FFXIV: Mare Mod Shut Down
Posted on August 23, 2025 by Aywren
This past week, the FFXIV community was in an uproar due to Mare, a very popular third-party mod, shutting down. While the developer of this mod didn’t outright say they received a cease and desist from Square/Enix, they did mention it was legal trouble, and it’s fairly much what most people have deduced has happened.
This mod is known as Mare Synchronos (sometimes called Mare Lamentorum), and it’s best known for being a plug-in to the XIV Launcher that allows players to share their modded character appearances between each other. While I do not partake in character modding, even I have heard of Mare, and was aware of what people were using it for.
Some of this was for innocent RP, some not so innocent. I’ll let you imagine. I’m pretty used to folks doing crazy things with appearances, having been a long-time resident of Second Life.
Why am I blogging about something that does not directly affect me seeing that I’m not a mod user? Because it still can send major ripples across the community, and in some senses, I am an RPer of sorts.
In fact, Mare is such a big thing that a number of gaming sites, such as Kotaku, covered the story almost immediately. There was a massive post about it on the main FFXIV forum, which I had linked to at the time of drafting this post, but has since been closed and removed (if that tells you anything). Therefore, Reddit is popping off with a thread of over 3K comments. It’s hitting up YouTube content, as well.
There are a number of folks out there who are very disgruntled with the whole deal. This is the RP community, the ones who have stuck Dawntrail out when others have already left, who hang around in towns and generally make the world feel alive and lived in.
Yes, I have heard that Mare has caused gating issues whereupon if you want to get into RP, but do not use Mare, folks were less likely to interact with you. Yes, I know it's link to explicit RP content, as well. I’m also certainly not encouraging people to use third party tools in a game where doing so is against the Terms of Service.
That being said, I do understand why people use it. And I do question why in the world this particular mod, that is so widely used by a solid chunk of the player base, would become a legal target right now. Right when the game’s population is already slumping in so many other areas.
Upsetting your RP folks on top of all the folks who are already unhappy about the Dawntrail story, the pace of content release, and the quality of content release… it’s just a very bad idea. We're already seeing review bombing of Dawntrail on Steam in retribution - not the most mature action to take, but I suppose players feel like they can't be heard any other way.
I have no idea where this is going to lead in the end. I just know the backlash and disappointment in my online social circles is quite vocal.