Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail Draws Most Players in Over a Decade Despite Launch Issues

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail launched on July 2, 2024 with some technical issues but that didn’t stop it from drawing the most players to the massively multiplayer online game in over a decade.

In a blog post, Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida thanked players for their support of Dawntrail and said the MMO had enjoyed its highest numbers since the game-changing A Realm Reborn update was released in 2013.

“I would like to thank you all for your patience and cooperation in dealing with server congestion during the early access for Dawntrail,” Yoshida said. “With your support, we were able to reach a record number of concurrent users we’ve not seen since the release of A Realm Reborn in 2013.”

A Realm Reborn is the revamp that saved Final Fantasy 14, which originally launched in 2010 to a poor reception. Square Enix relaunched the MMO in 2014 with the A Realm Reborn subtitle, which also saw its arrival on PlayStation.

Several major expansions have been released since — Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and now Dawntrail — with each adding a significant chunk of story content plus new dungeons and mechanics.

Dawntrail launched with some issues, however, especially on Xbox where the game client can become completely unresponsive when moving between locations. Yoshida previously said a fix for this should arrive in the week or two after its proper launch.

The expansion’s accompanying Version 7.0 patch made plenty of positive changes to the game too, such as new areas, quests, quality-of-life improvement, a huge graphical upgrade, and the Viper and Pictomancer jobs, but seemingly not without a few frustrating bugs.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

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