Dawntrail marks a new beginning for Final Fantasy 14, which has left producer Naoki Yoshida wondering if he should just let everyone skip all the other expansions.
Final Fantasy 14 is obviously a massive game (its genre tells us as much), and with the next expansion in the series, Dawntrail, being the first that will start a new story arc, it would make sense if new players just wanted to skip straight to it. In a new interview with Famitsu (translations by aitaikimochi), Yoshida, otherwise known as Yoshi-P, spoke on the possibility of introducing systems that let players more easily skip expansions in order to catch up to the newest one.
According to Yoshi-P, the Final Fantasy 14 team has prepared some new in-game features that will let you read lore and background of the characters and world up to the end of Endwalker, or patch 6.0. If you did decide to skip all of that, you would have to play from patch 6.1, leading you up to Dawntrail, which will be patch 7.0.