Time again to look into the MMO Final Fantasy 14… you have no idea how I had to resist making the meme when writing that bit… So last expansion was the big end to the story. We saved all life in the universe, ended the Hydaelyn and Zodiark story and ended up having a bit of an inward look at who we are and want to be by the end of it all. So how do we top that?

Well short answer is you can’t really, you can’t keep escalating the plot constantly going for a bigger and bigger threat, something all long running stories need to be aware of. Instead Dawntrail feels like a refreshing de-escalation of stakes. Oh there are stakes, and villains, lives to save, disasters to avert, just nothing comes to the level of do this or the world ends feeling like Shadowbringers and Endwalker had. The opening of the game feels more like you going on a new adventure or holiday rather than  a save the world mission and that very much plays out as a stark difference in how this expansion starts compared to those two.

While the majority of expansions before could be broken up into around 3 acts, this one is much more a 2 act story. Some may not like the first act complaining it’s not really about us, but then we did have our big story last time. Here we’re more working as a mentor to new character Wuk Lamat, a female Hrothgar ( previously exclusively male but with this expansion now playable) we were introduced to at the tail end of the patch stories of Endwalker. She is out to win the right of succession of Tural competing against 3 others which will determine who is to become the new Dawnservant, ruler of Tural. She starts out very much not really knowing why she would be Dawnservant other than stopping one particular challenger, but as the story progresses she grows to understand her people and what she would do as their leader.

The Second half meanwhile is a much more direct stop this or lots of people are going to die story, but plays off the events of the first half so people just skipping cutscenes (WHICH YOU SHOULD NEVER DO) will miss out on the whole weight of that story.

This expansion came with a graphical upgrade, but outside of water effects I haven’t really noticed it too much, maybe I need to upgrade my computer and raise the specs higher. Classes haven’t had any major overhauls in how they work from the ones I’ve played, mostly they gain new additions to rotation such as this power up gives access to this ability, which does mean you’re not going to get as much button clutter  as they share the key rather than adding a new one. Oh there’s still tweeking with numbers going on, at time of writing the .05 patch just hit and saw a number of buffs and nerfs, but the people pushing the savage raid can find that out.

The dungeon and raid fights do seem to be a stage up in difficulty from previous expansions, and honestly that’s good. To get to this point (assuming you didn’t just buy some story skip) you would have had to go through all that content before (well raids are usually optional but you should do them too)  so you should have seen a good amount of mechanics by now. That said there is one boss in an optional dungeon post main story that…. it’s just badly designed hard, iv seen people leave the moment they pop in seeing it’s that dungeon because of that boss.

The expansion has been out for around a month now, most big post game stuff hasn’t started yet. Last time we got those island getaways to work on and the variable dungeons so it should be nice seeing what is to come, but outside the first raid tier and the current treasure dungeons that’s the end game. I have managed to clear the first of the two extreme bosses with plans to do the other which was a decent challenge learning the fight and working with people, but I don’t tend to have the time available or static group to do savage raids.

I would say I’m enjoying it though, cant have end of the world or end of the universe heavy storylines constantly, though the later bits of the story may pull a few heartstrings.