10 Issues Holding Final Fantasy 14 Back Today

1 week ago 4

Published Apr 15, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT

Stephanie Watel is a writer for DualShockers. She has over three years of experience writing about all things video games, from news to lists to in-depth guides in a variety of genres. Her strongest niches start with RPGs and also include platformers, horrors of every variety, cozy builders and sims. She also enjoys a good looter shooter and the occasional gacha adventure.

Games have been her biggest passion since getting a Nintendo 64 for Christmas in the 90's and she carries that passion into all of her published content. With DualShockers, she specializes in crafting polished, informative, and enjoyable gaming guides that help pave a clear path for players and don't skimp on the details that matter most.

Final Fantasy XIV is a game that's been near and dear to my heart for just over a decade now, having joined the journey at the dawn of the Heavensward expansion. The overarching story of the Warrior of Light remains one of the most emotionally compelling and intricately crafted ones in MMOs, if not gaming as a whole. That sentimental love hasn't changed, despite the growing number of issues the game is clearly facing as it tries to turn a new page in terms of the story and the content that players get to enjoy.

Many of these issues are systemic in nature and thus, unfortunately, not a quick fix with a patch or two. They pertain to the very core of Final Fantasy 14's gameplay and the community culture that surrounds it. Years of creative back-and-forth have led the game down a path to an uncertain future, and the solution to it all seems to remain unclear as Yoshi-P and the team behind him provide little more than hints of what to expect as far as radical change.

Warrior of Light Viper Job attack in Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail trailer

Final Fantasy 14 Might Be Getting Reborn (Again)

Final Fantasy 14 Director Naoki Yoshida has revealed that the game may be reborn again in the future, possibly as part of move to a new engine.

That said, there are a number of issues that I think definitely need to be addressed one way or another to help FFXIV continue to thrive and be the experience that players should expect from a AAA-tier MMORPG.

10 Rewards Still Need More Work

What's So Bad About Rewarding Players?

Content-based rewards have recently become a big talking point in the FF14 community, and not in the best way. Among the game's other systemic incentivization issues, the player base has been especially critical lately of how rewards don't feel balanced, consistent, or intuitive enough to merit the effort required to obtain them. This also isn't specific to one niche of content. This spans from the most hardcore and challenging content in the game, such as Savage-tier raids, down to even the most casual seasonal events.

Over the past couple of expansions or so, content-based rewards noticeably dwindled, and "reskins" of existing rewards became more persistent. For example, gear from one particular dungeon inexplicably pops up in another entirely different dungeon 20 levels higher with the exact same design, save for a slight change in color palette. Worse yet, nearly all dungeon gear remains undyeable, which I would argue is more important to provide players with rather than unlocking job gear for glamour purposes.

Lazy rewards extend further to other types of loot, and it's a twist of the knife in the already-existing issue of insufficient rewards. Not only is there often not enough, but what's there is wholly unsatisfying. Even the eccentric hype around the return of variant/criterion dungeons with The Merchant's Tale in Dawntrail quickly deflated, as the acclaimed systemic rework of the content became overshadowed by the fact that the few and best rewards were, for some reason, kept for the most challenging tiers of the dungeon. It effectively canceled out the entire purpose of reworking the content for a more balanced experience.

Granted, director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has since noted that they're hard-focused on improving reward incentives going forward into 8.0's release and beyond. It seems like they wanted to get a head start on that promise with the remaining patches of Dawntrail, and the Pilgrim's Traverse deep dungeon is a good example of success on that front. However, it's still pretty hit-and-miss so far.

9 Housing Feels Like a Farce

Fantasy Housing Shouldn't Be Like Real Life

Housing in Final Fantasy 14 has long been a contentious topic among players, as up to now, any solution to rebalance the fairness of obtaining a home in the game hasn't remotely come close to being a practical one. While housing districts themselves have continued to expand from one region to the next, the problem remains that demand outstandingly exceeds the available supply, and this has only worsened with the influx of new players over the past few years. This is all due to the fact that, unlike other MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, the housing system in FF14 is not fully instanced, only partly.

Only the interior of homes and apartments in the game are actually instanced (hence why you always spawn outside of your homestead after participating in a duty or logging in). If both the interior and exterior of player homes were instanced, this would mean that a seemingly infinite number of homes could be provided without too much strain on the servers. However, with the way things are set up now, the housing districts in each region can only hold so many homes, leading to an unnecessary scarcity in what should be a fundamental aspect of an MMO experience.

