Ten Years In Eorzea
Not to write about Final Fantasy XIV on this blog for a third time but I recently hit a full ten years since I started playing. I always joked about being shocked that I would become an MMO guy but thinking about how I used the computer since I was a kid, it was always inevitable. For a while now I’ve wanted to write about my experiences in this game for the last decade. It kind of changed my life, for better or for worse.
Humble beginnings
When I was in elementary school, I was at my town’s library waiting to check out a book when I saw another kid around my age playing some adventure game on the library computer that looked really interesting. I asked him what it was and he said “RuneScape.” That interaction sent me down a dark path, forever changing the trajectory of my life.
Something about MMOs and online virtual worlds have always been fascinating to me. The idea of making a character however you want, growing stronger, linking up with friends and questing together is the perfect video game experience to me. I played RuneScape with my friends in school for many years and dabbled with some other free MMOs, but since my parents refused to pay for the sub (even if I used my own money) I was kind of out of luck for getting far enough into these types of games. By the time World of Warcraft was in the zeitgeist, I had moved on to other things…
…until my junior year of college. My brother and I had gone 50/50 on a shiny new PS4 and I was looking for something new to play - something that had online multiplayer. I saw Final Fantasy XIV on sale on the PSN store and figured it might be worth a shot. “Maybe it would be like RuneScape!” I remember thinking to myself. I did have some small income from an on-campus job and figured I could throw a couple months worth of sub time at the game and see if I liked it or not.
10 years later, I’m still exploring Eorzea. It kind of became more than just a game to me for a while. It was an avenue to express myself, meet like minded people, and feel part of something bigger, something that for a long time I didn’t really have in my personal life. But now looking back I realize I definitely got a little too into it in an unhealthy sort of way and I’m not sure if I have regrets or not about it.
I played FFXIV on and off whenever I had spare cash for the subscription for a few years until I had graduated college and moved out of my parents’ house. I ended up moving to an apartment that was close to a job I had recently gotten but in a boring suburban town with basically nothing to do but drink at the bowling alley down the street. Suddenly I had a big boy job, a big boy paycheck and lots more free time.
A group of online friends I knew were playing FFXIV and invited me to join them. I had to move my character over from the server I had started on, but a couple clicks later, Brock Hampton was born.
“Who’s that green bald guy you keep posting about?”
Somehow I’m 7 paragraphs in and haven’t talked about my character yet. In the world of Final Fantasy XIV, I’m Brock Hampton, a Sea Wolf Roegadyn Warrior hailing from the port of Limsa Lominsa on a quest to save the world. It is very easy to fall in love with your character in this game and I was head over heels for Brock Hampton.
Brock Hampton existed to fulfill two desires of mine. The desire to be big and powerful and the desire to be a hot bear.
I’m a small, unassuming guy in real life. I’m 5 foot 8 and weigh about 150 pounds. If I didn’t have a beard, I’d look like a teenager. When I was in college, I was even scrawnier. I was extremely self conscious about this and had been for many years. Brock Hampton is 7 feet tall, very jacked and quite scary looking. If I couldn’t be big and scary in the real world, surely I could be big and scary in the virtual world.
I was also still figuring a lot of stuff about my personal life, the main one being that despite considering myself bisexual (which was a journey to find that out in and of itself) by this point in my life I was thinking that actually I was probably just gay. And that I was very into bears. If you don’t know what a gay bear is, google that term right now and feel joy for a moment then come back to this article.
As a young questioning nerdy guy, I had a lot of video game crushes. Brock Hampton was a video game crush of my own design - both in the sense of do you want to be him or be with him. There’s something of a power fantasy in that… that this is my alter ego to play around with. Deep down, I had this fear of rejection that despite basically only being into bears, that bears wouldn’t be into me because I wasn't one. Obviously I would know now that is definitely not the case but back then when you're young and stupid and figuring yourself out, my way of coping with it was I can at least be a huge guy in this video game I play.
I spent the next couple years playing FFXIV a little bit every day after work trying to finish the story. The group of people I was playing with were all at the endgame and encouraged me to catch up to them. We also hung out in the game together and they introduced me to writing backstories for our characters. I never really did the OC thing when I was younger, and with some encouragement I was coming up with elaborate lore for Brock Hampton. It was fun! I was trying to get back into creative pursuits and writing more was great - and I guess it all culminated in me opening this blog. Eventually I was at the endgame and was looking to branch out. My goals were trying to get involved with raiding and hopefully make some new friends in the community, if I was lucky.
