Today, during Final Fantasy XIV Letter from the Producer Live 89, Square Enix revealed the first details and screenshots of update 7.4 and its cycle.
As usual, Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida and Global Community Producer Toshio Murouchi provided all the relevant details during the livestream from Square Enix’s headquarters in Tokyo.
We actually start with a mention of patch 7.38, which will release on November 11.
The weekly limit will be removed from the AAC Cruiserweight Tier Savage. Odelle Coins and Montiont Coins will be tradeable for evercharged ester, and a new furnishing item will be added as a reward to the Return to Ivalice Raids. You can see it below.
We then get the reveal of the key artwork for 7.4. The Title is “Into the Mist.” The patch will include the conclusion to the story of the Arcadion raids.
We also learn that the patch will release on December 16, 2025.
The update will include The Arcadion: Heavyweight Tier (Normal) raid and new Allagan Tomestones of Mnemonics. New craftable gear will also come.
The Savage version of The Arcadion: Heavyweight Tier will come on January 6. This is later compared to other patches to allow people to spend the Holidays with their families instead of being tempted to go raiding.
Of course, with 7.4, we’ll get a new chapter of the main scenario questline. You can see a few screenshots below.
A new chapter of the Inconceviably Further Hildibrand Adventures questline will also be included.
A new instanced dungeon will be added, titled “Mistwake.”
A new trial titled “Hell on Rails” will come, with Normal and Extreme versions.
Below you can see the first screenshots of The Arcadion: Heavyweight Tier raid.
The new Unreal trial will be Tsukuyomi’s Pain (Unreal). Too soon, Yoshida-san. Too soon.
Duty Support will be expanded to Dzemael Darkhold and Aurum Vale. Normal dungeons will get the retry counters from the 8-man trials. You’ll get one each time you die to a boss, and they reset to zero after the boss is defeated.
PvP will get an update with the start of Series 10, PvP action adjustments, and a new frontline map and campaign. It’s titled Worqor Chirteh.
The Gold Saurcer will get a new minigame, Air Force One (The Cieldales)
The Phantom Weapon will get an update as well, reaching item level 775. The items required for the upgrade will be obtained from various duties, including the Occult Crescent.
Speaking of which, the Occult Crescent will get new Phantom Jobs, Mystic Knight, Dancer, and Gladiator.
Beneficial accessories for Occult Crescent exploration will be added, including 4 pieces for Disciples of War and Disciples of Magic each. Character attributes are increased while exploring the Occult Crescent while using these items. They can be obtained rarely from critical encounters, treasure chests, magic pots, and happy bunnies.
Incidentally, a major update for Occult Crscent will come in update 7.5.
Cosmic Exploration is getting a new star, Oizys.
It’ll come with a new tier of the Cosmic Tools that will be upgradable to item level 765.
There will be new rewards, some available for Cosmocredits, some as Cosmic Fortune prizes, and some for new tokens obtained from Ex+ missions.
A sequential mission completion bonus will be added, on top of the Ruin Exploration, that lets you uncover ancient records of the planet’s past and have them appraised to obtain items.
You can check out two of the rewards below.
The new Variant Dungeon is The Merchang’s Tale. Interesting, the gleaner NPC you see below is related to Y’shtola.
Interestingly, we learn that the overall duty structure for variant dungeons has been changed based on feedback.
The normal Variant Dungeon has been left unchanged, but an “Advanced” version has been added. It includes no exploration, and you just fight the three boss battles in any order you want. They’re slightly more challenging than the bosses from the normal Variant Dungeon.
You get rewards after each boss, and you can stop at any time. You don’t need to fight all three, but defeating them all gives you a bonus reward. You can do it with 2 to 4 players, and the difficulty will be automatically adjusted. Duty-specific actions will also be available.
The Criterion Dungeons have also been overhauled, letting you fight the three bosses in sequence with increased difficulty. You need 4 players, 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS. Yet, you can pick any classes if you have a pre-formed party.
Below you can see a boss and rewards.
Additional changes include new color themes for the UI, Clear Green and Clear White.
The previously showcased Strategy Board is also coming. Interesting, players will be able to share strategies online via codes.
We’re also getting a new UI feature, the Command Panel. It has 4 separate panels with 25 slots each, and you can add anything that can be added to a hotbar to it.
You can also add buttons that call up specific panels of the Command Panel to the hotbar.
The next change is a much-requested update to glamours, the ability to use any gear that you have in your glamours with any class, job, and even without any level restriction. The only exception is weapons and tools due to animation constraints.
After this final announcement, Yoshida-san mentioned that players want more Glamour Dresser slots and Glamour Plates also need to be expanded. The team is working on it, but it’ll take time, as things need to be tackled in the right order.
Speaking of housing, the developers are in the optimization phase to increase furniture placement limits by 50% (1.5x the current limits) in patch 7.5. Yoshida-san is sorry about the delay on this, but the team is working hard on it.
The reason why it’s taking so long is that every object placed must be tracked and saved server-side, regardless of whether the player is online or not, and this puts strain on the hardware. When the servers are rebooted during maintenance, all the data has to be reloaded, which would take longer with more items.
If they just raised the item limit by 1.5x without optimization, emergency maintenance could take three times longer than they do now.
The developers have also completed the system to let players have mansion-sized interiors in smaller houses, which will, in turn, affect item placement limits across all house sizes. That’s why they’re now working on optimizing item placement, and when that’s done, they can let everyone change their interior size.
The team is working hard to make sure that optimization is done so that they can increase the number of items for both the interior and the exterior at the same time without having to wait for the next expansion.
The next step after that will be updating glamour plates, and the issue is pretty much the same. since swapping plates instantly requires server communication to work as smoothly as possible.
Looking further ahead, they also want to expand the things you can do in field zones, on top of somehow optimizing the system that limits the display of buffs to enable new forms of gameplay.
Basically, the folks at Square Enix are optimizing the game across the board gradually to improve the player experience considerably, and Yoshida-san is thankful for everyone’s patience and support during the process.
Final Fantasy XIV is currently available for PC, PS5, PS4, and Xbox Series X|S. If you’d like to read more, you can check out what Yoshida-san himself said about the collaboration with Monster Hunter Wilds.
Incidentally, Final Fantasy XIV is one of the pillars of Square Enix’s game lineup, with its recurring revenue making the MMO segment the most profitable among the publisher’s businesses.
