One of the amazing things about Final Fantasy XIV is how remarkably consistent the game’s update cycle is. Players have been able to correctly predict and anticipate when major patches drop because Square Enix and the FFXIV team have been on the ball. The patch cycle is nearly law.
That law needed to change though. In the latest Live Letter From the Producer, FFXIV creative director and lead producer Naoki Yoshida stated that the length of each patch cycle is increasing in the future. While major patches have come out at a pace of roughly three-and-a-half (3.5) months apart, Yoshida said that future patches will be coming four (4) months apart.
Yoshida asked players to understand that his team needs an additional two weeks in order to ensure the quality of each patch. This lengthening of the patch cycle also has to take into account employee breaks in the Summer and Holiday seasons, adding another week in each case.
“Those two weeks that we ask for your patience is one week for additional implementation and then one week for fine-tuning,” said Yoshida. “As I explained in the first half, we really depended on the motivation of each of the developers that are on the team. Looking at our schedule and how we were, I do want my team to be healthy and be able to maintain a good level of quality.”
“To be honest, there were areas where we might not [have] performed as well as we should have because some of us were pushing too hard,” added Yoshida. “We’re not an assembly line.”
Yoshida highlighted a chart comparing the amount of content in Patch 3.3 versus the more recent Patch 5.3. The latter patch added 20 more quests, had more jobs to balance, nearly twice the number of cutscenes, and around double the word count in the script. That all adds up to a lot more work for the development team to ensure everything that goes out the door is up to the team’s high standards.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge change for players. You now have another two weeks to dive into the smaller corners of FFXIV before the next patch drops. Take your time and maybe take a break! Here at The Linkshell, we have a host of guides for all the content you’ve been skipping in the game and far more details from the Live Letter.
