FFXIV Dawntrail's Job Designs, Midcore Content & Player Count: An Interview With Naoki Yoshida (2024)

After celebrating its tenth anniversary, Final Fantasy XIV is moving full-steam ahead into its latest expansion, Dawntrail. The upcoming content will see the story reroute into unexplored territory and a fresh main quest storyline, but as usual, what's on most players' minds is the introduction of two brand-new jobs in the form of Viper and Pictomancer. Those changes, coupled with the requisite substantial reworks for existing jobs to bring them closer in line with the design team's vision for balance and opportunity for fun, have made Dawntrail a must-watch development during 2024.

With the release date now extremely close, Screen Rant had the chance to attend the North American leg of the Dawntrail media tour. There, we played six hours of FFXIVDawntrail, participating in a new dungeon, exploring a few debuting locales, and getting a feel for both upcoming jobs. We also had the chance to sit down with FFXIV director and producer Naoki Yoshida to discuss a few hot-button topics heading into the game's launch.

We chatted job balance with the new Viper and Pictomancer additions, the existence of midcore content and how to add more of it, and player count ahead of the release of FFXIV Dawntrail and beyond.

Design Space In FFXIV's Job System

How Difficult It Is To Design DPS & Other Roles

Screen Rant: There's two DPS jobs this expansion. Is that the design space that you feel like has the most space to explore as time has gone on? Is there a role in particular that you feel like has the most restrictive design space - one that you're kind of trying to work against and work with as these expansions roll out?

Naoki Yoshida: So in terms of the different roles, and the design space for creating new jobs within those specific roles really doesn't change, depending on the role. What our biggest challenge though, is whenever we're thinking of or designing a new job, is "what kind of weapon will this new job carry?"

Whenever we are thinking about the different roles and the jobs that fit in those categories, we don't look at it from a perspective of whether it is easily expandable or whether it's less restrictive or things like that. It's more about we look at the different categories within the roles and then kind of see what the balance looks like and kind of go in order [of the most recent roles expanded on with new jobs].

Of course, an expansion release is a very big event for an MMORPG plus, introducing new jobs is definitely an appealing point for the players. Whenever we look at role balance, we already have an established rule where DPS is the most used role, so we will always have one job that will be in that DPS category [every expansion].

Two expansions ago in Shadowbringers, we introduced Gunbreaker, which was a tank role. With that, we now have four jobs within that tank category. And then with Endwalker we introduced Sage, which made the healer role have four different jobs. Going in order, of course Dawntrail would have another DPS. When we looked at the different categories within DPS, we saw our casters, or the magical ranged DPS, only had three, so we kind of filled in the blank there. That's why we have the Pictomancer. Of course, Viper is a melee DPS, but when looking at the different melee DPS we realized that Ninja was the only one who had the dexterity stat as its priority characteristic, so we kind of filled in the gap there. I think that's the logic behind how we got to them.

If I go any more into detail, I think players can start speculating and guess what's coming in the upcoming expansion beyond Dawntrail. In any case, we look at the balance of the roles and make sure that it's evenly distributed, based on the players and what we choose as the new job.

Defining & Adding FFXIV Midcore Content

Appealing To Players Between Hardcore & Casual Options

Screen Rant: One of the discussions I've noticed from the community leading into this expansion is on mid-core content, kind of defining what is in the middle of higher-end difficult content and the easiest, most accessible content. I'm wondering if the team has an internal definition of what that middleground is, and how much of a priority it is heading into this expansion?

[At this point there's a back and forth between Screen Rant, Yoshida-san, the translator, and staff to help define what the question means by "midcore" content.]

Naoki Yoshida: That actually ties into what we were discussing this morning at the presentation, when we said we want to enhance that multiplayer experience. Since Shadowbringers, we were trying to focus on efforts to get new players - as many new players as we can - in [to FFXIV], so we focused on enhancing features that will allow for players to enjoy the game solo, or with a smaller group. More casual content. That was the groundwork that we were trying to do to bring in more people.

We kind of agree that to players who've been with us [for multiple expansions], it feels like we're lacking in that sort of midrange content. So once we have finished that groundwork - which I think we have, through Shadowbringers and Endwalker - we have a lot of people that joined Final Fantasy 14. Now we can focus in on that sort of midrange content that many players can come in and play together . From here on out, we will be introducing more content that will allow for groups to participate.

Ideally, I think the definition of more difficult content would be an Extreme Primal Battle or Extreme Trial...but some people might regard that as easy. It is a little bit difficult now that we do have more people - the definition of what is difficult content versus more casual content is a little less clear nowadays. I think that also leads to our focus now moving forward, with bolstering multiplayer content, whether it be the quality that we're providing and also the quantity of content that we're delivering.

FFXIV Player Count In Dawntrail & Beyond

Why Yoshida-San Doesn't Think About It Too Much

Screen Rant: You've said that we've moved out of the phase of this aggressive player expansion that was being aiming for. I'm just wondering what the anticipation is for Dawntrail's player numbers. Do you still foresee it growing as explosively as the other expansions have? Or do you actually expect it to taper off and kind of focus more on the people who are already invested in Final Fantasy 14?

Naoki Yoshida: So, this might not be the best answer from a business perspective, or even as a member of the board of Square Enix. But I'm not that particular about subscriber numbers per se.

With trying to maintain production, as well as longevity, and making sure that the game is surviving - all of these things for an MMORPG are quite difficult. If I am affected by how the player numbers of that particular moment go up or down, if I'm excited or sad with how the numbers go up and down, it will not work for a long-term perspective.

I think we also touched upon this when we were talking about how we focused a lot on single-player, solo content, and casual content, throughout Shadowbringers. We also don't want to skew too much into focusing on our existing players either.

Of course, throughout 7.0 and the 7.X patch series, we want to now drive the players that came in with single-player content to kind of merge into how the existing players have been playing the multiplayer content - to get experience playing with other people. With that, I think that will also allow for players to get excited about "while there's a lot of people having fun on that game," and it might prompt other players to come and get excited with the game itself. I think I'm looking at it from a longer perspective. It's more like a three or four year span versus this next launch of an expansion. "I'm scared of player numbers decreasing or plateauing," that's not what I'm looking at. I'm looking at more "well, will people jump into the game and enjoy it enough to stay with us for the next three to four years?"

That said, the exponential growth that we saw from Shadowbringers to Endwalker, I think was partly due to the pandemic. People were not able to leave their homes, and through Final Fantasy 14, they were able to connect with friends and make new friends. A lot of media and players content creators were mentioning their experience of being able to connect and stay social with friends via the game. At the same time, a lot of prominent content creators picked up the game and did some live streams on their channels as well. So I think that was an added bonus to the explosion of players. So if I were to say, "Do I expect growth in that same scale?" I wouldn't expect it. I think it might be less aggressive than that period.

But I think even if we do see results that are less than optimal, we won't get discouraged. We analyzed it and we knew it was coming, and I don't want to put unnecessary pressure [on the team] that you must perform 120% more than the last year's performance. My priority is to focus on making sure that the players are satisfied, making sure we're delivering a game that our players would want to come back to, and to continue our live services with that in mind.

Final Fantasy 14

Franchise

Final Fantasy

Platform(s)

PC , PS3 , PS4 , PS5 , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S

Released

August 27, 2013

Developer(s)

Square Enix

Publisher(s)

Square Enix

Genre(s)

MMORPG

Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Engine

Crystal Tools

ESRB

T for Teen: Alcohol Reference, Animated Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence

How Long To Beat

Metascore

90

Platforms That Support Crossplay

PC, PS4 &PS5

PS Plus Availability

N/A