PAX East 2023: Final Fantasy XIV Panel Highlights

mmorpg.com:

The Final Fantasy XIV Panel was one of the things I was looking forward to seeing at PAX East this year the most, and it didn’t disappoint at all. I knew going in, there likely wouldn’t be any real announcements; after all, it was billed as a retrospective. An hour before the panel and the queue to get in was already full, and amazingly everyone seemed content to be packed in and waiting.

That said, this panel was held in one of the largest panel rooms, so the only way they could have gotten more people in would have been to have it in the Main Theater. It’s no wonder we were excited; according to Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), this was the first time they had made it back to North America to talk with fans directly since Fan Fest in 2018. If you missed the panel in person or streamed, you can still watch it on theFinal Fantasy XIV Twitch Page.

One of the first questions asked Yoshi-P to choose which of the expansions was his favorite. Unsurprisingly, he picked Heavensward, and it’s pretty fitting. While launching A Realm Reborn was a monumental undertaking in and of itself, Heavensward was their first swing at showing they could really build on the foundation they laid. Many of the story threads which had huge payoffs in later expansions started in that expansion, so I wasn’t surprised that was the first one he thought of. He also made sure to mention the whole tossing of Nighogg’s eye as being something he thought they didn’t execute quite as well as he would have liked. Sadly, he didn’t go into more detail about why they chose to do it in that way or how he thought they might have handled it better if they were to write that scene now.

I was also happy to hear him mention the scene at the end of Shadowbringers, where we return