I spent most of my weekend doing chores. Almost the entire thing, actually, when I really think about it. Woke up nice and refreshed feeling on Saturday and got out of bed, ready to dive into my weekend’s list of Things To Do in preparation for my friends coming to visit (last weekend, as this gets posted), and then got slammed almost immediately by the difference between feeling rested and recovering from burnout. So, rather than push myself to do the chores I’d set aside for that day, I took my time through the morning to relax, play some video games, and let my body be awake but still for a while. All while doing chores in Final Fantasy 14. I’ve started a personal money-making project, something simple but likely still lucrative, and had a bunch of orders and gatherables to deliver for my player guild to keep me busy while I spent my idle time doing research. Once that was done, I moved back and forth between doing bits and pieces of my chores and attending to the various tasks I’d set up in Final Fantasy 14, slowly whiling away my saturday while I collected a ton of stuff, crafted a bunch of stuff, sorted out my retainers in a more beneficial manner, and attended to some of the more laborious of my weekend chores. I did mostly the same thing on Sunday, but with the addition of spending about four hours playing Stardew Valley with one of my D&D group members since I wasn’t up for running a session, so really it was just chores all the way up and down my weekend.
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Trying To Take My Time In Final Fantasy 14
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.
Continue readingLaboring To Make Sure My Value Isn’t Only Seen In My Labor
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.
Continue readingI Can’t Imagine What Final Fantasy 14 Would Have Like Without My Free Company
Aside from my very first month of playing the game, I have not experienced what it is like to play Final Fantasy 14 without being a member of a Free Company (the FF14 version of player guilds). The friends who got me into the game were members of one already, so I was already predisposed to joining that particular group from the get-go, but the warm welcome I received while I was still a new player on a free-to-play account solidified my decision to join. Since then, I have not regretted my choice. Almost everyone in the FC has been a warm and welcoming person who has done what they could, sometimes at mild to moderate inconvenience, to help me out as I’ve gotten further and further into the game. From free level-appropriate gear when I was reached the tough middle of my crafting journey to tons of free collectibles (music for the in-game jukebox, minions, clothing items, mounts, and more) more or less constantly, I would not have made the progress I have without the support of this FC. Nor would I have made as much money since everything I know about crafting to make money has been learned from people in the FC and almost all of the money I’ve made in the game has been made via crafting and gathering jobs for the FC’s leader (often as part of deals he has brokered with other very wealthy players). Joining this FC immediately upon becoming a paying subscriber to the game has irrevoccably altered my experience in ways I rarely stop to think about now that I’ve adjusted to it.
Continue readingHousing Opportunities In Final Fantasy 14
After a relatively short time, I managed to win the opportunity to buy a house in Final Fantasy 14. I know people who have been trying for well over a year to get a house in one of the few player housing zones in the game, but I got incredibly lucky and won on a housing plot in what turned out to be a relatively unpopular area, based on how few bids there were. Personally, I think parts of that area are incredibly underrated, which is why I added them to my list of possible locations. Normally, getting a house of some kind wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it has been this past year, but there’s been a few events in the US that had the local housing market locked in a way that it normally isn’t. Typically, if you do not enter your home for forty-five days, your house will be automatically demolished, your things put in storage, and some amount of the house’s cost refunded to you. This is to prevent players from purchasing and sitting on the nicest housing plots long after they’ve stopped playing the game. Sure, it’s still incredibly easy to just log in every so often to keep your house occupied, but that means you have to buy a subscription every month and a half, at minimum, and Final Fantasy 14 loves that. They want your money. So, prior to the massive floods and damage to North Carolina last year, this process happened regularly and houses would go back on the market at a fairly normal rate. Once those floods happened and huge portions of the US (well, not that huge in proportion the the US itself but still huge compared to most parts of the world) were unable to access secure internet and gaming time, Square Enix decided to put the timers on hold. A decision they relented on in December of 2024 and them immediately put back in place during the L.A. wildfires. As a result, until incredibly recently, most houses only became available because people actively sold them or moved into new housing of their own.
Continue readingStill At The Same (Raiding) Party Three Months Later In Final Fantasy 14
One of the activities I was most excited to do with the Free Company (what Final Fantasy 14 calls player guilds) was something called “Content Rewind.” This isn’t an official activity in Final Fantasy 14, but the name given to an FC activity by the founder that the rest of us have adopted. The idea is to go back to early raids and run through them in a way that resembles what it would have been like to play through them when they originally came out. Rather than the “MINE” method (Minimum Item level, No Echo) that is the hardest possible way to do the raids, doing them “synched, no echo” is a way to include a decent amount of difficulty without making them as difficult as possible. For MINE, you’re using gear that has been scaled down to the lowest item level (which represents the gear’s power, essentially) that the raid will allow. You’re also doing it with no echo, which is the game’s feature that makes repeating a fight easier after you’ve failed it by raising your hit points and damage by a certain percent. Synched, No Echo, on the other hand, limits your items to the highest level that would be allowed and while you’d be missing the boost from the echo as well, it doesn’t hurt as much since your gear is stronger. It’s supposedly even easier than if you’d gone into the fight with appropriately leveled gear that was available back then due to the slow creep of power that has occurred over the years. I have no experience with this since I’ve only been playing the game for six months, but enough people have said it independently that I believe it. What all of this means, ultimately, is that we get a group of eight players together and work our way through a tough boss fight, one strange battle mechanic at a time, until we eventually emerge victorious.
