Final Fantasy 14 is fast-tracking one of my most-anticipated fixes, releasing an entire month earlie

Occult Crescent—Final Fantasy 14's newest field operation mode—is good fun, but it's an absolute pain to tackle its 48-player dungeon Forked Tower as a static. That's thanks to the fact the game currently doesn't let you enter in groups larger than eight, leaving folk playing what's been dubbed as 'instance gacha' to try and land everyone in the same place.

It's a pain I've encountered myself across my handful of clears, but director and producer Naoki Yoshida revealed in a June livestream that once Patch 7.3 released. Which was, unfortunately, at least a month and a half away at that point.

FINAL FANTASY XIV Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXXXVII - YouTube

It sounds like a relatively small length of time, but considering that Yoshida revealed that Forked Tower had only been cleared 400 times in three weeks, I feared that waiting that [[link]] long to reduce some entirely unnecessary friction would spell the end for people's already waning enthusiasm.

I have to wonder if Yoshida [[link]] and Square Enix felt the same way, because in a surprise turn of events we're getting at least some of the fix an entire month early.

In a post to Yoshida penned five tweaks to Forked Tower that the team is planning to make—and while the latter three are still set to arrive in early August, the first two are being implemented as early as July 3 (that's tomorrow if you're a timely reader).

1. The ability to enter Occult Crescent instance with a preformed alliance of up to 48 players.
2. Allowing auroral mirages to generate sooner after the Occult Crescent instance has loaded.
3. Improvements to the cipher offering UI.
4. Delaying auroral mirage generation until an active critical encounter has ended.
5. Enabling exclusive access to the Occult Crescent instance for a set time when joining with a preformed alliance.

In layman's terms, the first two essentially mean that up to 48 players can now jump into the same instance together without having to constantly roll the dice and pray. Once they're all in there, the weather effect that determines when Forked Tower spawns should be shorter than it is right now—it's currently around 20-30 minutes—meaning less waiting around once you're inside. Those are all coming this week, providing the emergency update doesn't need any extra testing.

The third point is dealing with the currency needed to enter Forked Tower. You can chuck in as many ciphers as you want—essentially entering your name into a hat multiple times—which gives priority when there are more than 48 people trying to get in. Currently you can't actually see [[link]] how many ciphers players are entering, but Yoshida revealed during last month's live letter that information will become visible.

The fourth point is essentially making sure that folks aren't locked into a critical engagement—world events that seal you into the fight until it's complete—and miss out on being able to enter the dungeon.

The fifth point is interesting, one which Yoshida says came "after additional deliberation and discussion," which makes sense since I don't recall it being mentioned in the livestream: What I presume to be the ability for statics to enter all together without potentially losing a member to an unknowing passerby or a troll wanting to mess things up a skosh.

Those are all still a few weeks away, though. Yoshida says the first two changes are being introduced more immediately partly thanks to how big an impact it'll have, but also because it's possible to do without causing disruption to Patch 7.3's testing and refinement phase.

It's kind of rare to see Square doing something out of patch cadence like this, and it's something I'm most definitely happy to see. While the ship'll sail a lot smoother with all of the changes in place, there's no denying that being able to circumvent the instance gacha all together is the most important one. Getting that in now—probably as some statics are looking to disband or take a break—feels like a smart move, and I hope I get to see more Forked Tower clears as a direct result.