Final Fantasy 14 is my go-to MMO, and just like anyone who has a primary MMO game, I complain about it a whole lot. I do this out of love, not grumpiness: I adore this game and I want it to do better. But like any relationship that’s gone stale, I do have a list of complaints that I’ve talked about on this exact website.
Close to the top of said list? FF14’s open world is beautiful but empty, utterly devoid of anything entertaining to do. Dawntrail, with its shiny graphics upgrade, completely hammered this home for me. Here are several gorgeous zones, meticulously designed, pleasant to be around—and I have almost no reason to go and visit them.
It’s an enormous waste of potential, which is why I’m utterly delighted to hear that Square Enix is taking aim at it. During last weekend’s fanfest, Square Enix proudly made promises to improve both “Public Fields” (that is, the zones you quest through during any expansion’s main quest), and the quests themselves.
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Director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) stated: “That means adding more dynamic events and more content for players to try out in each area, in order to truly master those areas. And again, with the majority of daily player activity being relegated to the duty finder, public fields can feel kind of lonely and underused—and that’s our fault.
“We want to fix that, creating more exciting dynamic content.” Quests will also be getting “quality of life” improvements and, one hopes, a little more in the way of excitement actually doing them.
This is, I cannot stress enough, music to my ears. Here’s me back in April 2025 having a big old moan about public fields. Most notably, FATEs, which I call out as being dull as a slice of archon bread:
“Other non-hardcore content has suffered from a similar death of innovation. Take FATEs, for example. In Shadowbringers, there was a new rewards mechanic added, but FATEs in Dawntrail feel mostly the same as the FATEs of A Realm Reborn about a decade ago. You go to a place. You either AoE monsters or knock over bosses. You rinse and repeat.”
Here’s another complaining session I had on this website about society quests: “No, Square, spending 10 minutes every day skipping three NPCs worth of repeatable dialogue and maybe killing like, two things is not how world quests work. You’ve tried to convince me it is for three whole expansions and it hasn’t worked. Please do something else, I beg of thee.”
Basically, trust me when I tell you that it feels like Square has reached into my brain and plucked out my exact complaints about the open world—and while we need to wait until Berlin to get more details, here’s what I’m hoping for.
An ill FATE
First up, FATEs need to take a look at world quests and public events from games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2—namely, they need to be more dynamic, with a wider variety of activities. Right now, FATEs in FF14 have the same handful of objectives: Kill stuff. Kill one slightly tougher monster. Kill monsters and pick up items to be delivered to an NPC standing three feet away.
There are a couple of other types, like the escort and defend FATEs, but I’ll be honest: They’re so deeply unchallenging that they’re really just the “melt enemies with AoE” events wearing a skinsuit.
Take those other games I’ve mentioned, for example. World of Warcraft’s world quests aren’t by any means incredible, but they at least ask you to perform unique activities—a lot of ’em are kill X, get items, sure. But some of them have you skyriding through rings, manning cannons, hopping in vehicles, and so on.
There are more unique world events, too. Midnight also sees you going out into the open world to defend keystones, play tower defense, and knock over world bosses. It also helps that the introduction of the new Prey system gives you an opt-in layer of challenge while you’re doing all of these.
Guild Wars 2, meanwhile, has a well-earned reputation for having some of the best open-world activities in the business: Multi-stage events that flow into each other, some of which are incredibly challenging. Take Dragon’s End, for example, which was a multi-stage marathon that required coordination over an entire zone to complete.
Basically, there’s so much more that Square Enix could be doing if it’d just crib a few ideas from its competitors.
We quest in a society
Other activities, like the society quests, also need a complete reimagining. Society dailies are not that hard to complete. They take all of 10 minutes a pop—and yet, I haven’t been keeping up with them. Why? Because they bore me to absolute tears, particularly the ones designed for combat jobs.
I rarely do this as a critic, but the combat society quests are actively bad, and the only good thing I can say about them is that they’re over quickly.
These are quests designed to be repeated daily, and yet, a lot of them simply involve a bunch of dialogue and talking to NPCs—I have had rotations of society quests where I’ve literally just flown to three or four locations, skipped a bunch of dialogue I’ve already seen before, and gone back. Dailies complete.
Even when you do get to fight stuff, it’s usually only one or two enemies—and with absolutely zero bite. I’m barely able to get my opener off before they fall over, most of the time. Compared to the other games I’ve mentioned, it’s profoundly dull.
Imagine if these quests were a little more involved. Imagine if they asked you to do one or two GW2-style dynamic events—or, at the very least, asked you to kill more than one critter in a designated “kill this critter” zone. Society quests are quickly dealt with, but they’re supremely boring. The stories they tell are cute, but they’re purposefully time-gated by a requirement to do twenty minutes of dopamine-deprived chores every single day for a couple weeks, and I just plainly don’t want to.
If they can pull it off? By golly, we might be so back.”
The only open-world bit of fun I think actually gets players to band together successfully are FF14’s hunts—and even then, that banding together isn’t organic. Players need to organise “hunt trains” on Discord with specific times and routes to do them officially.
This isn’t necessarily a failure of hunts, mind—I think it’s good and healthy for some activities in MMOs to require some cooperation—but when the only thing that gets you banding together in the open world with your mates requires hopping on a Discord server and carving out a specific block of your schedule, it’s not… great.
There’s a reason that when Occult Crescent, Dawntrail’s exploration zone (that is, a bespoke area designed by Square to actually have lots of players in it doing stuff) came out, fellow PC Gamer writer and FF14 player Mollie Taylor said it made the game “feel like an MMO again”.
And hey, I liked Occult Crescent too—but it’s probably not great that it took Dawntrail almost an entire year to reach the point where it feels like an MMO again, huh?
More than anything, I’m hoping for that Occult Crescent feeling on Evercold’s release. I’m hoping for reasons to actively go out and get stuck into a broad range of activities in the open world. I want to see these places bustling with max-level characters. I want dynamic, multi-stage events and tough-but-fair boss battles.
Not in a sequestered, instanced zone released months after the expansion itself, but in the areas I actually experienced the main storyline in. We’ll have to wait until Berlin’s fanfest to see how far Square Enix is willing to go, but if they can pull it off? By golly, we might be so back.
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