There was a thread I noticed through Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker that stuck in my mind with the general trajectory of the stories in that expansion. They felt like goodbyes. Not in the sense that you could never again go back to Limsa Lominsa or whatever, but in the sense that you just would not have a compelling reason or need to do so. Endwalker was very much meant as the end of an era in every meaningful sense, and now that we’re up to the point we’re at with Dawntrail… well, I feel like that’s been pretty justified.
So why do I say it now? Well, because we’ve gotten all of the major tranches of content we’re going to get this expansion, basically. And it seems that none of them are going to be back in the old world, so to speak. So I think this is a good chance to explain what that means in the first place as well as what we’re seeing here, and how this approach is shaking out overall.
To start with, however, I think it’s important to understand a game that I imagine most of the people reading this are familiar with but is still relevant in this conversation: World of Warcraft. When WoW’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, released, the landmasses of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor immediately became the Old World. They were the places where you couldn’t fly, for starters, which was pretty significant. But they were also the places where nothing new was happening.
While The Burning Crusade did feature some effort to keep new things happening on the older continents, Wrath of the Lich King basically abandoned that effort; all of the new stuff was happening in Northrend, full stop. And that made sense. The current area where players are already playing was the logical place to put more things for players to do, instead of sending them back to the old world where no one wanted to go anyway.
This is worth noting because Final Fantasy XIV has done things a bit differently. Even with Heavensward, there were still things that required traveling back to the rest of Eorzea, and the launch of Stormblood redoubled that. As a general rule, content has usually stretched throughout the whole game world, not just the most recent region.
Consider Endwalker itself, for example. While most of the MSQ took place within areas added within the expansion, our alliance raid series was based in Mor Dhona. Role quests sent players to each of the four major cities. Crafting tools sent players back to the First, and the deep dungeon was also in Mor Dhona. There was a clear and present effort to make sure that every part of the expansive game world had some attention paid, something to pin itself to.
Here is the basic problem with this: You will eventually reach a limit. There is only so much you can fit into an expansion that is structured the way FFXIV structures itself, and if you want to keep adding new continents, you will reach a point of just having more places than you have stuff to add. There is just not enough stuff to spread throughout the whole world, even if you figure out a way to invent a new alliance raid series for Coerthas after we spent a whole expansion solving problems there.
This is why, I think, Endwalker was trying to really bring a lot of that to a conclusion. It was in many ways a mixture of epilogues and farewells to places we have been visiting and exploring for more than a decade. Some of it hit differently, but I think it’s notable how so much of where we had been is now distinctly in the rearview.
At this point, the raid series and alliance raid are both in Tural. The trial series does not exist. Our next deep dungeon appears to be on the First, and we’re heading to literally other planets for the main crafting/gathering content. Perhaps most notably, we haven’t even had any reason to talk to Tataru thus far, with the implication clearly being that she’s got her mercantile empire to run, and while that means that the ostensibly disbanded Scions don’t need to worry about money, she’s kind of doing her own thing without us.
This was not, in some way, a bad decision for Dawntrail or the story as a whole. While I am, in fact, happy to point out things like how Gridania’s racist theocracy is still a prospective problem to be sorted out (because it is), I also appreciate the game saying, even if just via implication, that we are in fact done with exploring that stuff. That is in the rear view. Welcome to a new age; the problems that we have not dealt with are just not for this game.
Now, to be clear, there is also a risk to this. If one of the big things you love about FFXIV is “what if elves were French Catholics who worshipped Joan of Arc and dealt with dragons and it snowed all the time” it is a pretty big change when the game goes from “here’s a bone for the Heavensward enjoyers” to “go sit in the Firmament if you want to” as a model of content. Tural is something new, and to an extent how much you like Tural is going to depend on how boss you think the Mesoamerican fantasy feel is. My feelings on this are well-documented and do not need further elaboration; that’s not the point of this article.
I don’t think that this heralds a new state where FFXIV is concerned only with the current content area moving forward; that’s not the state now, and I doubt it’s the plan for the next expansion. But I think it does mean that Endwalker has meant a coda for the parts of the game that have been there for the longest. We are in a new era, and while the next expansion will bring us somewhere new like Meracydia or the Thirteenth or somewhere else on Etheirys, I expect that most of our deviations to slip back will be to head back to Tural. Maybe one or two jaunts to older regions.
But with the new exploration area here and not really bringing in outside forces, it feels like Endwalker really was a coda on a portion of the game world. I think that’s a good thing in the long run, but the transition is still noteworthy. And we’ll see more of how this shakes out once we’re looking at 7.3’s final feature list as well as the implementation of the supposedly still-planned variant dungeons and the inclusion of Beastmaster… but even so, from where we’re at now, this feels noteworthy.
Feedback, as always, is welcome via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com or in the comments down below. Next week, we’re in a bit of a lull, so I’m going to try doing something a little bit different: I want y’all to suggest something weird you’d like to see a whole column in down in the comments or via mail, and the one I like the most will be our column next week. And if I’m not in love with any of them or don’t have a column’s worth of material, we’re going to talk about the technology level in Etheirys.
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.
