The director and producer of Final Fantasy 14, Naoki Yoshida (also known as Yoshi-P), has revealed that he’s not announcing the exact release date for the Dawntrail expansion right now, since he doesn’t want it to get delayed like Endwalker previously did.
Yoshida said this during Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival 2024, which took place over the weekend in Tokyo. In his keynote, the director acknowledged that given the special occasion, fans were “probably expecting us to announce the release date of Dawntrail.” However, despite the expansion having an announced release window of summer 2024, and the team already targeting an internal date, he reiterated that this wasn’t being publicly revealed just yet.
"Unfortunately, though we do have an internal date that we are targeting, we are adjusting the schedule, making sure it's fine-tuned as much as it possibly can be before announcing, so we will not be sharing that today,” he said.
"If you're wondering why, well, it's because as you know, for Endwalker, for the very first time in my career we had to delay the release,” he continued. “We don't want that to happen again, even if it's just a few weeks, so we are taking great care to make sure that our schedule is on track before announcing, but we will get you that info as soon as we can.”
The previously delayed Endwalker expansion launched on December 7, 2021 - two weeks after it was originally supposed to. In a news post revealed at the time, Yoshida apologized for the delay, and stated: “The biggest factor behind the release date change was my own selfishness as the game’s director.” He explained that after playing through the expansion, “I just couldn’t contain my desire to further improve Endwalker’s quality.”
Back to Dawntrail though, and Yoshida reassured fans that the upcoming expansion is still very much on track to release within the ‘summer 2024’ window.
“People are saying, ‘you mean October then? It’s not going to be summer, it’s going to be October, isn’t it?’ No, no, it will be summer,” he said. Laughing, he added that “we will not be releasing on Square Enix time, we will be releasing on [Final Fantasy] 14 time, which means properly in summer.”
For more games like Final Fantasy 14, be sure to check out our recommendations for the best MMORPGs, as well as the best MMOs.
