Adam Bankhurst
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Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival in Tokyo is currently underway and its keynote revealed such exciting things as the full Dawntrail trailer, a new Pictomancer job, and a look at the female Hrothgar playable race in action.
While we didn’t get a release date for the much-anticipated Dawntrail expansion beyond Summer 2024, the glimpse of the future of FF14 shared by director Naoki Yoshida and the team was quite promising.
To learn more about Dawntrail as a whole, you can check out the nearly 6-minute trailer of the expansion above that is intended to be the “very best summer vacation a hero could possibly have.” It will also be the first step into a “new story” for the game and will send players to Tural, a land that lies over the ocean to the far west of Eorzea.
Players will be able to take on two new jobs in Dawntrail, and the Pictomancer job is now known alongside the previously announced Viper. Pictomancer is a magical ranged DPS that uses a paintbrush and a wide array of colors to take down its foes. It looks like a very fun job that has players painting landscapes, shapes, and other types of art as skills to cause damage, create weapons, summon creatures, and more.
To become a Viper or Pictomancer, players will need to purchase Dawntrail. If they aren’t ready to begin the new expansion, there will still be updates to enjoy like the major graphical update, system updates, and Gold Saucer updates.
One of the other biggest additions is for those who at least have the Shadowbringers expansion, and that is the new playable race known as the Female Hrothgar. The Male Hrothgar was added during the Shadowbringers expansion, and soon, the more rare Female Hrothgar will join the fight.
The Female Hrothgar are “identified by their lithe, muscular forms” and their “predisposition for leadership.”
Yoshi-P said the Female Hrothgar will be the final race to be added to the game, but he also left the door open for them to change their minds in the future.
As reported by Nova Crystallis, there were a ton of other new updates given during the keynote, including some of the new areas we will be visiting. The new region players will be visiting is called Tural and a Female Hrothgar will be aiding players and will introduce them to what they can expect. This includes a contest where the prize is “succession as the ruler of Tuliyollal, a massive city that sits at the juncture of northern and southern regions of Tural.” This contest may also split your team of Scions, potentially causing conflict or arguments between friends.
We also got a glimpse of a new town called Solution Nine, a “city of towering facades constructed by an entirely different civilization than of Tuliyollal.” There will also be another area called Heritage Found that is a region “overflowing with lightning energies, thick thunderclouds blot out the sun, while streaks of purple levin illuminate the land day and night.”
New challenges will put players face-to-face with Valigarmanda, The Eliminator, and the Barreltender. A new 8-player raid called The Arcadion was discussed and it will take place in Solution Nine. A new Alliance Raid – Echoes of Vana’Diel – is a collaboration with Final Fantasy XI and will test players with a battle against the Shadow Lord from FFXI. There will also be an Ultimate Raid call Eden – Futures Rewritten that will bring players back to Eden and see different “what-if” scenarios with Ryne and Gaia.
Fans of Island Sanctuary will be happy to know a new type of “lifestyle content” called Cosmic Exploration that will be released after Dawntrail and will let players visit other planets.
There are so many other smaller updates coming with Dawntrail and beyond, and we encourage you to check out the official Dawntrail page for even more info.
Lastly, Akihito Yoshida created gorgeous artwork for Dawntrail and you can check it and the Official Dungeon Crawl trailer below.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.