Stormblood is often looked at as one of the lesser-liked expansions, which, to me, speaks to how strong the rest of them are. That’s because Stormblood is still a crucial piece to Final Fantasy 14 that worked to conclude long-standing conflicts and show you just how evil and destructive the Garlean Empire was. I vividly remember the feeling of taking back Ala Mhigo after all these years of them being under Garlean rule, and taking back Doma Castle after seeing how Domans had suffered from the occupation. There are moments in which Stormblood undercuts its own messaging and perhaps didn’t fully find the nuance necessary to elegantly tell a politically charged story. However, it gets the larger picture right, and the liberation of the peoples across the different regions was invigorating nonetheless.

Stormblood’s zones might not be the most exciting of the bunch, but there’s a tranquility I still feel when flying across the Ruby Sea, over the plains of Azim Steppe, and past the rice patties in Yangxia. I often reflect on the stories of oppression and rebellion in those moments because of the smaller stories told throughout the expansion. I also remember Yotsuyu as one of the most complex villains of FF14 – her heartbreaking story represents how sadistic and corrupting living under oppression can be, which culminated in one of the best boss fights to this day. Stormblood may not have been the best expansion, but it had peaks that make FF14 what it is today. – Michael Higham

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail

With Dawntrail fresh in my memory, it’s a bit hard to gauge its place in the Final Fantasy 14 pantheon, but even with all its implications yet to be explored, it still stands as a worthy addition to the MMO’s long history. The land of Tural opens FF14 to so many different themes and cultural influences it wasn’t able to incorporate in the past, and although it does come with some mixed results, the vibrant foundation it lays leaves even more room for growth. Newcomer Wuk Lamat is a large focus and although she’s not the strongest character in FF14, she has the heart necessary to carry out Dawntrail’s message of finding peace through mutual respect and embracing our differences.

Dawntrail’s lasting legacy is in the second half of its story where things turn in unpredictable directions. Its fusion of references to ancient civilizations, its Latin American roots, and the old-timey American West somehow make sense when they clash with the cyberpunk-tinged sci-fi elements that eventually come to the forefront. It’s able to touch on classic Final Fantasy narrative themes from a fresh perspective. We explored the depths of the pain we feel from losing the things we love most during Shadowbringers and Endwalker, but the way Dawntrail contextualizes mortality is powerfully intimate. In its best moments, Dawntrail can be as impactful as anything else found in FF14, and for that alone, this expansion deserves its flowers. – MH

Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker

Endwalker is the culmination of a 10-year long story arc for Final Fantasy 14. From the days of A Realm Reborn, players became embroiled in a celestial battle between the gods Hydaelin and Zodiark. Beset in the real-world by a global pandemic that delayed the expansion by a year, Endwalker was a reward for players who stuck with the MMORPG from its earliest days who can now see the conclusion to a long-running storyline.

The stakes were high but Endwalker is FF14’s most emotional expansion to date, reinforcing Final Fantasy 14’s core themes of how friendship and courage can overcome even the greatest challenges. And with so much of Final Fantasy 14 now playable in single-player, a new player could play from A Realm Reborn through Endwalker and feel that they’ve finished one of the best Final Fantasy games of all time.

But thankfully, Endwalker is not the end of FF14, and the newest expansion, Dawntrail, is setting the stage for the next 10 years of Square Enix’s beloved MMORPG. – MK

Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward

What a difference an expansion makes. Free from the need to fix an entire MMORPG, Final Fantasy 14’s next expansion after A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, is able to jump right into the action. With the Warriors of Light on the run, they escape to the frozen, holy land of Ishgard which has been too busy embroiled in a war against dragons to do much in Eorzea.

What’s immediately apparent in Heavensward is that it quickly establishes the themes and storytelling the FF14 team seems to revel in: dramatic, high fantasy that harkens back to the old pixel games like Final Fantasy 6. Heavensward is such a throwback to the classic sword and sorcery fantasy of early Final Fantasy games, while also introducing the dark courtly politics that would make George R.R. Martin grin. If A Realm Reborn took a lot of time to get going, Heavensward is action-packed almost from the jump and from there sets the bar for all later FF14 expansions.

