Final Fantasy 14 facing a steep drop in player count following latest expansion

The latest expansion for Final Fantasy 14 ‘Dawntrail’ launched to a mixed review as players complained of a weak story that most people completed within a week. One of the latest patches to further improve on player complaints is also proving unhelpful as players are leaving in droves, leaving the player count on the verge of dropping below 1 million.

As revealed in a report from LuckyBancho, shared by Reddit user Impressive_Wafer_287, following the Stormblood expansion for Final Fantasy 14, this is the first time the game has seen a dip. The new raids, Cloud of Darkness and Echoes of Vana'diel, were quite impressive, but the main demand from fans remains for repeatable content instead of stories and dungeons that can be completed fairly quickly.

Final Fantasy 14 is ultimately an MMO game, and MMO players demand grind and loot in order to properly enjoy the game. Repeatable content further gives players incentive to come back; however, they also need to be fun at the same time.

“Far too much content in this; do it once, maybe a few times if it's fun, and then never interact with it again. It doesn't help that achievements are not interesting to do, like in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft. Achievements in this game are just milestones for doing X tedious activity Y amount of times,” one user explained.

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Player count may drop below 1 million

Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail brought in 1.4 million players, but the latest patch only saw 1.1 million players return. The retention of the returning players in the latest patch was less than 50%. If this continues, it won’t be long before the numbers reach below a million for the first time in a while.

With a new year dawning, game director and producer Naoki Yoshida revealed that the next two major updates are under development. Patches 7.2 and 7.3 are set to bring more content to the game, like job updates and new raid challenges. The update pattern remains the same, so it’s hard to tell if there will be any improvement in the player count. And while the news was interesting, many are confident that it will recover.