And there are people who are playing the game as their main experience who have absolutely no memory of it because they weren’t there.
If you think I’m upset about that, you’re wrong; I’m thrilled. I’m glad that the game has advanced to the point where people are playing the game and enjoying it without any real conception of the huge mess that was the original version. But now, three years away from that conclusion, I find myself looking back and thinking about it… and how it was at once awesome and something that no subsequent experience in the game can ever replicate.
One of the things you have to understand is that while we all knew we were getting an overhauled version of the game, there was no real warning that it was going to be like this until it suddenly became an onrushing freight train. Things were normal in Eozea for the longest time, and then all of a sudden Dalamud was hanging in the sky like an avenging wraith, and we all realized that we were far more screwed than previously implied.
For that matter, there wasn’t any assurance about what would or would not be the same after the revamp. Everything felt unhinged in those days. Monsters roamed cities, chocobos rode through the streets, and the game would occasionally just fling high-level equipment at you for being there once the final data snapshot happened.
But enough digital ink has been spilled on what led up to that; what really fascinates me, to this day, is the event that actually ended things. The theory and the execution both, even though there was a fair gap between them.
The problem was that the original version of the game was really not equipped to handle so many people bunching up in Carteneau, and everyone was trying to be there. It was a huge assembly of players, trying to beat back Garlean invaders, unsure of what was going to happen or what effects it would have on the future. In practice, it led to widespread disconnections and a whole lot of disjointed messes; players who were trying to finish up long-running stories (including myself) wound up subjected to a torrent of horrible ambiguity and unreliable connections.
Heck, an entire attack on Ul’dah happened not because it made any narrative sense, but simply because there was a hope that it would draw some players away from the straining landscape of Mor Dhona. That didn’t really happen.
When the connection was working, though, what took place was pretty astonishing in terms of large set-piece battles. It reminds me, at this later date, of World of Warcraft‘s invasions before the last expansion, except without any sense that things were going to be all right afterwards. Garlean machines spawned left and right, and it was a desperate fight not just to stay connected but to stay alive against an enormous assault. At the time, many of the weapons being deployed were extremely rare, such as the Garlean vanguard machines that previously had evaded most player encounters. It felt transgressive, unsafe, even in the existing atmosphere of fear.
None of us had an objective. None of us had an expectation of any reward. We were just there, fighting away, feeling as if it mattered even as we objectively knew that we were just counting the time until everything shut down.
Then it did. And then, almost at the same moment, we got the trailer.
I might be in the minority, but up until that moment, it seemed like there existed the genuine possibility that we would win. Sure, the fiction was set up so that we wouldn’t be playing for a while, but there seemed like we might just win, whatever it took. And then… we knew we wouldn’t.
At that moment, anything was possible. Had we all been sent into the past? The future? Another dimension? Another fragment of reality? What awaited us? Was the world gone? Would anyone live through to the second version? What was even happening?
We wouldn’t know for another several months. And yes, in the intervening time we’d have plenty of answers to smooth over some of that ambiguity, but at the moment of the event those answers didn’t exist. It wasn’t “ah, that was a last-ditch protective spell,” we all thought we may very well have just witnessed the end of the world.
I make the comparison to Final Fantasy VI because that’s another game that brought players to a junction and then let players fail, badly. Except that game didn’t force you to wait nearly a year to find out what happened or start walking around again. This was the sort of trick that you could only really pull off with an online game, shutting the servers down and letting everyone just wonder what we would see when the game started up again.
It also means that more or less every cliffhanger the game will have from here on out is going to be compared to that moment, which is something it can never live up to. I’m certain that we’re going to get a neat lead-in to Stormblood, yes, but there’s no way in the world that it can compare to that trailer and that harsh question of what comes next. We know what comes next, down to the fine details of where we go next. You just can’t replicate the end of an era or the experience of it.
Still, I think that’s kind of a good thing. Those of us who were there have a neat bit of online gaming history that we lived through, something unusual and weird. We’ll never see its like again, and that’s a testament to how successful the remade version has been; we can, however, remember how cool and weird it was when it happened.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week is Thanksgiving week here in the states, so as I do often enough, I’m going to talk about what makes me thankful for this game in particular. It’s only a little bit of a thematic stretch.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
