One interesting trend of the MMO genre is its slow drift towards a seasonal structure. Final Fantasy 14's getting properly-named seasons with Evercold, World of Warcraft's got its Mythic+ and Delve seasons, The Elder Scrolls Online's gotten them, and so on.

And there are plenty of advantages to this. Borrowed power grinds that span an entire expansion are obnoxious, and were thoroughly trashed back in Shadowlands: It doesn't feel great to fall behind on the treadmill, and having a routine reset to put everyone back on a level playing field is smart.

It also means that there's an easy excuse to come back. I, for one, don't play World of Warcraft full-time (I have too many games to keep up with, alas) but I will always come back and sink a few dozen hours into every major patch. MMOs that've adopted this model also tend to have fewer content droughts, the death knell of any game that requires (or encourages) you to pump out a monthly subscription.

But there are plenty of downsides. WoW's been struggling with its seasonal cadence lately, bogged down by bugs and balancing issues. There's also the seasonal weariness, too—unlike a sandbox MMO, these seasonal games don't offer much in the way of permanent progression.

If you get your BIS, it'll be replaced 3-4 months later. If you miss a reward, it'll likely be gone or harder to get as things are depreciated.

Most of all, seasonal zones drop off pretty quickly. Studios put all this work into an area that'll only stay relevant to the expansion in question for… well, a season. And while most of these games'll let you come back and still play through their storylines or snag the gear attached to them, there's precious little reason to do so for the gear-motivated.

More to the point, doing so makes you fall behind the current seasonal grind, kicking your can further down the road.

Contrast this to other ways of building MMOs: "Sandbox" games (air-quoted here because I might be stretching that definition here) like Old School RuneScape, EVE online, or Project Gorgon are all less concerned with some seasonal play metric and more concerned with offering you a broad ocean with things to do.

And more to the point, your progress is more permanent. No resets, no moving the gear goalposts—you can set your own objectives, and your progress'll still be there when you come back to them.

Others, like Guild Wars 2, take a more hybrid approach, still offering big zones in major patches, but keeping all progression horizontal so there's no real reason to do the new stuff aside from the fact it's, well, newer.

Which makes me curious: You, my smart, tasteful, and dare I say sensual Terminally Online reader. What's your preference? Do you think the seasonal treadmill's a nice concession between your limited personal time—or is it a pressure cooker that you're growing weary with? You can either give your hot take in the comments, or fill out this handy poll I've made just for you.

Loving someone means putting up with all their flaws. In Final Fantasy 14's case, that's shrugging my shoulders and going "classic server tick moment" every time something that is definitely not supposed to happen does, in fact, happen.

That's been happening an awful lot more lately as I've been progressing through Dancing Mad (Ultimate), the game's newest balls-to-the-wall eight-player raid. The final mechanic of the fight's first phase involves carefully placing 16 teleporting arrows in such a way that when four people get smacked with a classic JRPG Confusion status, they can run in (technically towards another player in an attempt to murder them) and get successfully pinged around the arena.

The problem? Sometimes, they simply straight up did not work. I've had static members run right over them, or get pinged off in every direction except the way the arrow is actually facing. That's because, for whatever reason, the arrows teleported you based on where you stepped onto the panel. Players had come up with ways to try and alleviate some of this bizarre behaviour, but having to create strats around janky netcode never feels good.

It's something I had resigned to forever being a little bit scuffed. So imagine my surprise when, upon peeping today's hotfix notice, I saw something I never expected: it's been freakin' fixed.

"Players will now always be teleported a fixed distance from the centre of the panel in the direction indicated by the arrow, regardless of where they step onto it," the brief patch notes read.

"Previously, players were teleported based on where their character stepped onto the panel. However, when discrepancies arose between the server-side and client-side positional data due to network conditions, the destination of the teleportation appeared inconsistent. To address this, this behaviour has been changed so that teleportation is now determined by the arrow panel itself, rather than the character's position."

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Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't the case from the beginning—it makes far more sense to me, personally—but I'm genuinely jazzed to see it actually rectified. Nothing feels worse than getting through the first three minutes of the fight, only to have to wipe the pull because of a little server side shenanigans.

The hotfix has also made it so that players with speed-buffing abilities like Sprint or Expedience shouldn't straight-up run over the arrows anymore. It's funny the first time, but certainly not the 10th or even 50th time.

It's not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14.

Part of that is certainly thanks to The Primals, the MMO's official in-house rock band. It's led by FF14 composer Masayoshi Soken, accompanied by localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and non-developers Eikichi Iawi, Tetsuya Tachibana, and GUNN.

Sporting a raw sound with distorted, screeching guitars and high-energy vocals from Soken and Fox, The Primals manages to strike this incredibly interesting balance of being right in the heart of nerdom while also putting out the kind of music that wouldn't sound amiss at your local rock show or festival.

It's no surprise, then, that The Primals felt right at home at Download, the UK's biggest rock and metal festival. It was the band's first non-Fan Festival appearance outside of Asia, and despite a short timeslot it was an absolute corker. I had the opportunity to sit down with Soken, Fox, and GUNN the day after their high-octane set, and it immediately struck me just how jazzed all three seemed to be—even after a night to sleep off the post-performance high.

I thought part of that might have been the release of all the nerves building up to the main performance, but it turns out the band didn't have much time for that. "[Download] took us around [the festival site] before we started, and the buggy that was supposed to take us back didn't come," Fox said.

"So we didn't get back until like, 10 minutes before we were supposed to go to the stage. Normally you sit around and you get nervous because you're thinking about it, but because all this was happening I didn't have time to get nervous. And by the time you get on the stage, it's like 'go, go, go'. And of course, once you see people, you take all of that power and go."

Scions and sinners

The Primals is rocking with a pretty decent discography at this point, but curating it to appeal to both fans and potential newcomers (some of whom may have never even played Final Fantasy 14) was important when it came to putting together the five-song setlist.

"Not everyone knew [Final Fantasy] 14, so we approached it from that perspective," Soken told me. "We wanted to make the most of the time we had, so we knew that we couldn't just rely on the songs that get a really good reaction at Fan Fest." Making sure The Primals could show their musical talent to "get everyone on board and make sure they're having a good time" led to a tight selection of some of the band's biggest, most energetic tracks. A choice which, as Fox tells me, actually proved a challenge in execution.

"[The Primals concerts] have the ups and the downs—you have the heavy songs, then you go into the slower songs, more electronic stuff. This time we focused on the heavy, on the power, on the 'go, go, go,' and our drummer was probably this close to dying," he said. "Even though it was 25 minutes—our shortest set ever—I think that's the most tired we've been after a set because it was just 'go, go, go, go, go' all the way to the end, 100% of the way."

Soken leaned forward, telling me: "Shouting. I just shouted the whole time."

Fox joked about the exhaustion he felt by the time the band's final track, Under the Weight, came around. "I was like, am I gonna pass out on stage? But if I pass out on stage, that'd be pretty fucking cool. I was like, I wanted some oxygen!"

While my favourite moment was hearing Absolute Tyranny—one of the game's more recent tracks from this January's last batch of Arcadion raids—the two tracks Not Afraid and Under the Weight were perhaps the most fitting energy for Download Festival, and the ones that The Primals plucked out as the one that had the biggest chance of reeling in new listeners.

A sound reborn

Seeing a videogame band giving it their all on a stage surrounded by tens of thousands of rock fans sprawled across half a dozen stages really drove home just how much closer the two worlds have become over the years, something which the band wholeheartedly agrees with.

"10, 15 years ago, when we were starting out with this kind of thing, there was game music and there was rock music. And there was a divide in between the two," GUNN said. "But in the past few years, I really feel like they've come a lot closer together, and in fact, sort of within that same bubble now."

But as Koji points out, videogame music has always banged—the technology just wasn't always there to fully realise it. "You look back at the music in games 20 years ago and go 'Oh, that's game music,' but it's only because that's how it was sold. You go back and listen to some of those soundtracks from Mega Man. They hit hard. You've got some rocking beats, bass lines that are just crazy.