To make matters worse, the process of securing a practically once-in-a-lifetime home has only gotten more challenging since the introduction of the lottery system. The way things were before wasn't much better, back when players would literally camp outside empty plots for hours on end due to the random timer unlocks for each piece of digital land. Now, in the supposed sense of "fairness", a lottery based entirely on luck has replaced that. No matter how much gil you have saved up, how long you've played the game, or how much your Free Company needs a place to plant roots, it's still all a matter of luck.

This leaves many players having to place continuous lottery bids for weeks, if not months, all while competing against dozens of other hopefuls who are in the same boat. It's a system that feels needlessly meticulous and unfair while trying to justify itself as fair. If that still wasn't enough, daring not to log into the game for an average of 30 days leads to the risk of losing that home you fought for altogether due to the internal demolition timer on each plot. This is what an artificial supply vacuum leads to, and why owning a home in FFXIV feels like a chore when it should feel like a whimsical refuge.

8 Do We Really Need the Armoury Chest?

No, We Really Don't

There are a number of ways that Final Fantasy 14 needs updating in terms of its infrastructure. One particularly useless feature that's often overshadowed by bigger concerns is the Armoury Chest. This is a unique inventory submenu that caters specifically to job gear and weapons, and it's where they get automatically stored first before your general inventory.

However, as the game continues to expand and upgrade other features, this one has remained largely unchanged since, well, ever. Frankly, it's something the game no longer needs if it ever needed it to begin with. After all, the Armoury Chest doesn't really serve a specific purpose that the Inventory menu doesn't already. You can technically store anything in your inventory, including gear and weapons, along with anything else.

Final Fantasy 14: All 7.41 Mounts & Minions

These FFXIV rewards are cosmically awesome and worth adding to your lineup!

Meanwhile, the Armoury Chest feels more like a dumping ground for any and all gear, even if it's Level 1 glamour sets that have no combat stats, which doesn't make a lot of sense in retrospect. If anything, it only causes confusion when you obtain new gear items and have to track them down in one menu or the other. Overall, the Armoury Chest just feels like HUD clutter, even if it was provided with the original purpose of preventing clutter.

In its place, an overhaul of the game's inventory system could consolidate this subsection of gear equipment. Or the Character menu could potentially do this as well.

7 The Gear Treadmill Renders Great Content Useless

Duties Become Ghost Towns Within Weeks

One of Final Fantasy 14's biggest ongoing systemic issues that's only becoming more apparent with each expansion is its so-called "gear treadmill". Contrary to how you'd otherwise imagine yourself on an actual treadmill, this actually refers to a vertical system of progression within a game that intentionally (or even unintentionally, to an extent) forces its players to constantly replace their current gear in pursuit of better stats.

This leaves much of the gear in the game with an extremely short shelf life, outside of it being used otherwise as glamour. As such, it leaves gear feeling far more disposable than it should, and the grind to obtain some of it ultimately does not feel worth it when something else will replace it soon enough.

The worst consequence of this gameplay structure is that it renders a surprising amount of the game's duty content "useless" after a short period of time. After all, the crux of running a dungeon or an alliance raid outside of first-time completion and lore is the gear. However, when the stats of that gear are quickly made obsolete by the next duty up the ladder, it leaves little purpose for people to continue running older content outside of Duty Finder roulettes or objectives for special events like Moogle Mogtome.

6 The Game Created FOMO That's Affecting Newer Players

A Growing Issue in This Exclusive Genre

To build upon the previous point, this vertical system of progression in FF14 has created a sense of FOMO that ultimately affects the sustainability of the game's content at large. Worse yet, when you have droves of new players coming into the game with the promise of a helpful and bustling community, they're the ones who take the brunt of it.

Take the game's series of Alliance Raids as a prime example. While few and far between, with only three per expansion, they're often some of the most anticipated types of content in major patch updates, more so than regular dungeons and sometimes even trials. That hype, in turn, pushes a majority of the community's active players to flood into the raid itself as soon as it releases. Within the first day or so, that chunk of the community will have the raid done and dusted, and the rest of that first week is usually for those who want specific gear drops and thus will run the raid a few more times.

