Over the weekend, after about six or so weeks away from doing any kind of Main Scenario Quest progression in Final Fantasy 14, I’m back at it again. For the first time in my seven and a half months of playing the game, it ACTUALLY feels like I’ve been away for a while when I meet back up with the main cast of NPCs and they all remark on how well I look like I’m doing (and I look GREAT, btw, since my main glams all got updated renders in the latest patch) and how nice it is to meet up again after all this time. Generally speaking, there’s usually at least a few months between an expansion and each of its patch updates, so people playing the game as it came out got to experience the passage of time that the game softly implies–albeit usually a truncated version given the way people talk about finally seeing each other again (the game’s actual timeline is incredibly unclear, but I’d guess it’s maybe a fifth of the real-world passage of time if I had to suggest something). When you play through almost the entire main story arc of the game that exists today, you don’t really get the same breaks and breathing space that the game was (eventually) written to reference. It was interesting to see the way they went from tightly-spaced events with a degree of implied continuity that mmade it feet like there wasn’t much time between each major event to events spread out by gaps the characters suggest were significant when they reconvene. They took the nebulousness of in-game time and went from ignoring it–which implied not much time passed at all–to doing enough soft framing around the start of each expansion and certain patches that it implied a moderate passage of time. Perhaps most notably, this was a major component of Endwalker’s conclusion and, given my own feelings at the time, it felt like it would be doing myself and the game a disservice to once more dive into the plot immediately.

Endwalker literally concludes with your character and several of the major NPCs talking about what they’re going to do now that the world is saved. Everyone but your character has a definite answer to give–some goal to pursue that they’d been ignoring in favor of preventing the end of everything they knew–but your character is left on the note that they’re still trying to figure that out. Everyone has suggestions and it’s played as this moment of your character finally being able to turn their attention to something other than the world’ problems for the first time in your gameplay experience, but I was actually stumped when I hit that moment. What did I want to do? What goals had I ignored? What was left un-done while I’d rushed headlong into the longest story I’ve ever seen? I had my tried-and-true laundry list of things to get to eventually, but what did any of that mean beyond just spending time on the game? What did I want out of my experience now that I was being prompted by the game (and, don’t forget, my own emotional exhaustion following the excellent conclusion of Endwalker’s core story) to consider what else the world had to offer? I didn’t know then and it took me a relatively long time to figure it out. I masked my uncertainty with leveling jobs, doing daily activities, and working through the game’s systems to attend to the vast quantity of Things To Do that any MMO must have to keep players engaged. It all felt worth doing, after all, and given how laser-focused I’d become through Endwalker, there were a lot of basic maintenance tasks that had just gone ignored long enough to feel urgent and important.

I don’t regret spending my time that way. I got a lot of stuff leveled, I figured out how Island Sanctuary stuff works enough to speed pretty well through it (I’m at Sanctuary level 14 as of writing this, which isn’t a SUPER fast progression, but it’s definitely in-keeping with my focus on efficiency), I bought and decorated a house (though that was mostly my friend I hired), I did a lot of old raids and missions I’d skipped (and the Endwalker Normal Raid series), and caught my crafting up to a place where it could be useful again. I even got to the highest displayed level in the previous season’s PVP rewards (not that I was terribly good or anything, just consistent and persistent). But I hit a point a couple weeks ago where I just didn’t really feel like doing any of that stuff. I still did plenty of it and I had fun along the way, but the fire and focus were gone. Still, I found myself wanting to play but not knowing what to do other than enjoy the spaces I’d grown fond of and keep plugging away at the various jobs and quests I’d ignored in favor of plot-essential stuff. Eventually, just last week, I finally realized that what I wanted was to spend some time giving back to the people who’d helped me get where I was and start moving forward with the plot again.

This past week, I spent some time working on something that will help the other members and found it very fulfilling, despite my concerns that I might be giving too much of myself. I felt recharged by this act of mutually beneficial charity and spent a bunch of time outside of that getting back into the plot and doing some job quests to level one of my crafting jobs. I’m determined to take the story a bit more slowly this time, only doing bits and pieces here or there as I feel so inclined rather than alternating between fixation on the plot, on leveling, or on whatever else caught my attention. I’m going to try to do a little bit of everything as my nightly inclinations take me but also avoid spending an entire evening on one single thing. I’m going to stop trying to maximize my progress every day and just do stuff. I don’t know if I’ll get back to my early days of puttering around the game–I’ve got too much on my to-do list to relax my drive quite that much–but I think that my goal is to get to something like puttering, just more focused. Focused puttering. Or maybe relaxed progression? Either way, I’m gonna try to be more okay with not spending every single second making some kind of progress or trying to make the most efficient use of my nightly gaming time. It’s not like Final Fantasy 14 is going anywhere. It’ll be here for a good long while yet, I suspect, and I’ve got all the time in the world to get through this game. We’ll see how long this new approach lasts, though. I would not be surprising if I found something super engaging and wound up getting hyperfixated again because that’s basically what led to the pell-mell grind through Shadowbringers and Endwalker. I didn’t plan to get through both of them in so short a time, but it was a fun idea to catch up with my friends and I was pretty dang hooked at that point, so I did and now I’m going to try to take it all at a more even, steady pace.