"But it was because the technology limited it, so you got the bleeps and the bloops, and it was 'Oh, that's just game music'. But you go back and listen to that now and you're like, 'Oh, I see what they were trying to do. If only they had the technology they have now.'"

Now that The Primals has tackled one of the UK's biggest festivals, what's next for them? First of all, a new album, Soken tells me—which should be plush with rearrangements of music from Dawntrail's stellar Arcadion raid series.

But doing this also seems to have given the band the desire to take their music all over the world. "We've never had any opportunity to go and meet our fans in Australia. I want to make contact with The Primals fans in areas and regions where we haven't been able to get in touch with yet. So the next goal: Primals world tour."

Final Fantasy 14 will give you a dog (among other rewards) for paying your taxes—if you're in Japan, that is. There's really nothing else I can say that isn't funnier than the truth of the situation, though I'm not pointing and laughing at Square here. It's a genuinely sweet incentive to have players contributing to other municipalities.

As reported by Famitsu, Square is partnering with the Shibuya Ward (which it has an office in) as part of Japan's "Furusato Nozei", a system whereby urban Japanese residents can voluntarily put forward some of their money to rural areas of their choice, such as their hometown—in exchange, they get gifts, such as travel tickets, gift cards, and so on.

If you do this for Shibuya, you'll get a dog. Specifically, you'll get the Megashiba mount if you donate 9,000 yen (the equivalent of $55)—or a bunch of other rewards, including five fantasia (used to change your character's appearance), the Collegiate Attire set, the Magitek Attire set, or a bunch of dance emotes, all with varying donation amounts.

The donation amounts are all far more expensive than their store prices. For instance, the Megashibu's usually around 2,530 yen (roughly $16)—but if you're a Japanese resident that's feeling particularly charitable with your money, it's a neat way to get some items while also contributing to the place you grew up.

Also, you can get a tax write-off if you're over a certain amount—which is the slightly more self-serving reason to do it. But hey, if you're paying a similar amount of yen in income tax anyway, it's a neat way to get a free digital dog out of the whole deal. If you happen to live in Shibuya yourself, you can go to the official collab site to sign up.

I always thought history was boring as a kid. Nuts to the past, I want cool tech, body mods, and lightspeed travel! But maybe I would have felt differently if I had a game like The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales back then. What better way is there to appreciate the past than violently cutting down a million monsters in a ye olde fantasy Philadelphia?

Centered around the—you’ll never guess—adventures of a guy named Elliot, this is a classic top-down action adventure through and through. I can taste a healthy smattering of Zelda in its recipe, a smidge of Ys, a dash of Quintet’s informal Gaia series. Traveling through time to explore the history of the magic city Philabieldia (no relation to the real magic city of cheesesteaks stateside), all the elements you’d expect of the genre are here: a condensed map, various tools to help uncover secrets, and plenty of puzzle-filled dungeons, all spruced up with Square Enix’s now-iconic HD-2D style looking the best it ever has. You’ve even got a little blue fairy friend yapping your ear off.

And boy does she talk.

With her portrait sitting in the corner of the screen so she can mug gameplay and cutscenes alike like a hungry react YouTuber, Faie the fairy truly loves to yap. All I'm trying to do is fight my way through a tiny cave, and yet there she is complimenting me after every fight, pointing out every item that drops or chest sitting out in the open or immediately explaining how to solve the world's simplest block pushing puzzle the second I see it. Luckily for my sanity, there's an option buried in the menus to cut her rambling down significantly, turning her from borderline unbearable to a charmingly optimistic companion. It’s frankly baffling that’s not the default.

Besides making sure you’ve always got someone to listen to, Faie provides The Adventures of Elliot’s biggest addition to a style of turn-based RPG Square Enix has gotten comfortable with in recent years., She has an entire host of abilities of her own to experiment with. I can urn her into a body double to clear out a host of monsters while sitting safely in another room, or have her warp me past entire sections of dungeons. Faie specializes in producing moments that make me feel like a genius cheating the system.

Controlled with either the right stick or by a friend, taking full advantage of her freeform powers can be brain-breakingly busy (and sometimes left me gripping my controller in a monstrous double claw), but the satisfaction of whacking an evil elephant with a hammer into Faie right as she’s turned into a mini tornado to hurl them into a pit is incredibly satisfying.

Timed events

Not that I wasn’t swinging a sword plenty myself. The Adventures of Elliot is a lightning fast game. Classic JRPG electric guitar wails while I hop over boulders that are sinking into lava. As soon as I land in a locked room, half a dozen murderous monsters are beelining right for me. At its best it’s positively exhilarating, a total high-octane thrill ride. Many of the bosses especially, these gorgeous behemoths of detailed pixel work, call to mind the furious action of Ys, dashing and jumping and blocking and parrying in an endless back and forth ballet of violence.

And while there’s not many graphic options—mostly the prerequisite smattering of resolution sliders and depth of field toggles—the HD-2D style ensures a strong visual look while keeping the requirements humble, and on my rig it all ran at a perfectly constant 120 fps; ideal for a game that has a tendency to get chaotic.

It’s too bad, then, that the game is so obsessed with making sure I’m never without a rogue rodent to explode that the puzzles suffer. Most about as complex as pushing a single block left a couple inches. Worse, without any memorable puzzles or interesting layouts, the dungeons all lack a strong identity, slipping right out of the mind the moment they’re done.

Acting your age

The Adventures of Elliot will have you hoping through a handful of time periods. Here's what to expect.

Link to the past

Still, it’s nice that the game treats its story with a similar sense of speed. You can easily hit the end of the of this adventure in under 20 hours, and while the narrative itself is mostly fine—every single beat is extremely familiar and wrapped up in a well-meaning if clumsy fantasy racism metaphor—it shows a real knack for connecting its mechanics to the story and endearing me to the cast with only a few lines of dialogue.

That cast gets plenty of love in sidequests. From helping a grieving widow find a way to remember her late husband to helping a researcher preserve the dreams of those who came before, they're all about the past, memories, and dreams, building out a sense of thematic unity and interconnectedness as Philabieldia's NPCs big and small see their stories cross in surprising ways.

It’s in that interconnectedness where the warm spirit of The Adventures of Elliot really lies. Setting the entire game in the same fairly small area across four time periods is a bold move, and one that pays off wonderfully. The game is deeply enamored with the very idea of history, with the joy and sense of adventure that comes with seeing how a single home or batch of trees might change with the years, with the way the past reflects the present and stories continue over generations. Just look at the world map to see the proof, each new age stacked up on top of one another exactly the same as the floors of its cavernous dungeons, layers of history peeled back as you dive deeper into the past.

Like that map, The Adventures of Elliot is built on a long and ever-evolving history of a genre. And while it might not stand quite as tall as its towering influences, its dedication to brevity, thrills, and a genuine passion for the past gives its own adventure a solid place to stand in time.

I rather enjoyed the first Final Fantasy 7 remake—I sank a comfy 35 hours into it, plodded along its story, and had a grand old time. I never got around to Rebirth, though. Partially because I just didn't have the time, but also because I didn't want another fully-priced AAA game taking a chunk out of my wallet.

Well, now I will be playing it, because as part of the Final Fantasy franchise sale on Steam, both games are (relatively speaking) dirt cheap. These are some genuinely hefty discounts, with the first game currently being around $14/£12, and the second being about $20/£16 at the time of writing.

Heck, you can even go ahead and snag FF16 for $20/£18 if you'd like. Just about every game in the series has some sort of discount—including one of my personal favourites, FF12. That's right, the best combat system to ever be put in a Final Fantasy game (and you can quote me on that. Also, former PCG writer Sarah James) is currently available for just $15/£11.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious—but the gambit system really is something special, and the Zodiac Age version of the game has several major perks, including the ability to speed things up. And you might be asking "but Harvey, if the combat system is so good, why do you want to speed through it?" and that's a very good question which I will talk around so as to not have to concede that the Gambit system isn't perfect. Which it is.

