The climax of Dead Pixels, E4’s recent sitcom from the creators of Peep Show and based on a group of friends obsessed with an online fantasy video game, was surprisingly affecting. After years of questing together, the friends, for whom the game had become the crucible in which their bonds had been made and reinforced, successfully plant the “Orb of Uncreation” into the slug queen’s egg sac and thereby triumphantly conclude the game’s story. The reward for the thousands of hours’ effort? A treasure chest containing a pair of red gloves.
“No, this was totally, totally worth it,” murmurs one of the players into the head mic she uses to chat to her teammates (one of whom plays from the adjacent bedroom). “I’m so happy with my life choices.”
It’s a joke about the fallacy of so much human endeavour, from stamp collecting to Westminster jostling: the hollow realisation that the appeal often lies in the striving, not the attaining. It also strikes at the heart of a truth about a certain kind of online video game, played at a certain point of early adulthood. Soon enough you discover that the game is merely the pretext to hang out with the people you met along the way. As the Dead Pixels characters mournfully say their goodbyes, one interjects, ecstatically, with the news that a story-elongating expansion has just been announced for the game. Blessed relief: the band can stay together.
Shadowbringers is the third and final expansion to Final Fantasy XIV, an online fantasy game much like the fictional one of Dead Pixels. For the past six years it, too, has provided an excuse for tens of thousands of players around the world to meet up. The MMO (massively multiplayer online game), as this genre is known, is no longer as popular as it once was (at one point, World of Warcraft had twice as many subscribers as Denmark had citizens) but Final Fantasy XIV has provided a stronghold for players who would rather collaborate in high-fantasy-styled world-saving endeavours than floss the nights away in Fortnite and its twitchily competitive ilk.
The story of Final Fantasy XIV’s development has its own enthralling arc. Released in September 2010, just as the genre’s popularity was peaking, the game was so poorly received it prompted a deep-bowing apology from its Japanese publisher’s president and the sacrificial resignation of its producer, one of the company’s longest-serving employees. The world was closed for a multimillion-yen refurbishment and, when in 2013 the doors were opened, the response from players was rapturous, making a hero of Naoki Yoshida, the underdog designer who had so successfully masterminded the refit.
This, then, is the third expansive chapter in Yoshida’s increasingly colossal story, which, for anyone looking to start from the beginning, spans virtual continents and dimensions, and requires about as great an investment of time as reading the complete works of Tolstoy. There are items that can be used to boot a new character to the beginning of the latest chapter in the drama, but whichever route you take, this is a joyously refined example of a style of game that, in less sympathetic hands, can be repellently arcane.
The dialogue is punchy, the characters well defined, and as you dash about the lavish world you soon get caught up in dramas both local and international. There are stirring set-piece battles, for which you’ll be automatically paired with other players, as well as smaller-scale errands, such as picking up items from local shops in exchange for information, and so on. You play as a hero, of course, but the world’s politics are fully formed, and yours is but one role in many required to win the war. You choose a class for your adventurer to fit your own temperament – knights, healers, samurai, gunslingers, dancers – and, away from the battlefield, you may put hours into perfecting your character’s outfit, choosing a pet or decorating your virtual homestead.
Unlike most games, Final Fantasy XIV requires a Netflix-style monthly subscription, money used to keep the virtual world’s servers humming. While the developer is therefore incentivised to waste players’ time, those who stick to Shadowbringers’ main storyline will reach its heady climax within a few weeks. Then again, there’s always a chance you’ll make some genuine friends along the way, and the game, like the golf course, the bingo hall, the pub or the yacht club, will become a mere pretext for something more profound and lingering to blossom.
Also recommended
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
(Nintendo; Switch)
Since 1990, the Fire Emblem series has provided a kind of soap-opera rendering of chess, in which each piece has a name, backstory and romantic feelings. Emotional tension is ratcheted up by the fact that, if you allow a piece to fall during battle, he or she will be lost from the story for ever, a rule known in game design as “permadeath”. Fire Emblem: Three Houses has all of this and more, as you play as a university professor-cum-knight who takes charge of one of three houses at an Officers Academy, responsible for both your students’ survival on the battlefield, and their martial education in between skirmishes. A deep and deeply rewarding game of strategy, wrapped in a high-school simulator.
This article was amended on 5 August. This isn’t in fact the final “final” chapter of Final Fantasy XIV. This has now been corrected.
