIV's jobs have been the biggest hook for me. They really let you immerse yourself in each role and aesthetic. Put it down to years of watching Kurosawa movies or infatuation with Demon Slayer anime, but I settled on the Samurai. Adventuring through Eorzea as a lone, wandering ronin fits the image of playing FFXIV I have in my head, though the melee DPS job's set of abilities is particularly accommodating for solo play.

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FFXIV Endwalker server waits are "inevitable", according to Naoki Yoshida

Just about every MMORPG suffers server issues at the launch of a major update, and Final Fantasy XIV has already been dealing with heavy congestion as a result of an influx of new players. What's going to happen when Endwalker launches? Director and producer Naoki Yoshida says "unfortunately, realistically speaking, it's just inevitable that players will have to wait a little bit to join the game when Endwalker hits".

"First and foremost," Yoshida tells us, "I would just like to say that we are doing everything we can to tackle the congestion currently in the game. There are different elements that we can look at when we're trying to address congestion - there are things we can improve using technology, there are places where we can find people and resources to address that, and there are also places where we can invest money. We are currently putting all of our energy into all three of these points."

But actually getting more servers up and running has proven difficult as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to show themselves - a problem Yoshida has discussed in previous blog posts. "If we really want to fundamentally fix the issue," he tells us, "the only option we have is to increase the number of worlds or, in other words, increase the number of servers significantly so that players would be able to log in without any waiting times."

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FFXIV's Moogle Treasure Trove and Dragon Quest events return - what you need to know

The Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker release date lands in just over a month, but there's still a bit more regular content to enjoy before we kick off the expansion. The return of the Moogle Treasure Trove and Dragon Quest crossover events have been on the roadmap for some time, but now the devs have provided a bit of additional detail on each - especially helpful for all the new players recently hopping into FFXIV.

The Moogle Treasure Trove event starts on Tuesday, October 19 at 1am PDT / 4am EDT / 9am BST, and will last until the launch of Endwalker. For the duration of the event, certain dungeons, trials, raids, and PvP duties will award Irregular Tomestones of Lore, which you can then exchange for special items with an Itinerant Moogle vendor that will be available in each of the three starting cities.

The items available include some that will be new for the event, including the sick leather jacket you see in the image above. Others are already available in the game, though those are mostly tied to especially difficult content or time-consuming grinds. You can see the full list of rewards, and the content you'll need to grind to earn them, on the official site.

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