Final Fantasy 14 is making it easier to enter its latest dungeon so you can stop spending half an hour playing 'instance gacha'

As I wrote when it first launched, I've quite enjoyed Occult Crescent, the Bozja-esque field operation mode. It's far from perfect, mind—it's a real 'you snooze, you lose' mentality that'll see you late to any fight you're not speeding towards within 0.2 seconds of it spawning.

Its biggest problem by far, though, is Forked Tower. It's a 48-player dungeon that can only be entered from inside the Occult Crescent, and requires some serious external organisation if you want a chance at clearing it. Yet even before you enter into its gauntlet of difficult boss fights, you have to face something far more chilling: Trying to get all 48 people into the same instance together.

For some demented reason, Occult Crescent doesn't allow parties larger than your standard eight-player composition to queue in together. If you manage to herd 48 players for Forked Tower, that's six separate parties desperately attempting to land in a single instance. It's a frustrating change from Bozja's equivalent, Delubrum Reginae, which allowed folks to queue in from the standard Duty Finder menu.

I've been fortunate enough to clear Forked Tower four times now—thanks to being in a group with excellent shotcallers and players who are far more talented at not standing in bad than I am—and playing 'instance gacha' has by far been the most frustrating part of the experience. Nevermind the fact that once you're in an instance you usually have to wait around 30 minutes for Forked Tower to then spawn. It's a lot.

That'll all be changing in August, however, as director and producer Naoki Yoshida revealed during a recent livestream in which he went over player feedback for both Occult Crescent and Cosmic Exploration, the other mode that arrived with Patch 7.2

"Many players have tried to clear and prog the Forked Tower, as of yesterday [June 19] there have been more than 400 clears, not 400 players but 400 clears," Yoshida said during the stream (thanks to the live letter translators over on the Final Fantasy 14 community Discord).

For starters, that number seems crazy low. Our other resident Final Fantasy 14 sicko Harvey Randall crunched the numbers and on the higher end that's only a little over 19,000 players who've cleared. If we take a look at LuckyBancho's unofficial census, that's only around 2% of active players who've cleared the whole thing.

But I digress. Yoshida acknowledges that "it is difficult to get into the same [Occult Tower instance] as a group of 48," before revealing that August's Patch 7.3 will finally let premade alliances queue in all together.

It does come with the caveat that the UI for setting all that up might look a bit crusty for now, but it's still a change I am incredibly happy to see. It was an entirely unnecessary additional friction, one which I admittedly wish was being rectified a little sooner than "early August."

Square's also making changes to Sanguine Ciphers, the currency you needed to enter Forked Tower. If there are more than 48 players the game'll pick from random, but you can throw more ciphers in as a way of essentially entering your name into the hat more times. Currently you can't actually see who has put in how many ciphers, but Patch 7.3 will make that information visible.

All in all it's nice to see Square is actually sort of listening to complaints. Though I would have preferred them to straight-up switch things back to the Delubrum-based system, it's at least the compromise I was hoping for.