Basically, FF12 works a lot like an autobattler game with some fine-tuned control. You can program your party of adventurers with Gambits, "if>then" orders that can be purchased in-game and assigned on an individual basis, with extra slots for bigger priority lists available through level-up bonuses.

What makes it cool is that, once you're all set up, you can rock around the game's areas as an autonomous ball of death, only giving the occasional command to deal with edge cases that your master plans couldn't foresee. It's satisfying and, more to the point, feels well-earned. A result of your investment into your party, tactical progression that makes them savvier fighters as well as just bigger stat sticks.

And that's to say nothing of the vibes. Sure, it's basically just Star Wars—but that's why I like FF12! It's a sweeping swashbuckling adventure that has a lot more to do with fantasy politics and personal struggles rather than the end of the world (until the final hours, but that's just how Final Fantasy works). Also, Balthier and Fran are gaming's best power couple. Don't come at me.

Anyway, even if you don't agree with my infallible and omnipotent knowledge of RPG design, you might enjoy snagging a few of the series' biggest games at a heavily discounted price.

We predicted last week that, with Summer Game Fest season upon us, we'd be seeing an uptick in the number of cool-looking new games that, whoops, were made with AI. Is the new Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3), announced today during the Nintendo Direct showcase, one of them? To paraphrase the famous Ancient Aliens meme, I'm not saying the answer is yes, but it's yes.

The potential use of AI was once again given away by funky fingers, in this case on official artwork featuring the great American avatar Donald Duck. As noted by Tracker_TD on Bluesky, the second-best waterfowl maniac in animation history (I'm a Daffy man, myself) has three fingers on his right hand, but four on his left—plus a thumb in both cases. There's really no missing it.

that KH Switch collection pack thing sure has some interesting cover artinteresting choice to give Donald a mismatched number of fingers on each hand, and a beak that absorbs into itself

— @tracker-td.bsky.social (@tracker-td.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:32:10.415Z

A number of press images accompanying the announcement have Donald's four-fingered hand covered, but it's clearly visible in an image posted by the official Kingdom Hearts account on X, and in a different piece of key art available on the Square Enix website—it's 100% official, extra finger and all.

There are no other cases of extra (or missing) fingers in the image that I've noticed, but I do wonder what exactly is going on with—to quote PC Gamer wordsmith Morgan Park's reaction—"Sora's whack-ass hand." Is that normal? At least it's got the right number of fingers, I guess.

I've never been very good at picking out telltale signs of generative AI in promotional images, but those Donald fingers seem pretty egregious—and even more so when compared to this image posted in response to Tracker_TD's message, which looks very similar but contains the correct number of fingers.

Did they take this old 3D render and get AI to turn it into an "illustration"...?

— @cdrom.ca (@cdrom.ca.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.422Z

Interestingly, folks who are hip to the scene said the real evidence isn't in the obvious stuff, but in the backgrounds, which are also visibly off when you get in close. "It's always the backgrounds," jessarcade wrote. "It's detailed but lazy in a way that doesn't make sense for a human artist."

Oh my god just why

— @chrisscheidig.bsky.social (@chrisscheidig.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.254Z

Yeah, there's more. Some of the oddities could be explained by an artist in a rush, or just good old-fashioned sloppiness, but collectively? It's a lot.

Here is a post going around that is pointing out each of the signs that this is indeed AI

— @retrogameart.bsky.social (@retrogameart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.345Z

I'd say it's pretty certain that generative AI was put to use here, but at this point all we can really do is speculate. Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3) is coming to PC along with consoles, but Square Enix only announced it for the Microsoft Store—there's no listing on Steam, which is the only storefront that requires AI disclosure. I've reached out to Square Enix to ask about the use of generative AI in the new game, and will update when they apologize for it.

I had damn near forgotten that Square Enix was making Kingdom Hearts 4. I was starting to wonder if Square Enix had also forgotten Square Enix was making Kingdom Hearts 4. It's been total radio silence since the game's initial 2022 announcement—four long years with nothing but a three-minute reveal trailer to sustain the gaggle of eager fans (hi, it's me, I'm eager fans). Until now, that is.

The game made a very surprise appearance during today's Nintendo Direct, offering a brand-new 90-second trailer that'll hopefully keep me going for another four years. It's pretty in keeping thematically with the 2022 reveal—a gigantic heartless manifesting among skyscrapers in Quadratum (the Kingdom Hearts version of Tokyo, more specifically here Shibuya) while protagonist Sora does some of his classic airborne flips and tricks while flourishing his keyblade.

We get a wee glimpse of some of the cast, too—there's Strelitzia from one of the mobile games, who we saw in the first trailer, along with Organization XIII member Luxord. The most interesting appearance by far is who appears to be a young Xehanort, holding a comically busted umbrella over Sora.

At least I'm going to assume it's a young Xehanort, considering the art Tesutya Nomura drew earlier this year to commemorate the series' 24th anniversary has him in the exact same getup (with an umbrella that hasn't actively been mauled by a strong gust of wind).

I am still getting whiplash from seeing Sora in a more grounded setting compared to previous games—and I'm going to generously assume that the emptiness and slight crustiness of the setting is a Switch 2 thing, not a Kingdom Hearts 4 thing—but this tiny little glimpse of my clown-shoed boy spinning and flipping around enemies, and getting launched into the odd skyscraper here and there, has already gotten me incredibly giddy.

Unfortunately there's still not even a vague release window for this thing. But it's exciting to know that the game'll at least be on PC and console at the same time—the trailer uploaded to the Kingdom Hearts YouTube specifies that it'll be "multiplatform at launch" while listing Steam, Epic, and Xbox on PC alongside our console siblings.

I've always been deeply impressed by Final Fantasy 14's solo only challenge runner RathGames—who has been working through the MSQ on his lonesome. Or, as much as is possible given the circumstances. See, FF14 is an MMO, it's not meant to be done on your own, there are explicitly mechanics, encounters, damage checks that are designed for a full party of four to eight people.

Furthermore, RathGames refuses equipment from quest rewards, making most of his gear himself—the one time he's had to renege on his promise was within the Crystal Tower, in which he assembled a group of other solo-only challenge runners because the game quite literally wouldn't let him inside otherwise.

The other time he's technically broken the rule of the run was recently with Shadowbringers' Hades fight. Though I'll say he did so by the letter of the law, not in spirit. RathGames beat that duty with a second character, but he swapped between them by alt tabbing without any external programs, and he levelled that second character all the way through the MSQ a second time without help.

Alas, it didn't take long for RathGames to hit another wall—the Seat of Sacrifice, a battle that has a massive group-based check: Ultimate Crossover, wherein Elidibus throws a Limit Break 4 at the party. Usually, you need to counter this with a Limit Break 3 from a tank, but given RathGames doesn't have access to those, it wasn't looking good.

Thus once more came his alt character, Solo Savior, to the rescue. Rather than trying to out-DPS the fight so that Ultimate Crossover never triggers, RathGames instead showed up running two clients: One with his main as a Blue Mage, and his alt as a Sage—a healer.

Blue Mages are a 'limited job' with a bunch of gamebreaking spells and, as such, aren't usually permitted in group content (but viable via an unrestricted party). They can obtain an ability called Self-destruct, which does what it says on the tin. Rath waited until Elidibus began casting Ultimate Crossover, had his Blue Mage main blow themselves up, and raised them with his Sage.

Because raises in Final Fantasy 14 have a grace period of one minute, and a brief invulnerability window after the target's resurrected, Rath was able to skip the mechanic entirely by timing his main's acceptance of the raise spell, being either in the raise animation or invulnerable for the oncoming damage.

He only had to do this once, mind, given the fight gives you a checkpoint afterwards—but still, the amount of preparation needed is immense, and it's not as though the rest of the fight was a cakewalk, either.

