FFXIV Island Sanctuary gives Animal Crossing fans a break

The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV makes perfect sense to many people, and now players can escape to their own Animal Crossing-style island with the upcoming FFXIV Island Sanctuary, detailed in Live Letter 71. Game Director Naoki Yoshida and Community El Producer Toshio Murouchi has expanded on much of the upcoming content players can expect with FFXIV 6.2, which is slated for release in late August.

An island hideout is a separate island that each player gets for themselves. It mostly runs separately from the rest of the game, with its own materials, coins, and inventory running independently so as not to clutter players’ regular inventories. You can farm, grow seeds, take care of creatures and develop and decorate your island however you want. Each island is unique to you and progression is single player only, but players will be able to invite friends and party members to visit their islands for free.

Yoshi-P points out that the islands are quite large and points to a small dot, barely visible in the telescope from above, which he says is Roegadin, as an example of their scale. Island Sanctuary is expected to arrive with update 6.25, so it won’t be in the August patch, but it should give players a whole new way to spend their time in Eorzea. We may not have Animal Crossing on PC, but it’s certainly a good alternative.

As for the other updates FFXIV Live Letter 71here are all the key details:

• Update 6.18with new worlds and the introduction of data center trips, it will launch on July 5 as planned after a 24-hour maintenance period to implement new features.
• Crystalline Conflict Season 2 will start with Patch 6.18 and Season 3 will start with Patch 6.2 along with the return of Rival Wings.
• Update 6.2titled Buried Memory comes out at the end of August.
• Tataru’s great adventure will continue in 6.2, with the Sky Pirates of Heavensward’s Shadow of Mhach alliance raid series. This means that players will need to complete an alliance raid to continue this story.
• Version 6.2 adds a new MSQ dungeon called The Fell Court of Troia, an imposing castle that appears to be in the Nether.
• A new challenge and an extreme challenge are coming up, but Yoshida declined to give any details about them before release.
• The second installment in the Endwalker raid series, Pandaemonium: Abyssos, arrives with update 6.2. Savage Raids will take place one week after the patch release; For the first time in FFXIV history, such a delay has been introduced. The team says this is a test to see how it will affect things like the first World Race and will consider player feedback before deciding to continue at this rate for future raids.
• Content Bay S1T7 (Unreal) is added in patch 6.2, a new Unreal Sephiroth test fight designed to match the original difficulty of the Heavensward fight.

• Quest adjustments will be made for classes in both PvE and PvP, but Yoshida says the “extensive adjustments” planned for the Astrologer and Dragoon quests are on hold for the time being, as they require too much work to complete.
• Yoshida says there are plans to make changes that will encourage players with abilities that guarantee critical or direct hits to continue to have those stats on their team.
• Task support will be added in patch 6.2 for five post-ARR and Heavensward content dungeons: Snowcloak, Keeper of the Lake, Sohm Al, Aery, and Vault.
• One of the last pre-Heavensward story challenges, Steps of Faith, was reconfigured as a single-player instanced challenge. Additionally, Thornmarch (Hard) has been reworked – the team says they felt it was too hard for what is now the first 8-player story challenge with changes to previous story content in A Realm Reborn.
• Adventurer panels and player portraits will be coming out of beta with patch 6.2. The player portrait system has been reworked to be more user-friendly, but players will need to retrieve their portraits as those from the beta period will be lost.
• New Allagan Tomestones of Causality have been added, along with new high-tier gear.
• Players will now be able to request equipment repairs from other players, even while on duty.
• Glamor Chest capacity increased from 400 to 800 slots.

• Update 6.25 will see the return of Somehow Further Hildibrand Adventures, which will also include “new weapon upgrade missions” teasing the participation of Herolt Blackthorne and Godbert Manderville.
• Update 6.25 brings new tribal quests for robotic omicrons that will focus on the assembly jobs of the Disciples of the Earth.
• New combat content called “variant dungeons” will arrive with patch 6.25; they are described as level 90 random dungeons for 1-4 players that scale based on party size. They have no role restrictions, players can freely switch jobs, and the dungeon path and story can change based on the player’s choice.
• The first dungeon variant is The Sil’dihn Subterrane, where players will be joined on their adventure by “someone” who will speak and provide additional story content during the dungeon.
• There are plans to release two more variants of these dungeons during the Endwalker 6.x content roadmap.
• Additionally, there will be two more difficult versions of this dungeon with a fixed composition of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 DPS, which are described as equivalent to the extreme and wild variants of the dungeon. In these, normal resurrection abilities are limited and players have limited respawn: if the entire party dies, all enemies in the dungeon will respawn and players will face the rage timer if they take too long to clear the gathering.

Yoshida notes that he has been so busy lately that he hasn’t had time to do many interviews lately, but he has found time in his schedule to talk to PCGamesN about the in-game tools, accessibility of FFXIV. The multiplayer community has a reputation for being very supportive, but some players feel that the reporting system is still bad when something goes wrong.