Last week I was: Sick, mostly. But also pretty excited about Starfinder: Afterlight.
Good news, everybody. After over a year of griping about Dawntrail's story, griping about Dawntrail's release schedule, and griping about Forked Tower, I'm finally logging back into Final Fantasy 14 again on a regular basis. More than that, I'm actually having fun. I'm having fun playing an MMORPG, it finally happened!
Alright, I'm being snippy—which you can't hold against me because I'm writing this on a Monday—but in all seriousness, it's not like Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's had nothing to do. Assuming you like raiding. But the ills of the casual/midcore content drought and an over-reliance on one-and-done activities has made the game suffer for some time.
Don't take my word for it, listen to director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), who has outlined a desire to make more variable difficulties after the whole Forked Tower snafu saw only a sliver of the playerbase engaging with it: "I do feel that Forked Tower: Blood was a misstep in development … we made it too difficult for players to even get into the raid in the first place."
In other interviews, Yoshi-P has said that upcoming dungeons and raids, including the now-released Pilgrim's Traverse, will be designed for everybody—not necessarily easy-by-default, but rather, they'll have variable difficulties players can opt into.
Indeed, Patch 7.35 is the first test of this new philosophy, so now it's out, is FF14 finally fixed? Well, not yet, but I'm feeling downright optimistic about the game's future.
The cooler deep dungeon
FF14's deep dungeons have a reputation as absolute bastards—in fact, that's part of the appeal. They're 100-floor roguelike crawls where monsters can one-shot you, and death sets you back several dozen floors. All the way back to zero, if you're aiming for a snazzy title.
Pilgrim's Traverse still has these challenges—and a 4-person boss at the end of it that can be juiced with offerings to turn it into a Savage-difficulty fight—but from what I've played so far, it's designed to be a pleasant slope rather than a brick wall. That's due to a few reasons:
It has more checkpoints—at floors 31, 51, and 71, rather than just 31. It, alongside past deep dungeons, now gives you your Aetherpool Armor and Weapons (which make you stronger and tankier while inside) at a much faster rate, meaning you can grind out weapon glams and climb floors without having to spend hours making number go up.
Rewards are generally more plentiful, and even then, grinding them out's easier thanks to weekly challenge log tasks that'll actually, y'know, motivate you to go back and do the dungeon again (cough, Variant Dungeons, cough). Even once I've snagged everything I want from the vendor, I might still hop back in and do my weeklies just to flog wares from the Accursed Hoard on the marketboard.
Crucially, you can now matchmake all 100 floors of Pilgrim's Traverse—rather than, say, Eureka Orthos, which cut off the matchmaking at floor 70 for no real discernable reason. Which means that billy no-mates of light like myself can still drop in and out basically whenever we want.
It checks all of my boxes for how things in FF14 should be structured: Not sleep-at-your-desk easy, but accessible enough and puggable enough that I'm not going to be stuck waiting months for something to do in a game I ostensibly like.
But the Pilgrim's Traverse isn't the only thing that's got me so back, so to speak. Other patches and activities have me happily hopping around Tural.
Grinds can be good
The Monster Hunter crossover event is great—mind, these sorts of events are a rare treat, but Square Enix didn't skimp on the rewards for this one. I've got two whole armour sets and a bunch of weapons to grind out, and I might even complete an Extreme again for the first time since the expansion launched.
Dawntrail's relic weapon grind is also much improved over Endwalker's "just get tomes" treadmill. Sure, I'm just doing roulettes again—but there's something satisfying about doing specific ones, and I think the compromise of "do it once, use tomestones for other classes" is a genuinely solid middle-ground between the two systems.
I would've liked to go back to Occult Crescent for the second step, sure, but I've got meaningful progress to make rather than simply making my XP bars go up.
Oh, and—speaking of, I don't want to let Occult Crescent go unpraised for what it did do right. It's had plenty of missteps, sure, but I still agree with fellow PCG writer and FF14 enjoyer Mollie Taylor that it's the most MMO-like FF14 has felt since the days of Shadowbringers and Bozja. All we need in the next zone are duels and an accessible end-raid, and we'll be back for real.
Cosmic Exploration is mostly a win, also. I've not been as taken by it, seeing as I'm not much of a crafter, but having repeatable crafting/gathering content you can hop into at any time is a win for the game as a whole.
Overall? I now have a really nice little trifecta of tasks to do—Pilgrim's Traverse, Trial-grinding, and my Relic Weapon—that'll keep me busy for a while. The only complaint I have is that it took so goddamn long.
15 months ill-spent
Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail released in July of 2024. It is now October of 2025. The fact it's taken Square Enix 15 entire calendar months to have, like, a list of approachable tasks I feel like doing?
That's an utterly wild amount of time. And given my sensibilities are solely in the midcore (that being, I have a lot of responsibilities, a 9-5, and TTRPG tables to run—but I'm not terrible at videogames), I'm willing to guess that I'm somewhere in the majority, too. Or at least, not in the estimated 2% of the playerbase that did Forked Tower almost one whole month after it was released.
The problem's two-pronged. The stuff that was somewhat-designed for me before this point is outdated and, if I'm being honest, incredibly boring. I had to actively hunt for podcasts to make my shared FATE grind enjoyable, and society quests are in dire need of an upgrade.
Because no, Square, spending 10 minutes every day skipping three NPCs worth of repeatable dialogue and maybe killing like, two things is not how world quests work. You've tried to convince me it is for three whole expansions and it hasn't worked. Please do something else, I beg of thee.
There's a chance, however small, that I'll have a good reason to log in at the start of FF14's next expansion, not 15 months into it."
The other prong is that Square's priorities are all over the place. As I've mentioned before on this very site, content that requires a high level of coordination—Savage, Extremes, Ultimates, Chaotic Alliance Raids, and if we're being petty, Forked Tower—have been prioritised over all this stuff.
Now, not all of that's "hardcore". Most players can handle an Extreme with a little elbow grease. But it's still pock-marked with enough body checks and insta-wipe mechanics to turn folks off. Don't get me wrong, all of this should be in the game, but if every other MMO is turning away from a rigid casual/hardcore divide and—more to the point—ensuring there's something for everyone in every patch? That might be a sign that the winds changed like, five years ago.
Still, 7.35 gives me cause for celebration. If Yoshi-P says activities like the Pilgrim's Traverse, with its variable difficulty and more accessible on-ramp, are the standard going forward? There's a chance, however small, that I'll have a good reason to log in at the start of FF14's next expansion, not 15 months into it. I live in hope.
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