The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #1: I, Catboi

The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #1: I, Catboi

    I fell back on my couch exhausted, my hands become unto fossils, sculptures of bone in the shape of a DualShock controller. I consider myself a seasoned and experienced gamer, capable of rising to any challenge, but I had not been prepared for what I met with when I ventured into Eorzea. After forty minutes of tooth-cracking, bloody-minded struggle, making use of every tool, skill and low-down dirty fuckin' trick I'd learned in my gaming career, I had taken almost as much damage as I gave, but my foe lay split open before me, my prize spilling out of it like jewels in the moonlight: I had finally succeeded in creating my FFXIV free trial account.

    What would you like?, the game asked. Balanced stats? Big ol' muscles and blue skin? Or a long fluffy tail and Very Good Ears? And so, alea iacta est: A Miqo'te Is You. Mrrow, etc.

    I see no thiefy-type option, my go-to in most games for the damage output, lock-and-pocketpickery, and bitchin' bandanas, and so I am become an Archer, cobbling together a story that my guy is an archaeologist, scouring the world for ancient relics, lost technology and DVD boxed sets of sitcoms that have aged poorly due to racism. I make him look as much like me as the options will allow, name him Den Jaymark, and we set off to shape his destiny, at which point the game says lolnope, you're gonna hang out in a a wagon for a while with an old man who notices when a wine bottle is empty but not when it literally floats in front of him and also the two main characters of NieR: Automata. After a momentary meet with an invisible, mischievous moogle, Sue the T-Rex rolls on her random encounter table and we are shortly thereafter delivered, covered in brigand-blood, to a verdant, sylvan glade that doesn't resemble Lothlorien or Rivendell in the slightmost. 

An elven maid there was of old, a shining star of day

"Miss not the 11 o'clock checkout", she warned, "Or be charged for another night's stay."

    Here we are met with Madame--I mean Mother Miounne, who inducts us into the adventuring guild and runs the attached inn and definitely does not operate a house of negotiable affection under its eaves.

"The in-room mirror tells of things not yet passed, things that were and things that are,"

"I didn't use that, what's this 10-gil charge?" 

"The gysahl-seasoned kupo nuts you took from the minibar."

    Okay so now it's adventures, right? Please let it be adventures now. And: kinda, because I am thrown immediately and without life preserver into the path of an oncoming COMPLETELY OVERWHELMING UI AND HUD SCHEME, and forced to struggle for my very survival.
    Now admittedly, part of this is never having played an MMO before and therefore having literally no grounding in the visual and interface language the genre has had two decades to develop and in which it expects a certain level of fluency on the part of the player. What am cooldown? How DPS? Wherefore, aggro?

In FFXIV I'm finally free to live out my greatest fantasy:
Having a green question-mark for a head.

    Once I'd gotten a handle on Popup-Quest-Alert Hoarder Simulator 2021 up there, I futzed around some, figured out how to pare some stuff down in the settings (no, I don't need more than 3 tasks displaying at once, no, I don't need to know which server I'm on ((???)), no, I don't need to see my item grid) and after maybe a half hour began to realize that much of what initially felt like inundation with options and commands and input-structures is actually designed to save me as much time and inconvenience as possible; does it clutter the screen some to have a palette dedicated to my equipped attacks that I can press R1 to flip over to a series of options relating to my inventory? Yes, but training my fingers to know that when I want to see my armory they just have to go R1-R2-Triangle is a hell of a lot easier and so much faster than stopping, pausing, and finding my way through the literal dozens of menu options manually before finally arriving at my inventory, by which time I would likely have forgotten what I wanted in there.
    There is, of course, the argument to be made that maybe building the menu-navigation architecture to not be so crowded and labyrinthine that you have to offer a set of shortcuts could've been a way to go, but once I stopped fighting it and realized that everything I was looking at was designed to save me time and effort and increase my efficiency if I would only let it, my experience with the game immediately improved. I'm not normally an efficiency-hound, but I'm super grateful for these shortcuts that rely on muscle memory instead of active memory because this is a game that I'm theoretically going to be playing for hundreds of hours, and if it takes even five seconds to get to my inventory or whatever the long way, that shit is going to add up to hours of my extremely limited time on this planet, so I really appreciate quality of life implementations like that. Also I'm well aware that this is a conversation the MMO community probably started, came to a consensus on and declared closed within the first two weeks of World of Warcraft coming online, but I'm in uncharted waters here, learning a lot of things the hard way, and this was a great example in why I should trust the game and, perhaps just as importantly, trust the other players.

But that's a story for next time.

 

I made a new cast of the death-mask that's gonna cover my face