In my personal life, I had gotten out of that boring town and was living in Boston. Somehow I was balancing work with regular gym going, lots of fun things we were doing around the city and playing FFXIV. I was also very much like “oh yeah I’m definitely gay” and was finally out to most of my friends at this point. Things were good!
Until a few months later Covid happened and I got addicted to staying up till 3 in the morning every night playing computer games.
Uh oh!
I didn’t get the chance to really dig into FFXIV until Covid lockdowns. From when I started, I played only when I had the spare cash for the sub fees, and even when I worked full time I could do an hour or two here and there which was mostly spent on doing the story.
Suddenly, I had unlimited free time, a decent paying salaried job and couldn’t leave the house. I also was working remotely which meant I could play video games on the clock. These combined to activate some long dormant Online MMO Gamer gene in my brain and it was soon very over for me.
I played every single day basically from when I woke up to when I would go to bed at 3 in the morning after talking both to my real life friends who also played XIV and to my new Discord friends I met in my guild. I leveled up all my alt jobs, dabbled into raiding, and got my mentor crown. And that was just the actual MMO part! The real reason to stay in Eorzea was the community during this time. People were hosting parties and hangouts, making virtual nightclubs in their homes with DJs spinning on twitch, exploring any way to try to be social during a time where you couldn't. I got sucked in completely.
I made a small name for myself in the guild I was in and was even asked to be an officer in it. The officer thing was kind of nice for a while because this was obviously during a time of great unrest and anxiety in the world and it felt good to have something small I could do to try and make people’s lives a little bit better - whether it was helping someone with a raid or having to moderate the community.
Looking back I kind of wished I had gotten into an actual hobby or tried learning a skill rather than spend a year with unlimited free time getting really engrossed in an MMO. But hey, I was desperate for social interaction any way I could get it and FFXIV just happened to be in vogue for me and my friends, so it happened to work out.
Seeking besties
On the plus side, being super involved in FFXIV was great because I was meeting lots of new people all the time. FFXIV is known for having a very large queer community and during the time of Stormblood to early Shadowbringers, it was amazing and felt very tight-knit. With everything shut down and me newly out as gay, I had the desire to still meet people that were like me so I turned to FFXIV to try and find my people.
I met tons of amazing queer folks in FFXIV during lockdown. Some of it was as easy as simply playing as a male Roegadyn. Roegadyn are a pretty unpopular race to play as since FFXIV is an anime game and many people would rather be a cute cat girl or bunny girl instead of a big muscular man or woman. Roegadyn for that reason attract a lot of gay players, and since there were so few of them on my server I quickly found my little niche. Others I met through the RP scene, such as the group of extremely funny and kind folks I met running a goofy pizza establishment on another server.
Honestly, MMOs are some of the safest ways to explore things about yourself like gender or sexuality. An MMO like FFXIV where the community is friendly, has a strong queer community and where you’re able to find trusted friends is very very beneficial and healing. And for me, FFXIV was healing for a while!
The deep end
I had a lot of fun participating in the FFXIV community at large, both in game and on social media sites like Twitter for a long time.
One of my favorite things to do in the game is use the built in screenshot tool (referred to as “gpose” from here on out) to take pictures of my character and the world around him. I got pretty good at this since I am into photography in the real world and built up a small but substantial following on Twitter and in a couple Discord servers I was in. A lot of people liked my character (and thought he was hot) so I got a lot of attention which I have to admit I liked. I ended up getting pretty deep into the FFXIV Twitter scene, especially in the gay Roegadyn sphere and made some friends and acquaintances, even from other countries which was really cool.
Around the time of late-Shadowbringers into Endwalker, two things happened that would end up impacting the community in a bad way over time. The first was that the game exploded in popularity. It was a perfect storm; FFXIV’s main competitor World of Warcraft was floundering hard and many players were moving to FFXIV to give it a try. Shadowbringers was also so good (the best reviewed Final Fantasy game in over a decade) that people were like “damn, maybe I should see what the fuss is about!” Notably, this all happened in 2021 AFTER most of the Covid lockdowns!
