Starting was innocent enough. My partner and I had talked about the game a couple of times. She had played WoW and FFXI for a hot minute back in their days while my only MMO experience was Runescape back in like 2003 or something. We danced around it for a couple weeks and decided to give it a go. I signed up intending to be a Paladin from the get go because femme Cecil Harvey is what I just want in general anyway.
I swore to be her shield even in the darkest of nights, always.
Things started off simple enough. There was a story, it was meh (but eventually got better). We got to the point that we could play together after leaving our respective cities and what came was months of chill hangouts discovering this whole new virtual world together.
I'm not sure at what point it went from enjoyment to habit, but it definitely crossed that line before I was able to internalize that it was happening. I'm not one to generally replay games let alone specific content but these new tanks really need to stop spinning that damned eye toward the rest of the party!
Our home, our hearts.
Gosh did I ever get hooked. One thing that really got me was the housing lottery system being implement in Ishgard about sixish weeks after we started playing. It became my goal to get a house. I grinded gil hard, scouted out what I figured would be a low-priority plot, placed my bid . . . And despite the initial glitches I managed to win my bid! I had a house!
Did you maintaining a house in this game is a lot of fucking work!? In a game that is all about the grind my virtual responsibilities just shot through the roof. Gardening made logging in daily basically mandatory to get anything out of it and decorating both the inside and outside is very time consuming. Both in practical application and grinding out materials to make a cool piece of furniture or whatever.
Then clothing and glams came into play. Oh gosh it's Animal Crossing but with way more grinding and numbers help. I'm out here grinding monotonous content for hours on end to get a shiny sword, I'm joining randos in party finder to loop unsynced extremes for doggos. Okay I did map night with some cool people a couple times and those two nights are like the only fond memories I have that didn't involve my partner in some way. Everything else was just looping the same content over and over and over again to get numbers up or get that drop or fulfill that time wasting objective.
A life should be filled with such joy.
Ultimately I know many people have healthy relationships with these games, I'm not one of them though. It's a poorly kept secret that in the past video game companies have hired psychiatrists to help make addictive number treadmills, and whooo am I ever a sucker for them. I wasn't even enjoying the story at this point. I sincerely enjoyed most of Shadowbringers/the postgame but I couldn't care less about what I was going on after I got to Endwalker. I was pressing on anyway because numbers, and it was a chore.
I kept playing for over a month since my partner had stopped. I forget the exact incident that broke me out of my loop but it was doing something for the like 40th time and realizing that I could've been doing literally anything else. Every another video game but like with an ending or something! I talked with her the next day and decided to end my sub, the renewal date coming up in roughly a week. Several nights were still spent cleaning up some threads for if I came back but having an exit date felt wonderful.
You have my loyalty until I breathe my last.
So here we are. With the game uninstalled from both of our computers we got to discover and rediscover so much. At first spending time together took a little bit of effort. It wasn't just log onto FFXIV and grind numbers. We had to come up with things to entertain us again, something we hadn't thought about much in seven months. Spending time alone was harder as well, there was a new void to fill that was simply filled before by logging in and making the numbers go up.
It didn't take long for this to become more rewarding though! Oddly enough watching each other play solo runs of Slay the Spire was what we gravitated to for awhile? But then that led to playing through each other's favourite games in private streams and playing different games together again. Not grinding numbers and zoning out but experiencing both old and new gameplay experiences together. Something that we hadn't really felt since the first couple hundred hours of FFXIV.
On my own my life got more interesting too! I started leaving the house more, actually finishing other games and seeing conclusions to things, reading a bit . . . And shamefully started taking better care of both myself and my apartment ha. Watering my own plant is a bit more involved than clicking virtual plants but gosh the graphics on this thing are unreal.
My first (non-Runescape) MMO experience is something I'll hold on to, and I may even return from time to time to see what's up, but as far as the genre goes I feel I've generally seen everything I needed to see. So it's off to the new number treadmill since that's what every video game is now . . .
. . . Which at the moment is Fortnite. >_>
<3