What ensues is a delicate dance where Rath has to use the Blue Mage's diamondback spell to avoid certain death, occasionally raising his sage alt (who spends most of the fight dead) to deal with other mechanics, usually causing them to immediately die afterwards while his Blue Mage lives on.

It's another incredible feat, and one that took multiple arduous streams just to theorycraft and tackle. Rath's determination in the face of absurd, self-inflicted (a little worryingly so) odds continues to be an inspiration.

I knew something had to give, but I never realized just how fatigued I was with Final Fantasy 14's current state until I walked out of the Anaheim Convention Center last month after Fan Fest. Years of rigid adherence to aging systems and its predictable patch structure were finally catching up to me. My favorite game was stagnating, and I was burned out.

I felt it, my friends felt it, and the community certainly felt it. But I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to Final Fantasy 14, so I'm not that surprised I left Fan Fest reinvigorated and ready to make the MMO part of my daily routine again. I am, however, quite surprised to have so much company when I log in now. Company that's in good spirits, at that. The event seems like it really charmed the playerbase, and I'm feeling better about the path to a new expansion.

In the month since Evercold's reveal, the change in community sentiment is palpable. Everyone has an added pep in their step. The empty player houses in my neighborhood are suddenly occupied, I see tons of sprouts in mismatched gear discovering new zones for the first time, and it doesn't take my roulettes three to four business days to pop. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I left Anaheim, but it certainly wasn't this.

Time with my Free Company has really made it clear there's a change in attitudes, too. My Eorzean besties are all back to in-game grinds and staying chatty—no more hopping on just to quietly do a few chores before logging out. They're playing the MMO like it's an MMO, socializing with other players in ways I haven't seen since Dawntrail's launch.

It's exciting to see, but I keep asking myself why it's sticking now. What was it about the Evercold keynote and subsequent patch that rekindled some of that FF14 magic? I know there's the normal uptick in players after a big announcement or even just a regular patch, but this time around it feels a little healthier than the usual flash-in-the-pan.

Nothing promised in Evercold has meaningfully changed the game yet, but when Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida took to the stage for this year's first Fan Festival, it felt like we were clearing the air after a falling out. It's what my aggressively southern roots would call a "come-to-Jesus" talk—it's the type of chat you have when you know you really need to level with someone before things get worse. They don't always feel great when you're in the thick of it, but you at least walk away with realigned expectations and a new direction.

That's how I felt leaving this year's Fan Fest. I showed up with my list of frustrations, and Creative Studio 3 brought an actual plan to address them. We both went into the event knowing there was a problem, and (hopefully) left on the same page.

Yoshida's North American Fan Festival presentation is typically limited to a short trailer reveal, a handful of new zone screenshots, and vague promises. Our event is the kickoff, and that's (usually) fine. But the playerbase has undoubtedly grown more restless over the last couple of years, and I reckon FF14's big boss showing up with nothing on the real meat of the expansion wouldn't cut it this time.

So I can really appreciate that Yoshida (and later, Mr. Prime) rolled into that convention hall ready to really speak to what must be one of Evercold's biggest changes, Evolved Mode. It's a major overhaul to the combat system that seems more significant than any of its previous evolutions, and not the type of announcement I was expecting at the North American event.

Evolved Mode feels like the result of a little soul searching at Creative Studio 3—real evidence that our grievances have been heard and understood. They've killed the two-minute meta, decided everyone gets a limit break, and even doubled down on more combo actions. We haven't seen it out in the wild, so it's hard to say if it'll fix anything, but I'm too excited by the idea of Final Fantasy 14 braving significant change to care about all the ways it could go horribly wrong.

And, had I not been surrounded by thousands of other people, I would've done cartwheels around the room when they revealed plans to implement a regional Party Finder system before Evercold. I know I cheered louder than that for anything else because I got the "you're being too much right now" jab from a friend, but the North American Party Finder situation is miserable if you like ranked PvP, raiding, and just being on your home server.

I can't say I'm completely sold on what I saw. Much like my colleague and fellow FF14 sicko, Mollie, I'm worried Evercold won't keep all of its promises, but what I really need to see is the MMO at least trying to make good on them.

That's really all there is to it. I would rather see the game fail at new experiments instead of slowly suffocating in the stagnation of current combat metas or dead open worlds, and that's where a lot of us seem to be at. I don't know if Evolved Mode, regional Party Finder, or anything else announced at Fan Fest will be the thing to reinvigorate Final Fantasy 14, but I know its current paint-by-numbers approach isn't it, either.

I went home feeling a little lighter, primed to be more receptive to the 7.5 patch that launched just days after Fan Fest. It wasn't particularly special now that I look back on it, and I was mostly excited by its quality of life changes, but the little things are easier to appreciate as some of that goodwill returns to Eorzea.

Final Fantasy 11 is a seasoned MMO with grey in its beard, at this point—not entirely unheard of in the industry (World of Warcraft itself is over two decades old), but absolutely in its veteran years. I mean, this is a game that originally came out on the Playstation 2 as well as PCs.

Still, it's trucking along quite nicely. That's per a Famitsu interview (translated here by Automaton) with Yoji Fujito, the director and producer of FF11.

There've been some events that the developer says were expected to give a player bump—such as the crossover raid series with Final Fantasy 14, Echoes of Vana'diel, as well as a Welcome Back campaign and giveaways. Fujito expected things to even out, but the new playerbase has, to his surprise, kept steady:

"Overall, the player count remained stable at a high level, and we never saw the kind of sharp decline we had anticipated, so honestly, the outcome exceeded our expectations and came as a surprise."

That doesn't mean the team isn't facing problems, though. For one, FF11 is encountering a similar problem to Old School RuneScape, wherein the developer is running out of IDs for in-game areas, requiring large systems architecture changes to accommodate new expansions (the following quote's been machine translated):

"However, we know that we can free up a few more ID slots if we are creative, so we are investigating how we can make that work. If we can make it work, adding a new area will not be impossible … Depending on the results, I have a feeling that some kind of project may start moving forward."

The idea of fleshing out FF11 with full-blooded expansions is exciting to me—not because I've played the MMO, but because I'm excited about MMO conservation in general. I think these games are important, and I always feel a sad kind of melancholy when I see an old titan diminish and go into the west. Especially since nobody's really making them anymore.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't the only Final Fantasy-related MMO. Its ancient ancestor, Final Fantasy 11, which released all the way back in 2002 before World of Warcraft reshaped the landscape for massively multiplayer games, is still trucking along. It's not exactly bustling next to the likes of FF14, Guild Wars 2, and WoW, but it occasionally attracts so much activity its dusty old servers buckle.

It seems like Square Enix wants to bring the game, if one small step at a time, into the current decade as well. Its website just got a shiny overhaul, and now it looks like something from 15 years ago rather than 25 years ago. Just to be clear, you still have to wrangle the abysmal and esoteric PlayOnline installer to get the game running; this is just a fresh coat of paint for the web.

It's part of the game's 24th anniversary celebrations, which you can read about in more detail in a blog post on the new site. The post talks about some in-game festivities as well as new features, like the ability to replay story missions. It also links to a nifty FF11-themed music video which looks like the opening credits to an anime that doesn't exist.

"The fact that the game has continued to thrive for so long is due to the tremendous support it has received from all of you adventurers out there and the 'culture' you have created around the world of Vana'diel," wrote game director Yoji Fujito in the post. "The game's success has forced us to update our long-term goals for the project yet again … the entire FFXI team will be hard at work to further solidify the game's foundation and help it reach its 30th anniversary."

It certainly sounds like more is on the horizon for the classic MMO. A livestream from Square Enix reportedly shared another tidbit of news yesterday, though I can't verify it myself as the stream is in Japanese. Reddit user hikiri translated the stream's FF11-related info in a post, with the headliner being that the game's 14-day free trial limit will no longer be time limited and will allow players to progress to level 75. "The areas are limited like normal, but you'll be able to play forever at level 75 on the trial in the OG zones," the post reads.

