It’s hard to believe that we’re only weeks away at this point from Dawntrail, the expansion designed to take us all away from a decade of Hydaelyn and into an entirely new era of Final Fantasy XIV. It feels a little surreal, if I’m honest; the story is what we’ve all known for so long, and it’s strange to think about heading into another story arc that could possibly take us another full decade to complete.
This will also be the third expansion I’ve experienced on day one, so I’m rather excited for it!
Obviously, while I’m looking forward to the story and the introduction of certain fluffy friends, I’m also particularly interested in what could change for us on the housing front. So I figured I’d share some of the things I’m hoping for, even if they’re not particularly realistic.
Fun new furnishings
I’m always going to root for new furnishings in every piece of content we get in FFXIV, but especially so with Dawntrail. Some of the new maps that Square Enix has shared look really neat, and so different from what we’ve already seen in the game, so I’m hoping we’ll get new furniture to match.
To go with that point, though, some of the maps aren’t super different from what we’ve seen before. One has a real Ronka vibe, and another feels almost like a knock-off Ilsabard.
So I’m hoping that new furnishings focus on the new maps, especially the one that looks like a train station from Final Fantasy VII. What I wouldn’t do with a set of rustic wooden beam items from a train station…
More design contest winners
There were a whole bunch of winners from the last design contest (which, by the way, was in 2022) that we haven’t seen come to life yet, so I’m really hoping that Dawntrail brings us more of them.
I’m especially hopeful for ones that fit what it seems like Dawntrail’s vibe is going to be, like the outdoor bar and pool items I wrote about back in May 2023. I could also see that ceiling trellis being a good pick for cozy yard builds inside of houses, which has been a really popular thing to do for FFXIV interior design in the last few years.
Of course, I’m also always going to root for the LED lighting item that won, but I can see that being something the devs decide to add later to go with a themed campaign or something of the sort.
A new housing area
If I know Square Enix, we’re going to get a new housing area sometime around the 7.3 mark. I’m hoping they do what they did with Heavensward and give us the matching housing area two expansions later—which would mean we finally get Crystarium housing.
Though we’ve gotten plenty of red brick items to tide us over, I’d rather just have the option to live in the Crystarium. I don’t know that I’d move my own house over, but I could see our free company loving being there!
A new design functionality
I’m just going to start this by saying I know this is probably a pipe dream, but I can still hope.
The design community in FFXIV has always had a dream for a design system that lets us work with the Z dimension, rather than just X and Y, so we could build without having to rely on floating glitches.
Right now, the only way to do that is with third-party programs that can get you banned from the game, but that doesn’t always deter people.
If they do give this to us, I could see it being a later addition, rather than right up front. I can imagine it would be a lot of work on the back end, and the dev team’s got enough on their hands with the graphics overhaul coming to the entirety of the base game already!
Simpler glitches
If we don’t get new design functionality, I do hope we at least get simpler glitches. It’s happened in the past; for example, I’m not entirely sure when they changed the wall-mounted items glitch so that items would snap to surfaces even when they couldn’t attach to them, but I absolutely loved it. It took so much of the hard work out of the previous wall-mounted item glitch, where you had to carefully line up your item from your storage before you could put it anywhere.
Windows were an absolute nightmare back then.
I’d love to see something similar happen with things like floating when Dawntrail hits. Even if it’s an accidental change to the coding, it’d be so nice if we ended up with bigger hitboxes on items, for example, so it was easier to hit them—and so things like partitions could float faster.
YOUR TURN