However, once the first week has come and gone, queue rates for these raids unfortunately drop by a lot. It can certainly depend somewhat on your server and data center at large, but this only further encapsulates the problem. If you're on a lower population server, this FOMO vacuum only makes things harder for you if you prefer to savor new content.

However, if you're an entirely new player who wants or needs to clear one of the game's older Alliance Raids for the first time, finding 23 other people to take that ride with you can be surprisingly difficult, even in a community of millions. So often, I've seen new players essentially begging in big city areas for folks to help them clear content (especially duties that require more bodies) because their queue timer for it is going on an hour with no end in sight. When they ask why no one is doing the content, no one really has a straight answer, or doesn't want to give the honest one.

This is why vertical progression is so impractical and frankly poisonous to a player community that's otherwise very active and itching to play content that matters. Not only that, it's unsustainable for the developers who put so much time and effort into crafting these experiences, just for them to get tossed aside in less than a month.

5 Limited Jobs Are Isolating

Why Restrict Some of the Coolest Legacy Jobs?

First, it was Blue Mage (sorry, BLU), now it's Beastmaster. A caster that can wield an encyclopedia of vibrant and unique spells based on existing ones from defeated enemies, and then a tried and true pet class that Summoner once was upon a time. The notion of providing players with some of the most unique and compelling legacy Final Fantasy jobs in the game, only to do so with numerous strings attached, is honestly rather disingenuous and really shouldn't be a thing.

Final Fantasy 14 is struggling enough these days with class identity, and the Limited Jobs feature just feels a bit too much like a twist of the knife on that issue. "Don't know what class to play these days? See how cool this class plays and looks with its own unique identity? Well, you can't use it here, here, or here. Have fun in a carnival gauntlet instead."

Final Fantasy 14's Yoshi-P Wants The Game To Finally Resolve The Big Problem With MMOs

Yoshi-P doesn't like how MMO content caters to several different demographics instead of one that encompasses everyone.

Given that the game has had a long-standing and dedicated Blue Mage community since its release in Stormblood, it only makes this all the more poignant. Players want these jobs in the game, and Beastmaster is one that's been especially yearned for throughout the global community for years. But as a full-fledged job, not one that's banned and isolated from half the game's content.

Limited Jobs almost feel like a consequence rather than a feature of the game's ongoing issues with job identity and balancing. The game and the development team behind it are entirely capable of providing fun and innovative combat jobs like these, but because of the status quo and keeping a meticulously level playing field, they're not allowed to be used or enjoyed to their full potential. A somber tale of what the game can and should be, but certain decisions have left such innovation at a creative impasse.

4 Chocobos Are Not Practical in Combat

The Game Almost Insults Their Actual Intelligence

While not quite so systemic an issue and perhaps more of a quip, Chocobo companions are still very much a fixture in FF14, not to mention one of the biggest mascots of the entire franchise. Similar to the Moogles, Tonberries, and Cactuars that we all know and love, Chocobos should get the same reverence, and honestly, their combat intelligence could use a touch-up.

Sure, we can customize our Chocobos to our heart's content once we've unlocked them (frankly, the ridiculously obscure and delayed quest to do so could use a rework), dressing them up in different bardings and dyeing their features all manner of colors. We can also level them in the field and unlock new combat abilities that can give you a decent edge in one-on-one battles. This is especially important at lower levels, when you're far more vulnerable, and your beloved bird companion can effectively help you survive encounters you otherwise wouldn't.

However, while they can wield an arsenal of damage and/or healing abilities, Chocobos are still subject to reactive blindness. All too often, we have to watch our poor birbs stand in one AoE attack after another without a care in the world, like they have no instincts beyond pecking and kicking their target to death. This can often mean having to go through countless Gysahl Greens to keep them up, sometimes during a single overworld encounter (such as World Bosses).

Just give them a little bit of self-preservation beyond Choco Regen. They don't have to be the Bird of Light to sense when something's about to wallop them in the face.

3 Constant Patch Droughts Leave Players Hanging

Are We There Yet?

This one is pretty much a given, and a longtime gripe of the community at large that's as relevant as ever. For an MMO that's only grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade, the content patch cycles have unfortunately only widened with no entirely clear answer as to why. The volume of content in each patch hasn't increased much beyond the usual scope, and that trend has seldom budged since the development team tends to keep their content schedule pretty predictable from one expansion to the next.

