Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida has issued an apology for some prominent technical issues that have arisen during the early access test period for its latest expansion.The Dawntrail expansion has been overall very well-received, but the prominent performance issues—especially on Xbox—led to Yoshida sharing an apology on FF14’s website.
The biggest issue right now is Dawntrail’s Xbox version, which will sometimes stop responding when transitioning between different areas like leaving a city or hopping between field locations. The developer’s investigation indicates it might be a memory fragmentation problem, so for now they recommend players stick to low-population worlds to better avoid it. A fix for that is in the pipe.
There is also an issue with how animations play and how certain characters display, as well as a problem with the freezing mechanics in a few dungeons, like the Syrcus Tower alliance raid. Those fixes are in the works as well, with a client patch to be deployed knocking them out.
“Despite our efforts to correct and fine-tune the graphics in the final moments before the release of Dawntrail, these issues were unfortunately identified late in the process. I would like to apologize for this,” said Yoshida.
It might seem a little dramatic to issue an apology for some notable, but not world-ending bugs in a public test, but Yoshida has been very sincere about avoiding major issues with the launch of Dawntrail, even refusing to assign it a concrete release date for a long time in the name of polish and perfection.
And overall, Dawntrail has been a hit. PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor praised how stable the servers were, noting that despite thousand-person queues the wait wasn’t very long at all.
News writer Harvey Randall, meanwhile, wrote that the graphics overhaul coming alongside Dawntrail has been a huge boon to the now 11 year old MMO. He particularly highlighted that the lighting changes are impressive upgrades for the older areas of Eorzea.
“The overhaul has massively improved the look of earlier expansions so much I’m tempted to go through everything on another alt. Ishgard feels appropriately frigid, and the Kugane’s kaleidoscope of colours is actually, well, visible now without third party tools,” he said.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen the issues at all and would rather ponder a more productive mystery, we’d like to know what’s up with those gimp suits in Dawntrail and if they’re story relevant.
