Ten Years of Final Fantasy XIV
Posted on September 20, 2023 by Aywren
Ten years ago today, I wrote my first blog post about my first experiences in FFXIV. This post was originally on Tumblr, but I’ve moved all of the oldest FFXIV content from my Tumblr account to this blog for safe keeping.
I wrote that post with hesitance. As if admitting something I was shy of sharing, which I was at the time.
I shouldn’t have been playing FFXIV, you see.
Why I Shouldn’t Have Played FFXIV
I’ve told this story on this blog before, but I might as well tell it again!
Ten years ago, Square Enix had burned a lot of bridges with me as a company. I saw what they did with constant re-releases as well as serial releases of unneeded, poorly written sequels on mobile platforms (only to later box it together on another platform and sell it again as one game). Just a lot of things that made it feel like they were milking the Final Fantasy franchise for lack of forward creativity.
As an oldskool gamer from the NES/SNES days, this bothered me. So, Syn and I had decided to vote with our wallets, and did not give S/E our purchases for a very long time.
I was the one who broke this “boycott” and it was all because of FFXIV. This is a thing that I’m happy about, looking back on it. S/E still does a lot of franchise re-releases (look at the Pixel Remasters), but I think I’ve come to terms with it (I own the Pixel Remasters…).
How FFXIV Healed the Rift
FFXIV was the game that smoothed over that strained connection to Final Fantasy for me. Not only was it a MMO that was getting huge attention for being a re-release of a failed 1.0 game (which I did not play, but observed from afar), it was a game that respectfully paid homage to a lot of the old FF games that we loved.
I kept hearing how great it was. How much better it was than 1.0. How it was a MUST play.
So, it was hard for me to not be interested. The only problem was, by the time I decided to pick up a copy, it was no longer on sale. The servers had been hammered so much by the large influx of players, they’d stop selling the boxes and the digital keys to allow for release to calm down.
This is something they still do, in fact, but at the time, I was taken aback. I’d never seen a MMO so popular that they stopped selling it at launch.
This only made me want it all the more, of course.
As soon as it was available again, I picked up a digital copy. I’m not sure of the exact date of this (I wish I’d recorded it), because I didn’t come out and admit I was playing it until September 20, 2013. My first screenshot of my original character was taken a day before. In my post, I noted I’d been playing a few days prior to that, too.
And so, I admitted it – I was mostly shy of admitting it to Syn, but she actually didn’t care about my break of the “boycott.” I had nothing but good things to say about the game, even though I struggled with the forced dungeons I had to do to make it through story (I was playing alone back then, and it was nine years away from Duty Support).
Better With Friends
It was late November-ish when Syn decided to join me. Ironically, I was just about to quit FFXIV due to the stress of solo playing a game that forced me to group with strangers (which caused extreme anxiety for me back then). In fact, she was like: “I have something to tell you,” and I was like: “I have something to tell you, but you go first…”
When she told me she was going to start playing FFXIV, I just laughed and told her… “I was about to quit because of these forced dungeons, but if you’re going to play, too, I’ll stay.”
Because she joined on that very day, ten years later, I’m still here.
I rolled my first alt (which I still have) so that I could play ARR along with her. We were super slow making progress because that’s just how we played all MMOs.
I’d never actually reached an MMO to endgame until FFXIV. So, when we pushed all the way to that point, I had no idea what to do with myself once I’d level capped. I still don’t, honestly, which is one reason why I have too many alts!
10 Years In
Ten years later… I’m still playing without a lapse in subscription all this time. Sure, there were times when I was more active than others, but there was never a time that I officially dropped the game.
My Mogstation account says:
Keep in mind that number of days subscribed does not count the initial free 30 days that came when you first bought the game. I also got another free 30 days of account time for leveling a new character to 30 on a new server during a promotion that gave away game time.
So, my time played is two months more than my time subbed.
Anyhow, it’s been quite a ride. From being new sprouts in the game, to learning how to balance mid-casual end-game content, to forming a fairly sizeable FC and running it several years, to passing the torch and moving to an RP server for a more “quiet” social life with RP alts and stories…
FFXIV has helped me a lot with overcoming my grouping anxieties. While I still struggle with this a bit, and tend to avoid dungeons and raids when I don’t absolutely need to run them, I’ve grown a lot as a MMO player thanks to my experiences. Despite being in Eoreza as long as I have, as I always say – there’s still much for me to see and do!
I’m up for another 10 years (we can hope)!