However, alongside that predictability, we also need consistency. With how FFXIV's content infrastructure functions right now and the points previously mentioned, most new content that's released gets a pretty brief shelf life. This leaves a deprivation vacuum that shouldn't exist, but it does. This means that more consistent content is needed to keep the community engaged, but as it stands, even substantial content patches take months to arrive. In an MMO with a fast turnaround, that's pretty much the equivalent of an eternity. It leaves many players sitting and twiddling their thumbs, unsure what to do when they don't have any present goals to pursue in the game.

Beyond the COVID era of Endwalker's patch cycle (when it was more understandable), one often-discussed culprit of this sluggish content schedule lies in the gradual overhaul of the game's graphics. Or, in other words, a shift in the allocation of priorities for the game's development. While there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting the game to have a glow-up after several expansions, if the method of doing that comes at the expense of at least relatively consistent content for players, it may be the wrong method.

2 Leveling a Job Isn't Gratifying

Some Jobs Have Only Two Buttons For the First Two Dozen Levels

ffxiv-jobs-should-feel-gratifying-header

Another aspect of the broader issue with jobs in their current state in FFXIV is how level progression feels with each one. The constant need to rebalance jobs continues to happen more so at the top of the skill ladder, instead of across the board. As a result, it's led to some seriously skewed progression with a number of jobs, and an utter lack of viability at lower levels doesn't make a very good impression for those aspiring to explore different roles.

I'm not talking just the first 10 or 20 levels of a job class, either. Certain ones don't even fully break into a combat rotation until at least Level 50, which, in retrospect, is technically more than halfway up the ladder (as of Dawntrail's release). Forcing players to crawl their way through multiple dungeons and other combat instances with so few abilities to draw from for so long isn't necessarily the best way to show how reliable and fun the job can be. Sure, hard work pays off when it comes to maximizing your potential, but if the effort-to-gratification ratio is so lopsided, how does that compel anyone to play the job in the first place?

While this is something that would honestly need to be part of a sweeping infrastructure overhaul in the game, akin to the reset after 1.0, if the game wants to remain at the top of the food chain in the MMO sphere, then this genuinely needs to happen sooner rather than later.

1 Combat Jobs Have Been Drained of Identity and Flavor

What's Left When All That Matters is Damage Numbers?

That brings me to arguably the most pressing issue in Final Fantasy 14 as it stands right now. The game's otherwise impressive variety of combat jobs is in peril, and this is because these jobs have evidently all but lost their sense of personal identity. What makes FFXIV jobs stand out from other games in the genre, like World of Warcraft, is that the job system as a whole is very straightforward and thus more approachable for the average player.

There's no build complexity, no skill trees to forge different paths on. Every job in the game has the same fundamental start and end point. I'd personally argue that FFXIV is missing out on this dynamic of customization, but it can still be strong without it, if the jobs themselves retain their uniqueness.

However, relentless pushback from certain niches of the community, endgame raiders in particular, led the developers to pursue uniformity in job performance rather than letting each one have its own spotlight. This, in turn, led to certain jobs such as Astrologian, Summoner, and Monk getting dramatic changes in their setup and output that have effectively removed what made them unique in the first place.

A Summoner's carbuncle now functions as little more than a standard rotation prerequisite instead of a unique facet of the job. Astrologians no longer have various party buffs to experiment with in their deck, as the cards are technically now all the same. Meanwhile, Monk is now more complicated than ever due to being given a more tedious rotation that doesn't even unlock sequentially during level progression.

This loss of job identity in favor of an optimized and ultra-balanced performance has left jobs in FFXIV feeling like they seldom actually differentiate from each other. Sure, different skills have different names, but at the end of the day in Eorzea, all that seems to matter is damage numbers. The type of elemental magic you cast doesn't matter, only the numbers. The style of attack you do as a melee is subverted by landing positionals. A Summoner's carbuncle no longer functions as a magical pet with its own abilities.

Combat in the game now is all about numbers, numbers, numbers, and little else. When you take that away, what's left of the jobs that currently exist? Not even aesthetic, since job gear is now universally unlocked for those seeking more glamour opportunities. If the rumors are right and FFXIV decides to systemically overhaul the game yet again, this is where they need to start.