Earlier this week, a resurfaced interview from 2023 with Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida, lead producer and director of Final Fantasy XIV, seemed to suggest that developers were eager to help new players to jump into Dawntrail by letting them start the game from Patch 6.1 onwards. However, in response, newly released statements by Yoshi-P, published in PC Gamer, have squashed this rumor, saying that allowing more skipping would ‘diminish the value of FFXIV.’
The comments, which PC Gamer says form part of a longer interview set for release later in March, directly addressed reports that went viral on March 11 after being reposted by a Japanese FFXIV blog. “We are not currently planning any kind of new skip feature. This is something I’m constantly torn about, and we have already finished implementing a feature that allows players to learn about the story, setting, and characters even when they skip the story," Yoshida told PC Gamer.
The feature described is almost certainly the Unending Codex, a feature added in patch 6.1 that added backstory and information about characters and NPCs you encounter in-game.
Continuing the explanation of no further story skip, Yoshida talked about the value of FFXIV’s narrative: “I’m concerned that if the globally acclaimed storyline can be skipped through a function, the value of the FF14 game itself will be diminished. ... So far, FF14 has been able to continue to grow while keeping the story as the main focus.”
Certain translations of a 2023 press conference suggested that the FFXIV development team had planned to add a new type of story skip that allowed newcomers to start the adventure from the post-game of the previous expansion. These new statements put to bed any suggestion that a new story skip system would allow players to start FFXIV from Patch 6.1.
The current purchasable story skip system, Tales of Adventure, skips patch content, bringing you to the the next expansion's release. For example, Tales of Adventure: Shadowbringers skips a character through the entirety of A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and all of the following patches, starting you immediately at 6.0 to play Endwalker. A similar skip for Endwalker will likely be unveiled around the release of Dawntrail.
The assurances that the story skip system isn’t changing will come as a relief for players who are already against skipping any of the story. Yoshida himself stated that story skips were not the ideal way to experience the game at the Las Vegas Fan Fest in 2023: “This is like a season six that we are just now releasing. And people might be tempted to say, “Oh, well, just start from six,” but I honestly feel like, well, it’s season six, and we’ve made it so that season one is very easy to get through into binge, and so I think it would be easier to recommend for them to just start at the beginning and take it from there.”
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