No, Final Fantasy XIV isn’t about to get a difficulty boost

There’s news spreading like wildfire at the moment about something the Final Fantasy XIV director said during a recent interview with Famitsu, but there’s one small detail that’s being left out which I think needs to be clarified. 

The news that seems hard to escape at the moment is that Yoshida wants to increase the difficulty of Final Fantasy XIV moving forward, particularly with the release of Dawntrail. According to some trustworthy translations on the official FFXIV Discord server, this isn’t true. 

While he did say that the development team may have overdone things in their attempts to make the experience of FFXIV “stress-free”, and they want to very carefully try to make small changes moving forward, he expressly clarified that this doesn’t mean that the overall difficulty of the game will increase. 

Of course, there should be an element of challenge to any game, and in a game like Final Fantasy XIV, where you’re pulled into the story and face challenges as your WoL, there will always be stressful moments. However, even I have to admit that Endwalker and the post-Endwalker patches didn’t feel all that challenging, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the expansion.  

In a recent interview with Play Magazine, Yoshida reflected on the Endwalker Relic Weapons (Manderville Weapons) process and said: “When we think about players who have been playing for a long time, I think for them a lot of what sticks in their memory is the original Zodiac Weapons and how hard it was to like, for example, collect all of the materials”. He goes on to say that there will be “various routes in place in terms of the methods to enhance the weapons”.

So, yes, while certain parts of the game may become more challenging, or return to more challenging roots in the case of Relic Weapons, the overall difficulty of Final Fantasy XIV will not be seeing an increase. Rest assured, the MMO will still be enjoyable for players at every level.