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Final Fantasy (1987)’s Marsh Cave requiring multiple delves (and a boss fight) to fully accomplish, each with a treacherous overland slog to and from Elfheim to recover is one of my favorite design decisions in game history. I love the possibility space of the tavern in Wizardry. Of course, if you think about me for more than a moment this entirely makes sense. I loved the weirdness leading up to it in the open beta periods, and the stories I’d been hearing from friends and colleagues and reporters who had experienced or heard about the even earlier, weirder phases. See the thing is…I actually loved Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0. There was an internal logic to systems and UI that could be understood by others, but only truly made sense to their creators-and, I guess, me. Artists focused exclusively on how beautiful they could make each individual element they crafted for themselves. But for the most part, 1.0 was actually an exercise in self-indulgence. The creators of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 looked forward as much as they looked backward. But even these moments of brilliance were undercut for many by how many grind-focused, story-less hours players were required to spend in the original vision of Eorzea. The pop-up server events called Hamlet Defense brought together players as warriors and mages, as well as, and gatherers and crafters. If you know anything about XIV’s early incarnation, you probably recall a story about a single potted plant having as many polygons as a character model. For all the beauty and depth in the world, it was bought at the cost of devastatingly high hardware demands (which caused even high end machines to struggle).
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Where it innovated in terms of class being tied to the weapon or tool in your hand, it confused by having separate job and character levels, and a chaotic paper doll character sheet. 1.0, as we now colloquially call it, for as forward-looking as it was, was steeped in ideas of what MMOs were, and not the shape they had been taking on. For every bit that it was beautiful and weird, it was also a frustrating mess. And in order to talk about Endwalker, we need to go back to where it all started.įinal Fantasy XIV launched on Sept. It’s been a weird fucking journey, Final Fantasy XIV’s been on. I’ve been here since the beginning, since the game was ended once already in the cataclysmic collision of a giant red, god-bearing, artificial moon, and a knock-off elven Tellah summoning a bunch of gods with an entire continent’s prayers until he became a god himself in a massive blast of magical energy and turned into Phoenix. job,” I was coasting into Endwalker on fumes with the taste of a bad gas station burrito in my mouth.
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Between the fans who refused to acknowledge fair criticisms of the game, and the outright haters who mistakenly believed I was ever in their camp, and having to explain myself to the non-MMO normies who couldn’t understand why anyone would “take on a second, third, forth, etc. Going into Endwalker, I wasn’t sure I even liked Final Fantasy XIV, that maybe I was completely burnt out on MMOs, and that I never actually imprinted on this one.