When Final Fantasy 14’s 7.2 update — subtitled “Seekers of Eternity” — drops on March 25, it’ll bring with it all the flashy content players of the massively multiplayer role-playing game have come to expect from developer Square Enix. But nestled among all the info on dungeons, gear, and side activities in the patch notes were also details on a handful of quality-of-life changes that should greatly improve the simple act of exploring the game’s world.
According to community translations of the latest Letter from the Producer stream, broadcast in the early morning hours of March 14, Final Fantasy 14 producers Naoki Yoshida and Toshio Murouchi shared two major adjustments the 7.2 update will make to sprinting and mounting. Instead of defaulting back to the normal walking speed when the sprint buff wears off, players will instead enter a jogging state with a speed somewhere between walking and sprinting as long as they remain out of combat in safe zones like cities and sanctuaries.
Also, climbing aboard Final Fantasy 14 mounts will no longer require players to stand still as the action resolves. It only takes a few seconds to summon mounts in the current version of the game, but this short wait can feel awkward when you’re moving between locations in large zones. Think of it like the difference between hitting all green lights on a long stretch of road and having to wait at a red every block. Sure, the latter isn’t going to kill you, but you’d much rather avoid the stop-and-go loop.
“[It] only took us 10 years,” Yoshida is translated as saying. “But we [also] have 10 years of muscle memory. It will take some getting used to.”
And finally, when the new Cosmic Exploration mode is added to Final Fantasy 14 on April 22, it will feature a toggleable sprint that will never run out. The game’s Island Sanctuary mode from update 6.2 provided something similar in a unique, low-cooldown “isle sprint” ability, but Cosmic Exploration’s sprint is for all intents and purposes infinite, allowing players to zoom from objective to objective without worrying about reupping the speed boost.
“We call it Cosmo Sprint,” Yoshida said, apparently.
Square Enix has yet to provide official details about this update 7.2 content in English, but if you’d like to know more about what was shared during this morning’s Japanese-exclusive broadcast, be sure to check out the community translations here.