In any case, it's remarkable to see such an old MMO with a more popular sequel by the same company continue to draw in players and get substantial updates. With some MMOs of FF11's tenure, you're lucky to find a decent private server that isn't a cease and desist away from oblivion.

Final Fantasy 14 has sent my unintimidating, run-of-the-mill-looking cat girl on all manner of world-saving missions. She's squared up with a dying god on the moon, fist fought an alien super weapon, and even confronted the literal embodiment of nihilism at the ends of the universe. My girl has been through a lot, but the MMO is pretty good at making me feel like there's no challenge I can't rise to meet.

Well, that is until you give her a fishing rod. For a cat person, my little Warrior of Light absolutely sucks with a rod and tackle box. You would think the hero of the universe could do a little black magic and complete her fishing log, but nah. I haven't even caught fish that Final Fantasy 14 added over a decade ago. It's that dire.

So I'm not joking when I say that nothing, and I mean nothing, in Final Fantasy 14 intimidates me in the same ways some of its strictest fishing challenges do. I don't care how hard the raid is or what new world-destroying evil awaits in the next expansion; the Bobgoblin Bass is enemy number one forever and always.

As for the title of enemy number two, I'm awarding that to the Purse of Riches.

Like so much of the ultra-rare aquatic life in Final Fantasy 14, both fish are finicky bastards that only nibble on your reel under specific environmental conditions. For the Bobgoblin, you have to wait for the MMO's weather system to bless an old Heavensward map with a very specific weather pattern. Then it's all got to happen within a certain in-game time window.

Before Square Enix updated Fish Eyes—an ability that removes time requirements from rare fish in old expansions—you had to wait for the stars to align in a brief five-minute window every few days, weeks, or sometimes even a month. The opportunity could arise at any time, even at 3 am on a Wednesday night, because the fish don't care if you have to wake up for work in a few hours. Happen to sleep in and miss it? Tough. Your next chance is in another five-minute window a month from now.

Fruity Snacks, one of the MMO's resident angler experts, has even documented the freshwater terror's downtime on X, but now there's another sea creature driving FF14's bravest players mad. It's my aforementioned enemy number two, the Purse of Riches. If you don't catch the elusive guppy by August 1, you'll have to wait 92 days before you can try (and possibly fail) to catch it during another short window. Then it's back to waiting.

Maybe I wouldn't have even bothered with this particular challenge right now had it not been for a post on X from Mr Happy, who blessedly warned players about the upcoming drought in its availability window, but I'm back on my bullshit (achievement hunting in Final Fantasy 14), and need to make a dent in my long-neglected fishing log.

"Getting a house, fishing and finding enough inventory for hoarding glam," wrote Happy in a response to another player. "These challenges scare hardcore FFXIV players."

The PSA was much appreciated, but his follow up is what really rekindled my reluctant interest in the MMO's most cursed job. Fishing may seem like one of those things snubbed as "casual" for whatever reason, but he's got the right read of it. I've spent weeks and months throwing myself at Ultimate raids, Blue Mage challenges, and the no-death dungeon runs of Criterion Savage, but I'm still too intimidated by these soul-crushing spawn windows to get serious about fishing for more than a day.

I say that, but here I am, writing this just after failing to catch the Purse again, and I'll be waiting in this same spot for its next spawn window in 11 days. Remind me to bring more than 10 pieces of bait next time. That was more embarrassing than any goofy raid death.

Naoki Yoshida's opening keynote at April's North American Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival made one thing clear: the team is serious about change. Or at least, it appears to be. Especially, for a studio that's dug its heels in the sand about any sort of drastic change in the past half-decade or so.

For upcoming expansion Evercold, abating the stagnation that's permeated the MMO since 2022 (even longer than that, some may argue), seems to be Creative Studio 3's number one priority. An entirely new combat system that promises to highlight job individuality and skill expression, changes to gearing to make it less unfriendly to anyone hoping to play more than one job in savage or ultimate raids, and deprioritising daily tasks to give players more flexibility to complete their in-game goals week-to-week.

Those are all genuinely great things that I am incredibly excited to see manifested in Evercold. But I can't help but carry that eager anticipation with a side of cautiousness. A wariness of a company who has been so reluctant to tweak even the tiniest cog in its core setup at the risk of upsetting the balance. Of creating a little more friction for the sake of a more interesting experience.

Because I so desperately want these changes to spark bigger overhauls. These are all well and dandy, but if we can still look at a two-year life cycle for an expansion and know exactly what to expect—an alliance raid on the .1, .3, and .5 patches, savage raids on the .0, .2, and .4 patches, etc etc—then I don't know how much that staleness will actually fade away.

I want Evercold to be the expansion of risk-taking. Of experimentation. I never expect Creative Studio 3 to return to the puzzles and mazes of A Realm Reborn's dungeons, but I crave more than the whole "two packs of trash mobs into boss" pattern that persists across all of them. More opportunities to dictate the pace and flex those tank mitigations and healing spells, more enemy varieties that do more than the odd auto attack, bosses that don't automatically open every goddamn fight with a raidwide attack.

I really think the studio has hit its stride with designing higher-difficulty fights in Dawntrail—the Arcadion savage raids are some of the best the game has ever seen. And while I haven't been a fan of every extreme fight, they've all stood out to me for different reasons. Valigarmanda in particular stands strong as one of the coolest trials with its incredible power fantasy tank busters mid-fight. Putting more of that pizzazz into designing its story-difficulty dungeons would go a helluva long way.

Final Fantasy 14's overworld has also been criminally underutilised for years now, and Evercold is the perfect time to return its relevance. I don't want its use to remain solely on lightning-fast hunt trains and FATEs that stand idle and undefeated mere months after an expansion's launch—which are also two things that require being in non-cross-world parties to make them viable, something which isn't possible if you're utilising the Party Finder function. Which is also usually the perfect time to actually make use of the overworld, since Party Finder locks you out of doing any instanced stuff like dungeons or field operation zones in the meantime.

Having "evolved" jobs and quality-of-life changes is great, but it means very little if the ways to put them into practice remain the same as they have done for a half-dozen years and a handful of expansions. I don't want Creative Studio 3 to abandon its core identity entirely—I'm not in complete agreement with folks who think fight design should veer into WoW's more reactionary direction—but it doesn't have to.

It just needs to make Final Fantasy 14 a more dynamic, engaging world to exist in once more. I'm sure we'll discover more about how it plans to do that during July's European Fan Festival. I'm just sincerely hoping that Creative Studio 3 doesn't let its fresh new ideas sit in stagnant water.

I've always loved dissecting song lyrics, but doing that for videogame music always feels like a coin flip. I do find that, more than anywhere else, videogame music is absolutely rife with nonsense lines. Take this one from raid boss Sugar Riot in Final Fantasy 14: "Now we come to orange / Gotta rhyme something with orange / 'Cept that nothing rhymes with orange / Think that I'll just forget 'bout orange."

Erm, yeah. A little goofy and sorta thematic with her whole graffiti artist shtick, but the lyrics still give me insane whiplash every single time I hear them. Then there's your edgy stuff, like Devil May Cry's Devil Trigger: "All of these thoughts runnin' through my head / Arm on fire, veins burnin' red / Frustration is gettin' bigger / Bang, bang, bang, pull my Devil Trigger." Does the song go hard? Yes it does, but do I also think its lyrics are ridiculous? I absolutely do.

And finally, my personal candidate for worst videogame lyrics has to be the opening song for Dead Island with Who Do You Voodoo? I almost have to commend just how closely the song toes the line between terrible and hilariously good. Seriously, I don't know any other song that could have gotten away with lyrics like: "Handful of fingertips, toss 'em up like confetti / Stable of corpse bitches, I'm a pimp of the dead." Very much a product of its time, I fear.

