As per Final Fantasy 14 tradition, the story of Dawntrail has come to a close with the release of patch 7.3, and the next couple of patches will likely start to set us up for whatever the next expansion has in store. Dawntrail aimed to strip the multiverse-ending stakes of previous expansions back with varying degrees of success, but it sounds like things will soon escalate once again.
"With Endwalker, we reached the climax of one big story," director and producer Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida tells GamesRadar+ via translator. "When we looked at the story of Final Fantasy 14 and the sense of tension that you had at the end of Endwalker, I didn't want us to see a scenario where we just simply inflate the enemy or the bosses that the players encounter. So with that in mind, when it came to the story of Dawntrail, we looked at the hero, our player characters, which are the Warriors of Light, and we positioned them as a sort of mentor of sorts for a younger generation."
With the launch of patch 7.3 earlier this month, Yoshida says, "we have finished that story which we wanted to depict, and now, when we look at the Warriors of Light, we want them to take that step again as someone who has the fate of the world on their shoulders, and go forward on that adventure again."
Yoshida doesn't really fully explain that last bit, but it certainly sounds like the stakes of the story are about to get raised once again. I guess you can only avoid intervening in the fate of the world for so long when you're an MMO protagonist.
"On the one hand, I'm kind of glad and relieved that that part of the story has finished," Yoshida says of Dawntrail, "but at the same time, I'm also excited about what is to come. So, although patch 7.3 has just been released, me and the rest of the development team are hard at work on the future of Final Fantasy 14, and we're just really excited about what's to come."
There's a reason FF14 made not just our list of the best MMORPGs, but also our list of the best Final Fantasy games.