To quote FromSoftware, the real Final Fantasy 14 begins with Heavensward. – MK

Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers

Final Fantasy 14 truly found its voice in Shadowbringers. Lead writer Natsuko Ishikawa stepped into the role and her poetic storytelling style gave the expansion its identity, focusing on its characters with a level of depth and emotional sincerity never before seen in FF14. From the moment you step into The First, there’s an immediate sense of urgency that sets the tone for how dire the flood of light has been on the entire realm, flipping the script on typical light versus dark stories. And in horrifying ways, leaned on showing rather than telling.

Shadowbringers captured its grand moments with a weight and excitement that few RPGs are able to pull off. It earns those moments by building characters like the Crystal Exarch, Ardbert, and Emet Selch in a complex web of heroes and villains to carry its heavier themes, and contextualize despair and tragedy in a world separate from anything we’d known in Eorzea. FF14 began to ask the big questions about loss, grief, and the lengths people will go to preserve the things that matter most to them, and did so with nuance.

And if we want to count the post-launch content, Patch 5.3 capped off what was already one of the best stories in the series with another incredible conclusion, reaching a height that I don’t think FF14 will ever be able to top. My precious crystal cat boy gave his all to save a realm, and all of my Scion friends were there to witness his greatness as he immortalized his life’s work at the Seat of Sacrifice. From its writing and narrative themes to its music and visual storytelling, Shadowbringers not only proved itself as peak FF14, it’s arguably peak Final Fantasy. – MH

These are our rankings for our favorite Final Fantasy 14 expansions. Let us know below in the comments which expansions are your favorites.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

To ensure Toshara is as immersive and authentic as possible, Massive approached the moon from all angles. “We had to work out the demographics of the planet,” Khavari explains. “We had to work out what the major hubs are. We had to work out fauna, flora, all of these sections that needed to come together and also be weaved by narratives.”

But before all that, Massive had to pitch Toshara to the custodians of Star Wars: Lucasfilm. Because Toshara isn’t just a location for a video game; anything in Star Wars Outlaws is canon, and so whatever Massive made would need to be fully approved by the people behind the films, shows, and Star Wars universe at large.

“It’s like they’re giving us a box of toys, we take the toys out, play with them, but then we also create our new toys and put them back for somebody else to play,” says Benedikt Podlesnigg, art and world director on Star Wars Outlaws.

A major player in such a process is Steve Blank, director of franchise content and strategy at Lucasfilm. “Massive came to us with the idea of a savannah planet,” he recalls. “Once we sort of knew the high level intention behind the story and where we wanted to go, we let them ruminate on what does that mean? What would you like to see? What do you feel like you haven’t seen before?”

The result of those conversations was a collection of unusual and familiar ideas. Massive wanted Toshara to be a world where the Star Wars mythology’s pirate-inspired elements could live – think Jabba’s barge and Luke being forced to walk the plank over a sarlacc pit. This had to be a place of high risk, high reward treasure hunting. And so was born the so-called gem of the underworld; a moon ruled by a corrupt division of the Empire and largely controlled by the galaxy’s crime syndicates. But it wasn’t enough to develop lore. The team had to start with the look and feel of the very ground itself.

“We approached Toshara in terms of the general Star Wars design tenets, where it has to be familiar but with a twist,” explains Julian Gerighty, creative director of Outlaws. The familiar is the landscapes of Tanzania, which Podlesnigg says would be the shooting location for Tosharan scenes if Outlaws were a movie. Layered on top of this is the twist: “huge mountain outcrops that have been carved so that a city can take place within those rock walls,” describes Gerighty. And then, within that rock, is Toshara’s most distinct characteristic: amberine.

Amberine is an orange, crystal-like material that runs through the crust of Toshara and juts out through its surface. Inspired by an old Austrian fortune-telling tradition in which molten lead is poured into cold water to create shapes that reveal what’s to come, the Amberine forms into a variety of striking forms. It is Blank’s favourite part of Massive’s new world.

“You find [amberine structures] sort of wherever you’re going,” he says. “They’re inside caves, they form plateaus […] and they also react beautifully to the sun over Toshara, so you get these gorgeous reflections in the lighting.”