That doesn't mean all videogame vocal music sounds like it was written with a heavy dose of teen angst, of course. Portal's Still Alive is by far one of my favourite tracks ever penned for a game—written from the perspective of GLaDOS as she writes her assessment report. It plays as the credits roll with lines like: "Now these points of data make a beautiful line / And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time / So I'm glad I got burned, think of all the things we learned / For the people who are still alive."

It's the perfect blend of Portal's slightly dark humour without veering into total cringe or silliness, while also giving players a glimpse into the sadistic robot's actual fate.

I'm also a huge fan of Nier: Automata's Weight of the World—another end credits song—which people theorise to actually be from different characters' perspectives depending on which language you listen to it in. As someone who regularly bumps the English version, I adore the chorus: "Cause we're gonna shout it loud / Even if our words seem meaningless / It's like I'm carrying the weight of the world." It's incredibly befitting of the journey 2B undertakes throughout the game, and the best culmination of that game's gripping narrative you could ask for.

But what about you? Is there a videogame lyric that's proper stuck with you—either for being powerful and impactful, or for being so utterly ridiculous that you have to wonder what was going through the writer's head when they penned it? Be sure to drop a comment below with the lyric and which game it's from.

MMOs stop being games where you go kill mobs for XP and chase fat loot when you discover player housing. Once that bug nips you, they become 3D diorama creation software with a bunch of useless RPG crap tacked on for a few days, or maybe forever, depending on your capacity for rotating couches. I've never been so lost in the sauce that I've recreated entire zones from other games inside an MMO's player housing feature, but then again, I'm just not built for this like X user Miya Shikhu.

Shikhu shared their latest creation in a post on X Wednesday, and it's an uncannily good recreation of the shelter from hack 'em up third person shooter Pragmata. If you haven't played that game, the shelter is a hub you return to between checkpoints to upgrade your stats and equip new build items. It's got a sleek, futuristic aesthetic and walls of computer screens, all of which have been approximated using Final Fantasy 14's housing props.

"I was playing a different game for a while, but I've come back to FF14," said Shikhu in the post (via X's machine translation). "Everkeep-style furniture is the best! Increased placement limit is the best!"

Based on Shikhu's posts, it sounds like the Everkeep Sofa and similar items are what make this particular illusion tick. Lay out enough white sofas in close proximity and it looks a bit like sci-fi paneling: "The floor couches fit the space perfectly, don’t they? I really like how they turned out," Shikhu said in a reply on the same thread. The players running around in cosplay as Hugh and Diana make for a nice touch that makes the scene unmistakable.

Another part of what makes this work is a recent update which increased the number of furniture items that can be on-screen simultaneously. If MMO player housing has taught me anything, it's that players will continue to cook up projects that boggle the mind, like Dust 2 in World of Warcraft, for as long as these games exist.

The last few times Square Enix has unveiled the name of a new Final Fantasy 14 expansion, I've wondered whether the team plans to stick to its love for a good compound word. As it turns out, the answer is "yes" every time: Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Endwalker, Dawntrail, and now the upcoming Evercold.

But as it turns out, director and producer Naoki Yoshida has tried to break that pattern a few times. At least, if his list of rejected expansion names is anything to go by. During a Q&A at the North American Fan Festival in April, Yoshida divulged what Evercold and expansions of Final Fantasy 14 past could have actually been named.

"When we were trying to come up with a name for what became Stormblood, one of the names that came up was Rebellion," Yoshida told press via a translator. "But unfortunately that was rejected for various reasons, including legal reasons, so we couldn't choose that one. It was already taken."

I wonder whether that was studio Rebellion who got in the way of making that name a reality—you could certainly argue that both a videogame developer and a game called Rebellion could cause some confusion. It's also the name of a game on Steam as well as a short-lived television series, as I'm discovering. Really, it could be anything, but I'm glad Yoshida and the team weren't able to go through with it as I think Stormblood sounds a lot neater.

But what about other expansions? Well, for Shadowbringers the name Darkbringer was toyed with but ultimately rejected—once again, very pleased about that—while an attempt to break the compound curse was made again during Endwalker when the name World's End was pitched, "but obviously that was not possible either." A little clash with Edgar Wright's movie of the same name, perhaps?

When it comes to binned candidates for Evercold, I actually quite like the title: Absolute Zero. Yoshida said he "really wanted to go" with it, even going so far as to imagine what the expansion's logo would look like with that name, but it was once again nixed. You can't escape the compound names, Yoshida.

He goes on to say that he thought a lot about the different meanings of things or people icing over—from the theory that our humble planet was once entirely frozen over, to even the way that a person's heart can metaphorically freeze over, causing them to grow cold and distant.

"So with this expansion, the Warriors of Light will be encountering many instances where various different ice that they would either melt or even have to destroy to move forward and explore and become that sort of wanderer," Yoshida said. "And I hope that the players will experience and enjoy that journey."

As for when the whole idea for Evercold was conjured up, Yoshida said he began to put the wheels in motion approximately two months after Dawntrail released. "But of course, I do have a general idea of what direction I want to take. The overall scenario or saga, and so it's more like narrowing down, determining, pinpointing what the next theme would be."

Final Fantasy 14 has some weird bosses. In fact, some of the hardest encounters in the game are against enemies like his cobbled-together majesty, Perfect Alexander, and then whatever awaits us in Kefka's ultimate-tier clown show when it launches this summer, but they're all old news as far as I'm concerned. The real FF14 sickos are all about a new dungeon boss, Chort. He lives in the Clyteum.

Chort—a patch 7.5 boss with zero spoken lines who violently rolls around the arena a few times before he's slain for a pair of gloves—is the new weird little (big) guy players are obsessed with. We've only known Chort for about a week, and his popularity rivals last month's Evercold reveal. I'm only sort of kidding, but look at this guy.

He's of no major significance to the plot, and he doesn't drop anything particularly good, but he's beloved by all for his clearly seasoned battle posture—just look at that wide stance, ain't no one tipping him over—and brick house build. He's also quite the speedy boy, and has a whole mechanic where you've got to dodge him as he flings himself around the arena.

Honestly, I think Chort belongs in FF14's wrestling-themed raid series, the Arcadion, not the Clyteum. And no, Clyteum isn't a typo either. That's a real Final Fantasy 14 dungeon name. There's a lot going on in Patch 7.5, okay?

A fixation with weird little guys isn't a new FF14 phenomenon; the MMORPG is full of them. Last year, we had this nameless, glitched deer roaming the Coerthas Western Highlands, and before that, there was Dawntrail's no-thoughts-behind-those-eyes baby Mamool Ja and Endwalker's son with every disease. Now we have Chort, and once again the community hasn't let me down. They're Chort posting through it all.

Comment from r/ffxiv

"Moments like this are why I play this game and love this community," a Reddit comment reads. "I gave chort some jorts," another user wrote on X, attaching an incredible screenshot of Chort wearing jorts. "Chort appreciation post, do you appreciate Chort?" another player asked on Bluesky.

Then there's this Chort fancam. Nothing tops the Chort fancam. It's looping on my second monitor as I write this.

#7.5spoilers Chort Fancam

— @brutejussy.etheirys.social (@brutejussy.etheirys.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-05T22:18:01.173Z

Even the Final Fantasy 14 official social media account has joined in, simply posting "Chort," because what else is there to say, really? "They don't even know Chort is the word for devil in many Slavic languages," reads another meme posted on X. "Very fitting name for a voidsent fought in a northern region."

I guess that explains this other Chort from The Witcher 3, but I think Final Fantasy 14's Chort could take him. That guy is just a silly goat (cow?) baby, he's no match for my Chort son from the Void. Maybe they can duke it out 1v1-style, Chort versus Chort.

Final Fantasy 14's Arcadion raid series has been a highlight of Dawntrail for me. All 12 fights have been resplendent with impeccable vibes and a distinct identity thanks to Creative Studio 3 going all-in on the wrestling theme.

