Peter Gabriel’s song “I Grieve” has a bit of an odd history; the song was included on his 2002 album Up, but its first release was on the soundtrack for the 1998 film City of Angels. The concept for the song came to him when he looked at his overall body of work as an emotional toolbox and realized that he didn’t have a song that worked through the process of dealing with grief and death, and in the process he made a song that I still believe is among the most ruinously effective songs of mourning ever written. And it’s in the second verse when he delivers perhaps the most painfully effective line in the entire song: “The news that truly shocks is the empty, empty page.”
This is a very heavy introduction to talk about a subject that is not heavy at all for Final Fantasy XIV, but it does tie into a weird state of mind I find myself in as I look at FFXIV’s schedule for the year. I’m not looking at something I see, but something I do not see. And when I look closely at the space where I do not see something, I do not see even more, and that gets me thinking about a lot of things I don’t see. So I encourage you to look with me and not see the game’s next fan festival.
Now, in and of itself… not having dates for the next fan festival means basically nothing, in that there is no exact timeframe when it needs to be held or announced or whatever. There’s not even a law saying that we need to get a fan festival before the next expansion is announced. There’s no rule saying that all of the patches being released in a given year need to be announced at the start of the year. You get the idea.
But none of that is really the point because there are certain expectations about how things are done based on their always having been done this way. By any reasonable math based on history, patch 7.3 is going to be out at the end of July or the start of August. It would thus be really unusual if patch 7.4 weren’t out in December, moving beyond even the existing four-week window. And logic would suggest that the game’s 8.0 expansion is due for 2026, but we have yet to hear anything about it.
Again, I want to stress that none of this is worrying or even a problem; it’s just unusual, just like when we had a longer-than-usual wait for the release date announcement of Dawntrail last year. The thing isn’t that I think I have uncovered any sort of conspiracy or that I’ve proven something; it’s just that it would be unusual given the game’s history, and as it stands we kind of have things pointing to not getting another expansion for the game until 2027 rather than 2026. Which, again, would be… odd. On the outer limits of plausibility, but the outer limits are still plausible.
Now, this is not exactly a shocker because Endwalker itself lasted longer than two years. Both Shadowbringers and Endwalker were about 31 months in total, but Shadowbringers had the big marker of having been running when Covid-19 shut everything down that delayed development plans and Endwalker didn’t really quite ping that way because it released late in 2021 and thus Dawntrail felt a bit more like a return to normal timelines. The past history of the game points to closer to a 24-month cycle. And as of this time it is way too early to say that anything there has changed; we’ve had two patches in the current expansion and we’re not even up to the one-year mark. There is plenty of time for the next couple of patches and an expansion release in 2026, even for the announcement of one.
But that’s where we get into the empty space thing. It’s not that we have been told this isn’t happening; it’s that as of this moment, we haven’t been told things are happening, and in fact we have a bunch of big question marks. And that empty space is pretty noteworthy in the wake of the game slowing down a little bit after all.
To be clear, FFXIV slowing down is not my suddenly changing my view of the game; the game is what it has always been. It has been going strong for more than a decade. I have become more convinced than ever that this is really just a good thing, acknowledging that instead of Square-Enix trying to keep the game up at the same height of Endwalker’s launch forever, it’s all right to back off a little bit and enjoy the accomplishment. FFXIV is firmly in Nothing More To Prove mode, and that’s great.
But it does mean that those of us who have paid attention to the game’s cadence for a long time know that it is changing. And that leaves with it a lot of other questions because if that cadence is no longer what it has been before, a lot of other expectations would be thrown into question – including whether there even are going to be continual fan festivals every so often for the next expansion.
It’s mostly irrelevant at the moment, of course. At this point, trying to figure out what’s next based on the non-data we have is a mug’s game, and the reality is that Dawntrail definitely made money and did just fine. I would be kind of surprised if the next MMORPG weren’t being discussed at Square-Enix HQ these days given how well FFXIV has done over the years, but it’s at no real risk of going anywhere. And if some elements of it are slowing down just a bit, well, after going from a joke to one of the biggest MMORPGs in the world, it’s allowed to quietly slow down at that point.
More than anything, I just wanted to shine a light on what is an empty space that is remarkably visible to my eyes. Maybe I’m just looking at nothing. Almost by definition you cannot really see something that isn’t there, and right now, upon the stair, I see a man (or event schedule) that isn’t there. Nothing is wrong with that, nothing needs to be changed, there isn’t a problem to be dealt with from that angle.
It’s just something that I can’t help but notice. Maybe it’s nothing. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But if someone told me confidentially that this is the plan and we’re not getting another expansion until the start of 2027, well… I wouldn’t call them a liar.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to take a very different tactic by talking about how we’re never going to have another Shadowbringers even as the many shards still out there remain narratively important. That might seem like an odd direction to go, but I promise, it’ll make sense.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
