During the first part of the Final Fantasy XIV Letter from the Producer Live 88, Square Enix addressed recent feedback on the state of the game.
At the beginning of the livestream, Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida admitted that the quality of the service may have declined and apologized for that.
The team may have become a bit too complacent, causing things to slip. In particular, the release of large-scale content like Cosmic Exploration and Crescent Isle made it challenging to keep up with the proper quality checks.
Yoshida-san had a talk with the teams about this issue, and the intention is to improve, making an effort to do better and to keep providing fun and interesting content in the future.
Starting with the feedback received about the Occult Crescent, to players who wish they could enter the Forked Tower with a preformed alliance, Yoshida-san mentioned that a system will indeed be implemented in update 7.3 to let us queue directly with an alliance of 48 players.
Incidentally, we hear that update 7.3 will be released in Early August, so this system is being designed quite fast, and the UI may not be perfect.
There will also be a system that displays how many Cyphers a player has invested. One Cypher will always be required.
The Forked Tower was not designed with normal and savage versions due to budgetary reasons. Future instances in Occult Crescent will have normal and savage versions.
Yoshida-san then admitted that the rewards from Happy Bunny Coffers may have fallen short of expectations, and the team is considering how to address it.
The developers also acknowledged the fact that enemies feel like they go down too fast during FATEs, causing players not to get there in time. This is due to the fact that the system is designed to be balanced between instances that are highly populated and those that are more sparse. Yet, Yoshida mentioned that perhaps it’d be better for it to be designed with more difficult conditions in mind from the start and then tweaked.
To players asking to increase the drop rate for demiatma and soul shards, Yoshida-san mentioned that the rate for Critical Encounter is 20% and for FATEs is 5%. For the moment, there is no plan to increase the drop rate.
Changes will be made to the weather system that governs auroral mirages, so they will not happen when there are Critical Encounters. This doesn’t mean that auroral mirage will spawn less.
Moving on to Cosmic Exploration, update 7.3 will bring the ability to use mounts. New content will come with update 7.31, and it’ll have the ability to use months from the beginning.
Time available for some of the missions (B rank and lower, and some A rank) will be adjusted, and the mission report window will be changed so that it opens automatically.
The end of a gathering mission will also restore used GP and reset the cooldown of your Cordial potions. Sequential missions will be made more visible with a message at the center of the screen
Completion data for projects is being examined by the developers, and they’re considering whether to make it easier or not. The plan is to implement a system in the next star that will let you continue after the failure of a project.
Yoshida-san admitted that too much attention has been given to making the base feel like it progresses at the expense of usability, but the level design will be overhauled for future content to address the issue of shops and NPCs becoming less accessible.
From the next star, Holograms will be installed from the start.
Yoshida-san also admitted that players don’t have enough reasons to keep playing the content after completing the Cosmic Tool enhancement and earning all the rewards. This will be changed in the future with more ways to get rewards.
Bells to summon your retailers will be added. We’ll also get a way to teleport to Drivingway from Bestways Burrow for the next star.
If you’d like to read more about update 7.3, you can check out our recap of the second part of the Letter from the Producer Live.
If you’re unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV, it’s currently available for PC, PS5, PS4, and Xbox Series X|S.
Incidentally, Final Fantasy XIV is one of the pillars of Square Enix’s game lineup, and its recurring revenue does wonders to keep up its otherwise shaky financials.