Continue readingDedication To The Craft In Final Fantasy 14
One of the things that has taken up a large amount of my time alongside running through the plot of Final Fantasy 14 has been not just leveling the combat classes I need to complete the plot-based missions, but also leveling the crafting and gathering classes required to repair the gear for those combat classes. I mean, I can also make gear for the lower-leveled classes I’m working on getting up to snuff now, but most of the purpose for all that leveling is so I can keep my highest tier of combat gear in tip-top shape without needing to rely on other players I might not have easy access to when I need the work done and so I can stop paying an NPC vendor to repair my gear. Getting it fixed by a player character is a much better investment since you can repair gear beyond what you’d normally expect to it’s “full” state. It’s a bit silly since all this does is set a new point for what counts as “full” integrity on your gear, but it is satisfying to see all of those blue lines (to signify full integrity bars) next to all of my gear whenever I open my character window. Still, having all this extra space before you need to worry about your gear breaking is one of the main benefits of crafting to the person playing the game’s content and, for a while there, I couldn’t actually fix my top-tier gear. In order to hurry through the last two expansions, I set aside my usual schedule of 2-3 weeks on content and then 2 weeks on other stuff (mostly leveling crafting jobs), so while the leveling I’d done previously was enough to keep my gear going in the 2nd to last expansion (Endwalker), it was not enough to fix the gear I got following that expansion. And some of the gear I got toward the end of the expansion, too.
Continue readingMy Island Getaway Turned Into More Work In Final Fantasy 14
As I’ve played through Final Fantasy 14, one common refrain from a lot of the NPCs every time I hit what should be a lull between expansions is just how tired my character must be and wouldn’t I enjoy a break. Most of the time, I’ve gone immediately from that “go relax for a bit” end-of-expansion message to the “You look so rested after your downtime!” start-of-new-content message, which isn’t really a problem since I can acknowledge that the game was not meant to be played in so compressed a fashion as I have, but it has always struck me as kind of funny. It took on a bit of a different note during Endwalker, though, as the game started to build in little moments of downtime and inaction for the primary NPCs and your player character, focused as it was on the development of those relationships in preparation for the finale, almost all of which were far too short or actually cut short by events proceeding without us. So, this time, when I hit the end of the expansion and was told to go rest, I didn’t pick up the next mission. I, personally, took most of a week to rest and do whatever tickled my fancy rather than continue my constant grind of progression through the game’s quests. Last weekend, though, I started dipping my toes back into the expansion content, focusing more on the side activities than the story quests that I knew would start setting up whatever is coming next. One of them in particular caught my attention (mostly because one of my friends started on it immediately and her talk about it made it seem like a lot of fun), so I made sure to set some time aside for starting the Island Sanctuary process.
Continue readingPlanning For My Future In Final Fantasy 14
Now that is has been six days since I finished the base portion of the Endwalker expansion of Final Fantasy 14, I’ve finally hit the point where I can really start to think about what I’m going to doing next (as opposed to just sorta thinking about it). I’ve had a lot of this stuff on my mental to-do lists for a while, but I’ve been putting a lot of it off in favor of progressing the main story or doing the work required to continue progressing the main story. Now that I’m hitting a slow-down point and won’t be racing to get as much done as I possibly can, it’s time to turn my attention back to that stuff. Most of it is stuff I’ve been working on slowly, as a part of daily and weekly activities, but it hasn’t really gotten any focused attention from me in a couple months and now it’s time to shift my attention and reasses priorities. All of which is to say that my equipment inventory has way too much stuff in it and I need to get that thing cleared out by leveling up a bunch of classes. Also, I really need to put a bit more focus and effort into my gathering and carfting skills since I’ve hit the point where I can’t repair my own gear anymore and that’s no good. Gotta be mostly self-sufficient so I don’t need to rely on barely-fixed gear or finding a random person whose crafting skills are high enough to fix my stuff (it was a whole thing in my latest raid night with the FC). Lots of stuff that I meant to maintain as I played has fallen by the wayside as the demands of my life and the main story of FF14 have fluctuated and it is time to get everything humming along again.
Continue readingSwitch 2 Ownership Is Already Changing Me And I Haven’t Even Unboxed It Yet
I got my Switch 2 yesterday. It was delivered a day ahead of the earliest I thought I could get it (even with paying a small amount extra for expadited shipping), which caused me to scramble to make sure that there’d be someone around to receive the package since the scheduled delivery time overlapped with a physical therapy appointment I couldn’t skip. I didn’t want it sitting out on the stoop where someone might spot it, recognize it as possibly containing a Switch 2, and decide to break their streak of not stealing packages for this one special occasion. It turns out I needn’t have worried. Not only did the UPS driver have the ability to bring it inside, they brought it right to my apartment door, tucking it out of general visibility around the little corner hiding my door from the view of anyone but my across-the-hall neighbor. They also didn’t buzz or knock or anything, so I only knew it happened because I heard a jingle of keys followed by the gentle metal-on-metal clatter of my door jiggling in place. I wasn’t quick enough to thank this delivery person for going the extra mile, but I appreciated their consideration all the same. Especially because of how conspicously inconspicuous the package was. Every possible gap into the box was covered in enormous tape that screamed the phrase “ELECTRONICALLY VERIFIED DELIVERY” or something like that in massive block letters over and over again. The box itself was a non-descript brown cardboard number that was perhaps four or five times as big as it needed to be and the shipping label even avoided any mention of Nintendo save for the incredibly non-specific “NOA” at the head of the return address. Clearly, keeping the package discrete had been a part of their shipping plans for the console, which I appreciated.
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