Since A Realm Reborn, the community of Final Fantasy XIV has been debating whether dungeons are too hard, too easy, or too boring. Initially, the dungeons of the new expansion Dawntrail also received rather negative feedback. Now, the director says players find them just right.
Why were the dungeons discussed? Every new expansion and (almost) every patch brings new dungeons that must be completed during the story quests. Since most of the new endgame content can only be tackled after finishing the respective DLC or update story, these dungeons also need to be doable.
This applies equally to hardcore raiders as well as casual players. Finding the right difficulty level here is not easy.
However, with the new expansion Dawntrail, the development team seems to have hit the mark.
That’s exactly how it should be
How do players see it in Dawntrail? Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida spoke in a Famitsu interview about the difficulty level of the latest dungeons. At the beginning of the joint meeting with Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy, they talked about the dungeons.
Yoshida mentions here that there were initially some voices saying the new content was too hard for casual players. However, these concerns have calmed down significantly. At the same time, a lot of positive feedback has been coming in:
[..] in Japan, but also internationally, there was a lot of feedback like:
Naoki Yoshida in an interview with Famitsu, 04.09.2024That’s exactly how it should be. So I think we will continue like this for the time being.
… but there is still room for improvement
What are players saying on reddit? In a post, the community discusses Yoshida’s statement. Overall, the commenters are happy with the current situation – as Naoki Yoshida also mentioned in the interview. Here are a few voices:
The Dawntrail dungeons are largely better than they’ve been in years.
– KnifingGrimace via RedditBig agree. Personally, I think the only stinker is the 99 dungeon.
– sekretguy777 via RedditThe difficulty of casual content is good at the moment.
– CaviarMeths via Reddit
However, the commenters still have a few remarks:
The only thing I wish for is that there are more mechanics during the “wall-to-wall” pulls. It becomes extremely tiring to do the same thing in every dungeon between the bosses.
– Defiant_Mercy via redditI wish they would let us change the colors of the AoE markers. Kaktorsenke is a nightmare if you are colorblind; the floor has the same color as the AoE markers in many places.
– LilyHex via reddit[…] I wish the dungeons weren’t designed as cinematic halls. I long for something more than a corridor that looks nice and is functionally identical to the 20 dungeons before and after it. Since we have variant dungeons, I wish for a similar design for all dungeons.
– CaviarMeths via reddit
Player feedback will likely not fall on deaf ears. Naoki Yoshida listens to his community and communicates with the players as transparently as he can. For example, he spoke during gamescom 2024 regarding the controversial changes to a new class.