With a cast of colourful fighters to contend with, giving each one their own bespoke theme song was the correct choice. It's not something the developer always does when it comes to the eight-player raids—sometimes a four-fight tier (five if you count any savage-difficulty second phases), will only have two or three songs apiece, sometimes sharing a more overarching theme than being tailor-made for the opponent in question.

One of my favourite songs to come out of this raid series is by far Sinister. It's the theme for Vamp Fatale—the first fight in the final tier—a seductress of a competitor whose fighting form consists of bat wings, fishnets, and a tight leather jacket. Before I go face-to-face with her, she literally tells me: "You've been a naughty, naughty girl. And I'm going to give you the punishment you deserve." Gulp.

It's no surprise, then, that her lyrics have "dominatrix" written all over them:

• I'm sinister, under your skin / In lace and leather
• Going hard, going soft, ain't no limits here
• Free for all, consensual, I thought I made it clear
• Ready or not, bottom or top, what you got in mind?
• I don't hear no safeword, honey

For localisation head and lyricist Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, there was only one place he could venture to in order to concoct these lyrics: the BDSM page on Wikipedia.

During the North American Fan Festival, Fox ran a panel around the work that goes behind creating lyrics for Final Fantasy 14. Some awkward moments involving AI pictures aside, it was a ridiculously interesting insight into how many of these songs get made, especially as someone who is deeply in love with this game's music.

Fox says a lot of time crafting lyrics for a song might just involve reading some quest dialogue or taking a look at how the gameplay for the encounter will play out, but "a lot of times it'll involve research on subjects I'm not familiar with."

This is where Fox specifically highlights the Arcadion raids: "Deep dives into pro wrestling, I had to do a lot of research on surfing which was a lot of fun," he said, referencing the Red Hot and Deep Blue fight in the Heavyweight tier.

"And then of course there's Sinister for Vamp Fatale's theme. And the scenario writer [Yuki Kimura], he made it crystal clear in his document that the theme behind this character was BDSM. So of course I go to the internet to study it out, I had to go to Wikipedia."

This is when Koji's presentation throws up a giant screenshot of the BDSM Wikipedia page which, unsurprisingly, is almost entirely redacted save for the words "and ball" before going one step further and redacting the ball, too. "While I appreciate the detail to which Wikipedia describes this subject, I could've used a heads up before going there," he joked to the audience.

"I wanted to do something provocative, because that's what [Kimura] wanted. But I also wanted to be respectful to the BDSM community so I didn't want to come from a place of stereotypes. I wanted to do my research, so I did ample research. So much research."

After squeezing in a "hole" joke (I'll allow it), Koji noted that much of this research was taking place in the office which lead to a lot of "judgemental scowls" from people walking past his booth, but joked that it also led to a handful of sly wink-wink nudge-nudge smirks from his coworkers.

Jokes, japes, and a very dad-humour presentation aside, it was interesting to know the ins and outs of how some of this stuff gets cooked up. I suppose I hadn't thought much about the research that would go into crafting a theme song around a woman who keeps calling me a naughty girl.

As someone who has also had to send some diabolical access requests to IT for some wildly NSFW sites (all research for news, I promise), I can definitely relate to Koji's awkward disposition. Will I now be thinking about the BDSM Wikipedia page every time I have to fight Vamp Fatale? Definitely, but to be fair it's hard not to when you listen to the song in its entirety.

I'm breaking my routine, here—typically, when I sit down to write Terminally Online, I'll alternate between a hot take or an interview and something a little more light-hearted, like a poll or a discussion. This week, though, you're getting two in a row, because recent subjects I've covered have me a little bummed out.

Maybe it's my allergies acting up, or a remnant of winter blues, or the fact everything feels just a little bit dire in the world at the moment, but I'm kinda bummed out about the state of MMOs, man. And it's not because of the experience of actually playing them, mind. There are a lot of great offerings out there right now (peep our best MMOs list).

Sure, WoW's having a bit of a tizzy right now, but the bones of Midnight are good and will continue to be so once Blizzard's gotten its act together. The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy 14, and Guild Wars 2 are all some degree of decent. Warframe's doing its own thing and Fallout 76 is good now.

If you want a taste of retro, you can hop back to several points in WoW's history via Classic, check out the still-stellar City of Heroes, or mess about in Old School Runescape. There are even some halfway decent indie MMOs making strides.

But if you want new MMOs to get excited about, you're out of luck. We literally described 2025 as an MMO massacre, because so many work-in-progress games were cancelled, and some younger blood shut down too soon after going live. Rest in peace, New World—as for Project Blackbird, we hardly knew ye.

Which leaves you and me stuck with the old guard. Ah, jeez. On second thought, maybe this is all just because I'm aging into my 30s and getting a proper sense of the passage of time.

Everything changes, and it has to

There's a sort of monkey's paw curse that happens when you're invested in an MMO—if you get particularly taken, the rewards are vast. These are sprawling, giant worlds filled with lovely communities that can absorb you for years at a time, giving you friendships and companions who can eventually become real-life pals.

But they're also in a constant state of flux. If I talk to a friend about a game I adore, generally speaking, I can go ahead and play it. If it's really old, maybe that's not a sure thing—but if I can get it to run, I can head back into those halcyon days without fear of things being different.

Not so for the MMO. Every two to three years, the game you love will change—and not always for the better. WoW's the biggest example of this, dipping in and out of controversy and catastrophic design like it's about to do the Hokey Pokey, turn itself around, and show us what it's all about. Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, Battle for Azeroth bad, Dragonflight good, and so on.

Sometimes not changing is a problem, too. Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and Endwalker made me cry dozens of times—but as a game, the stagnation has eaten at me terribly, to the point where Evercold's job shake-up feels like the light at the end of a tunnel.

And hey, let's say you boot up something like World of Warcraft: Classic for a hit of liquid nostalgia: Too bad, things are different here, too. Ragnaros dies in a matter of days, rather than months. The game has been optimised into something different, changed by the hands that hold it.

When I say loving an MMO is an exercise in frustration, this is what I mean. If there are no new games to go to, then you're either in a cycle of being happy with your lot and waiting for the other shoe to drop, or grappling with update-borne depression and anxiety that your game's on the decline. If you've seen it happen enough times, it might drag you out of love with a game entirely.

Nothing new can stay

Sometimes it all ends in tears: City of Heroes, Star Wars: Galaxies, Wildstar, Warhammer Online—nothing lasts forever. Maybe it'll take another decade or two, but there'll be a time when even Blizzard closes its doors for good, sure as death and taxes.

The upshot is that sometimes these games make their way into good hands. City of Heroes: Homecoming is on my recommendations list because it's pretty much in the best state it's ever been in—divorced from microtransactions and the need for profit, powered by donations and enthusiasm.

But there is this eerie sense that we MMO players are all sort of just in a retirement home waiting for the next one to pop off. Oh, sure, occasionally a game gets a golden era—sometimes bingo night slaps—but that doesn't change the fact we're all sitting here with dentures and knitted blankets.

How'd we get here? Well, a couple of reasons: Firstly, shareholders. While game cancellations have always been a thing, MMOs take a heck of a long time to make, and the hunger for quarterly growth makes that a terrible proposition for a late-stage capitalist system that only cares about the incline on a graph somewhere.

And that's not just my take. Listen to Matt Firor, steward of the trashed Project Blackbird this week, speaking to YouTuber MinnMax: "They want a business they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount—and this isn't [just] Xbox, this is all public companies, they want reliable, forecastable business."

Nothing described here works very well in the messy sprawl of an MMO. An MMO has ups and downs, busts and booms, and requires consistent, deliberate love to flourish. Instead what we get are $75 housing bundles chasing that sweet, sweet short-term payout, and seasons. Because you can align seasons with quarters, and a little bit of excitement probably looks great on the balance sheets.

And hey, seasons aren't inherently a bad thing—except for when you can't keep up. The price you pay for constant evolution is, inevitably, the embracing of instability. And the MMO genre writ large could really use a bit more stability right now.

