I never finished Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker. There, I said it. It has been long enough since it released that I’m comfortable admitting that having to constantly wait in server queues as I desperately tried to finish the main quest to write my review just wasn’t worth the hardship. My attention span isn’t great - pour one out for my neurodivergent brain - so I wasn’t interested in waiting in a line that lasted hours (even though I’m British) or only putting in a short session to progress the narrative when I knew getting up to do something else would risk me getting booted out with nothing to show for it. It was frustrating, and soon enough I lost interest.

That’s where my adventure in Final Fantasy 14 came to an end, but now I’m ever so tempted to go back following the reveal of Dawntrail. I suppose I just need a holiday.

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The hype that comes with each new Fan Festival and major patch announcement is always infectious, and I find myself swept up in this world and its characters all over again even if I have an obscene amount of catching up to do. I don’t know what happened after the events of Endwalker, or why the Scions of the Seventh Dawn are on a boat bound for new lands. All I know is I’m excited enough to embrace the mystery and jump back in all over again. There are a few obstacles in my way however, namely finding a new Free Company and finding out which of my friends who are still playing are willing to catch me up on everything. My future will be paved by slovenly patch quests and mechanics I don’t understand. Will it be worth it?

This is coming from someone who has worked their way through the likes of Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and the A Realm Reborn patch quests so I could manage a decent understanding of the world and its myriad characters, but even I have to peek into Wiki pages to ensure I’m correctly addressing certain people or understanding the stakes at play.

Such a thing will always affect an MMORPG as it approaches its tenth anniversary, let alone one that also takes into account the events of a game that ceases to exist anymore and was wiped off the face of the planet to make room for this one. That’s a lot of context I can’t blame most players for failing to pick up, let alone newcomers who are eyeing Final Fantasy 14 and unsure where exactly to start. That will happen with Dawntrail.

People will be asking the same sort of questions about where they should begin, which of the expansions are okay to skip, which class is best if I haven’t played MMOs before, and all of the other things we’ve seen time and time again. Except this time, it comes through the perspective of new content and a new adventure which casts aside much of the usual ground we’d been expected to accustom ourselves too in past occasions.

Presenting us with a new land to explore with new stakes and ideas are all well and good, but will this suffice for newcomers who might not be so interested in exploring the previous expansions for hundreds of hours in order for any of this to make sense? I’m just not sure.

Square Enix and longtime producer Naoki Yoshida have been grappling with this problem for a long time, one that when you break it all down, is impossible to fix. Obnoxious parts of the base game which asked you to perform countless dull fetch quests initially designed to pad out time out of desperation were smoothed out or removed entirely, but it wasn’t enough to pave over all the cracks. Even if Final Fantasy 14 was the only game you played in your spare time, it would still take you months to catch up to where hardened veterans are right now. To some, it just won’t be worthwhile.

Even with the free trial we’ve been making memes out of for years now, that’s still a major time investment that dwarfs most games on the planet, let alone other MMORPGs. Dangling a relaxing vacation in front of us isn’t going to curb that trend.

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