Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's preliminary patch notes are here—showing fixes to those annoying stealth quests and the ability to banish NPC-crowding players to the shadow realm

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail is coming at you fast. With a 48 hour maintenance due to start tomorrow, and early access beginning on Friday, it's time to plonk on your sea legs and head to Tural—but not before obsessively coming through some patch notes, of course.

In typical Square Enix fashion, the 7.0 patch notes have arrived ahead of the big update (which includes the much-anticipated graphical overhaul). Unlike my coverage of most patches, however, there's a lot of ground to retread here, since we already knew a bunch of this was coming as per a handful of media tours—we know about the graphical facelift, we know there'll be new tribal quests, and we know that the blacklist system is getting an overdue overhaul. FF14's structures have, bar Endwalker's experiments with Variant Dungeons, remained largely unchanged.

What interests me more is a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements included therein that should make questing a whole lot better, which is great, because there's a lot of questing in this game—hundreds of hours worth. Let's run down the list.

First up, if you're trying to click on a quest giver, you can now enable an option to «temporarily hide the display of nearby player characters when interacting with quest-related NPCs or objects».

While there was a keybind you could enable to let you click through players beforehand, this is pretty huge for immersion's sake. After all, you're meant to be the Warrior of Light, and for some players, I can imagine having an active rave in out-of-cutscene conversations would pull them out of the experience a bit.

FF14's most annoying quest type is also getting a massive quality-of-life improvement—for those unfamiliar, the Main Scenario Quest occasionally sees you needing to follow an NPC without getting spotted. If you're wondering whether stealth mechanics in an MMO are good—they aren't, obviously. Patch 7.0 will add some very obvious visual indicators to make these less of a headache.

For quests that require