Unusually for Star Wars, amberine isn’t a precious resource like spice or Beskar Steel, and so Toshara’s population has left it untouched and intact. That’s not to say the crystal is useless, though. The moon’s climate is incredibly windy, and those winds erode away rocks, cliff faces, even mountains – a process that gradually reveals the incredibly resilient amberine within. It made sense, then, that Toshara’s main metropolis, the city of Mirogana, would be built within an amberine structure to protect it from the winds.

Basking within the orange glow cast by sunlight filtering through that amberine shield is the Pyke Syndicate, the most dominant of Mirogana’s criminal organisations. But don’t let them put you off visiting; the city’s busy streets are full of opportunities for both a galactic scoundrel scouting for gigs, and a player looking to diversify their experience.

“Every single location we had to choose had to be a den of scum and villainy, right? And in Mirogana you can do a lot of things,” says Gerighty. “There’s the first thing that you should do as a scoundrel, as an outlaw, is go to the cantina. And in the cantina you’ll find lots of shady characters that’ll offer you jobs. Or you can just relax, eavesdrop, pick up some intel, play a couple of games of sabacc, bet on the Fathier races, play some arcade games…”

Beyond the cantina you’ll find a city split into several regions, each with their own flavour. The gambling district is constructed using different architecture and signage to the central market, while the Imperial checkpoint is built out of the Empire’s instantly recognisable flat panels and grid vents. No matter where you find an Imperial base on Toshara, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb.

“They come in, they don’t care about their environment, they just stamp down their base wherever they need,” says Podlesnigg. He paints a picture of a time when the Tosharan landscape featured a colossal amberine archway, but when the Empire arrived they simply demolished the arch to make way for the base. In the game, you’ll be able to see that very base flanked by two amberine pillars – all that remains of that historic arch. “It creates a really interesting visual that’s seen from far away that you can really use as a landmark.”

Beyond the city’s borders, the aforementioned winds have eroded away the moon’s rock surface to reveal even more unusual amberine formations. A resourceful outlaw with a speeder bike could use such formations to hit even greater speeds during hot pursuits.

“It’s very orange glowing, so it stands out very naturally in the environment,” says Podlesnigg. “So we could make ramps where you can jump off [while riding the speeder bike]. We made the wind tunnels where you can see [how they have been] carved out by the winds. I think one of the references was surfing underneath waves.”

In the process of planning out Toshara’s geography, Massive went as far as establishing that the moon’s wind currents all run north to south. This dictated the map’s population density, road networks, audio design, and – importantly – the formation of the speed-boosting wind tunnels. And so while the amberine ramps and tunnels may be a gameplay-first element, it’s all created hand-in-hand with world-building.

“For every location, no matter how small, we want to think about what happened here, what is happening now, and what is the location in general? What [do] people do here?” explains Podlesnigg. “So we have a very clear idea of the history of the place and what the place is.”

A skilled outlaw can harness the moon’s winds for their benefit, but not everyone is prepared to tackle such a climate. Echoing the derelict Star Destroyer on Jakku in The Force Awakens, Toshara is littered with crashed starships. They’re the remnants of those who tried to fight the winds and lost. It’s a smart bit of environmental storytelling, but the tale doesn’t end there. Those shipwrecks have become part of Toshara’s history and economy; with nothing but rock and amberine available to the moon’s population, the crashed ships were harvested for metal which was then used to construct many of the buildings you’ll see and explore.

With so much of Toshara’s environment being made up of harsh rock, crashed spaceships, and strange amberine structures, the finishing touch had to be something much more alive and endearing. While the crime syndicates may be the planet’s apex predators, there are plenty of other creatures in the wilds to discover and befriend. Podlesnigg describes a magpie-like flying creature that’s “attracted by everything that sparkles, and they steal everything.” It’s an amusing trait, but one that folds directly into gameplay: “When you see them circling somewhere, maybe you can go there and find something of value.”

A cuter friend can be found in Toshara’s weasel-like creatures, small pettable animals that will follow you around in groups. We can only hope that we’ll be able to round up a dozen and cause chaos in a cantina…

Toshara has yet more secrets to be discovered, but we won’t know this new moon’s best treasures until we explore it ourselves when Star Wars Outlaws arrives on August 30. Until then, you can always read more about how Massive Entertainment has tackled building the first ever true Star Wars open world game.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.