Over the last weekend, we got to see many games being represented in the Pax West 2024 panels, with Final Fantasy XIV being one of them. And they gave us a sneak peek of some promised features that should be coming to the game very soon.
During the “Putting the U in UI: Tailoring the Final Fantasy XIV Experience” panel on the second day, Lead UI Designer Kei Odagiri showed us first-hand some of the process of thought that goes into creating the visual elements in each of the game’s menus. As the main responsible for systems like the menu options, Gpose, Portraits and others, we got to see much of his work in general.
But the main appetizer was the screenshots displaying some of the upcoming features of the game: the Chat Bubbles for characters and a Strategy Board for encounters accessible directly from the game.
Chat Bubbles are a long-time request by the community, as NPCs from cities and even FATEs are known for having them ever since the game’s release. In fact, some third-party plugins do exist to implement this function in the game, but will soon be turned into an official feature. For now, the functionality is still in its testing period, so there’s no expected date for when it’ll be arriving. So don’t expect to see them during Patch 7.1, which is expected to arrive in November.
We can see how each of the bubbles has a unique color matching their respective chats. The longer sentence in the screenshot isn’t fully displayed either, and this could be either a limitation or an option. We also don’t know if they’ll be permanently enabled or if you can disable them, but it’s very likely to be an optional feature.
Related: How To Spawn All Dawntrail S-Rank Monsters in FFXIV
Moving on to more battle-centric content, the Strategy Board (or White Board, as it’s being named in Japan) is a new option for players to create and share strategies and positions for encounters. High-End encounters always require specific planning, and guides are traditionally shared on external third-party sites among the community. This function would theoretically eliminate the need for those, as the strategy would be easily sharable inside the game itself.
But just like the Chat Bubbles, there’s no expected date for those. We know they’re coming in the 7.X patch series, so they’re slated for the major expansion patches. But we have no idea of when, as development is still ongoing.
Both of these features were previously teased to arrive in Dawntrail, but weren’t nowhere to be seen with its release. Fortunately, they weren’t forgotten, and the Pax West panels were able to confirm that they are still coming to Final Fantasy XIV. We’ll just need to wait a bit more for the next updates, which are expected to arrive regularly.
Final Fantasy XIV is available now.