The second thing was the proliferation of mods. The modding culture in FFXIV is… not great. Mods are against the game’s terms of service, but generally operate as an open secret for better or for worse. Most of the drama that you hear about in the FFXIV community has to do with modding in some fashion. You may have heard of raiders using plugins to cheat at world first ultimate raids. On the other end of the spectrum, role players put up real-world billboards with datamined outfits to advertise virtual events and modders ripped assets from other games to sell with a premium price tag for use in FFXIV. There seemed to be a big controversy monthly and I saw all of it every time thanks to Twitter.
The community was becoming less and less fun to participate in because of things like this. More people playing the game isn’t inherently bad on its own, but the amount of frankly stupid drama I was seeing in the community on a greater basis was getting a little ridiculous. It all felt very… immature.
Real life or fantasy
I could go on for a while about the weird and frankly unhealthy things I’ve witnessed during my time in the FFXIV community. I could talk about being stalked multiple times. I could talk about the unwelcome and overly horny interactions I’ve had in game toward my character by people that forget they’re talking to a real life person on the other end. I could talk about catty behavior, public fights and callouts over little things like mods for our virtual barbie doll characters. But I don’t want this to sound like a hit piece because that’s not what this is about.
The issue is for some people the line between their character and their real life self is blurred. It’s an escape. It was for me for a long time.
Final Fantasy XIV is a game where everyone is beautiful and simultaneously the most important person in the room. You can do almost anything you want from the comfort and anonymity of your computer. It truly is another world and everyone treats it as such. Like I said earlier, it’s a good place to find out things about yourself. But eventually it stops being satisfying because none of it is real.
Obviously in real life none of us are perfect. I’m shy and awkward! I’m the polar opposite of my character. FFXIV was a way to escape negative feelings about myself and give myself something to focus on when the world was burning and when my personal life felt miserable. Frankly, it was just easier for me to socialize on the computer than it was in the real world, even after restrictions were lifted and things were happening in the real world again. It’s the junk food of interactions - sweet and satisfying in the moment, but in the end you get hungry for something more substantial.
The honeymoon phase I and most of my friends had with this game during Covid ended around the time of Endwalker. The story we all had been following for years had ended, and unfortunately the quality of the game kind of took a turn for the worse during patches. Deep down I felt like maybe it was time to start moving on, and I ended up unsubscribing for the first time in years. I still clung to the game both out of habit and for my community, but it wouldn’t be the same as it once was - especially with the tepid reception of the newest expansion Dawntrail causing long time players and friends to quit the game entirely.
Moving on
When I wrote my review for FFXIV Dawntrail on this blog, I mentioned that I was hopeful and excited for the future of the game despite the actual expansion being kind of mediocre. Turns out, my interest in the game seems to be drying up even more instead. Many of my friends have stopped playing, I’ve stepped down from my leadership position in my guild and I am planning on finally giving up my in-game house.
I gave up raiding when I realized that spending 2-3 nights a week dying to the same boss was both making me miserable and making me miss fun and exciting things in real life. Unfortunately, these high-difficulty endgame raids are the vast majority of the content that has been added to FFXIV since Endwalker. After a decade and over eight thousand hours logged, I think I finally ran out of stuff to do.
I’m going to Japan on vacation in a few days. Before I go, I’ll be cancelling my subscription and uninstalling the game for a long time. I was talking about this with a friend who was a little sad that I wouldn’t be in the game for a while, but then we realized that nothing would actually change since we still talk on Discord all the time.
I don’t know what the future holds for me in terms of FFXIV. I don’t think the game is good place right now and hasn’t been for a few years. Maybe they’ll turn it around in the next expansion. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll be willing to find out. Maybe not playing for a year will make me enjoy the game again and see it with fresher eyes. It was a little hard to start taking down stuff in my house for demolition, I will admit.
But that being said, I think I got what I wanted out of my time in Eorzea - which was everyone that met Brock Hampton and instead got to know Sean. I’m really lucky to have met so many life-long friends from all walks of life and all over the world through this game - and especially to those who helped me figure out myself. I’m even luckier to have spent time with some of them in real life too and I hope to be able to meet many more. I also feel like I have a healthier mindset when it comes to online spaces now. I see what happens when you get too involved in an unhealthy way - you focus too much on things that don’t matter and get annoyed and irritated more easily because of it. Shame that it took so long for me to realize these, but hey, better late than never.
The real thing to take out of FFXIV though... shaving your head and growing a beard is a killer look - both in a video game and in real life.