Moving on

I really would love to be proven wrong. Maybe Riot's new MMO comes out of nowhere and ushers us all into a second golden age—after all, these trends come in waves. Just as WoW brought on its own flood of imitators, Fortnite begat more… well, Fortnites. We shifted from MMOs to battle royales to extraction shooters. There's every chance the pendulum comes back again.

But right now, in 2026? I feel a bit of vertigo for a genre I deeply adore. A lot of my favourite games will probably make it through the next decade, sure—but certainly not forever. And if there's no-one there to pick up the torch (and 2025 saw an entire generation of prospective MMOs wither on the vine), what happens then?

I don't really have an answer that isn't just a bummer, and hey—there are certainly bigger ills to worry about in this world than 'my favourite kind of game doesn't exist anymore'. But I'd still rather it did, because MMOs are lovely. I've made some of the most enduring friendships of my life in them, and I want that experience for future generations. Assuming we're not back in the stone age by then, or technofascist serfs, or something.

But this is my hope: If someone's still writing this column when I'm fifty, they won't be forced to pick a different genre to write about.

I've always felt inventory space was the most valuable thing in Final Fantasy 14, and in the wake of patch 7.5, that's never been clearer for packrat players like me. I'm sure you know the type—those of us who can't stop shoving ceaseless amounts of garbage we know damn well we'll never use into precious, limited retainer storage.

My army of retainers can hardly keep more than a handful of free inventory slots available at any given time, but thanks to the 7.5 update, that's less of a problem. Now, I can at least unburden my one item mule that was drowning in thousands of multicolored dye pots I totally, most definitely, absolutely needed. You know, just in case.

That's right, Final Fantasy 14 has blessed the glamour and housing sickos again with another space-saving upgrade. You can finally consolidate all of those ten million dyes into just a few item slots by speaking to your local Calamity Salvager. Thank the Twelve.

Well, I say a few, but my collection didn't consolidate neatly into one stack of the new Standard Spectrum Dye. I exceeded that, thanks to my nasty what-if-I-need-this-later habit, and so I have five stacks of the standard color. That's still better than the 85 inventory slots they originally occupied, mind you, so I'm not complaining. If you're tight on inventory space, I recommend you beeline it to the nearest Calamity Salvager and do the same.

Find the Calamity Salvager and reclaim your inventory space

It's not a complicated process to trade in all of your old dye in FF14 and free up some space. Just speak to the Calamity Salvager in any of the three starting cities and select 'Dye Exchange' to consolidate your collection of pigments.

All it takes is a single dye from one of the three new consolidated items to access the dozens of color options you're used to. If you've collected a little of every color, then that's 105 inventory slots consolidated into three.

Calamity Salvager locations for exchanging old dye

• Old Gridania (X:10.0, Y:8.4)
• Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks (X:11.4, Y:14.4)
• Ul'dah - Steps of Thal (X:12.6, Y:13.1)

New dye consolidation items

• Standard Spectrum Dye - Obtained from any of the 85 common dyes that were crafted, bought, or rewarded through questing
• Wide Spectrum #1 Dye - Obtained from any of the nine dyes unlocked in special side content like Ishgardian Restoration, Island Sanctuary, or Cosmic Exploration
• Wide Spectrum #2 Dye - Restricted to the 11 dyes obtained in Dawntrail's special crafting and gathering content, Cosmic Exploration

You can no longer buy the vast majority of classic colors, so you won't find those high-value pigments like Dragoon Blue or Gunmetal Black in The Firmament or Island Sanctuary. Instead, FF14 has replaced 20 pots of dye with just two items, the Wide Spectrum #1 Dye and Wide Spectrum #2 Dye. You can sell both of the consolidated items too, and with the patch day rush they're quite pricey on my server.

The extra expensive colors like General-purpose Pure White are still their own thing; you can't combine them into a singular space saver. The same goes for cash shop dye, which is kind of a bummer since I pick up a few colors whenever there's a sale, but I'm too elated about the other billion inventory slots I'm saving to be fussed.

Combine the new dye system with all of the dungeon gear I can finally toss into the glamour pile, and I've got tons of extra space for hoarding more crap I don't need. I should probably use this as a chance to cut a few retainer slots from my monthly FF14 subscription, but I know myself too well to pretend like that's going to happen. All of those item mules glamoured to look like Estinien will be over encumbered with junk by next week.

Patch 7.5 for Final Fantasy 14 landed today, and with it a strange appearance in the inventories for some players: an adorable otter backpack that reminds me of those weird Loungefly bags that seem to permeate every pop culture store in the UK.

It wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, and stuff randomly appearing without due notice is very rare. It also wasn't immediately obvious exactly what was triggering it to show up for some but not for others—I didn't have it, but my friend did.

After some tinkering around and dropping 140,000 gil on a Black Embroidered Parasol (and a handful of other registrable accessories), I saw the backpack instantly pop into my fashion accessories tab as if by magic. My friend surmised it was probably an accidental item ID overlap, and I now have to regrettably tell him that he's pretty smart since Square Enix has now confirmed this to be the case.

In a known issues post on the Lodestone, it goes into a little detail about what happened here. "Upon investigating this issue, we confirmed that during data configuration, the internal ID for the 'Senor Otter pack' was mistakenly set to the same internal ID as the 'Black Embroidered Parasol.' As a result, if you have already obtained the 'Black Embroidered Parasol,' you will also be able to use 'Senior Otter pack.'"

The post continues: "We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. However, we plan to correct the internal ID in an upcoming HOTFIX, so the feature will no longer be available at that time. We would appreciate it if the content could be reviewed again once the revised version has been officially published."

As for where the backpack is actually supposed to come from, that's less clear. Square Enix just calls it "a fashion accessory that is scheduled to be released as a content reward in the future." Could be treasure maps, could be an upcoming event. My money's on the annual Make it Rain event, personally.

Either way, prepare for a huge surge in the price of black parasols on the market board until a hotfix is out, I guess. Presumably the backpacks'll be taken away when the hotfix lands, so make the most of 'em.

When Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida took to the stage for his opening keynote at the North American Fan Festival, I knew change was coming. He'd been hinting that the next expansion—which we now know is called Evercold—would mark a new era of Final Fantasy 14.

Despite that, I still thought it was all going to be relatively safe. Creative Studio 3 has been trying little bits here and there throughout Dawntrail, but its core gameplay and patch cadence has remained staunchly the same.

I was wrong.

Yoshida's keynote felt like a recognition of the community's frustrations, one which culminated in the big announcement: Evercold will mark the end of the two-minute meta, and a brand-new combat style intended to return some flexibility to rotations and individuality that has suffered at the hands of homogenisation.

For those who aren't familiar with Final Fantasy 14's current combat, almost every job essentially revolves around one big button that's on a two-minute cooldown. It usually grants either a buff to themselves or to the party. In the vast majority of encounters, making sure everyone is aligning their big button (and pooling any resources to spend during its effect), is incredibly important.

It's a rather rigid choice that's led to Creative Studio 3 designing themselves into a hole. New jobs have to slot into this meta, and designing encounters has to be done with this two-minute synergy in mind.

But when January 2027 rolls around, these big buff abilities are going away and two combat styles are being introduced. Reborn mode, which is what we have now, and Evolved mode. New jobs will only have the latter mode available, which makes me think Reborn only exists because CS3 is too scared to force everyone over to the new style straight away.

I don't blame them either, especially after seeing a huge mix of opinions on Evolved's combat. It's condensing skills down—think putting your 1-2-3 rotation onto a single button or two abilities on one button that'll do different things depending on who you're targeting—which some are construing to mean "easier".

Will it be easier? Who knows. We did get a glimpse of the changes during a developer panel on the first day, with Yoshi-P showing off Bard, White Mage, and Paladin. I'm not completely sold on White Mage's damage ability, Glare, becoming an instant-cast, but the team said it was in the interest of placing greater emphasis on GCD healing, which is something I am sold on.

They've put a little pizzazz into Bard with some sweet aerial dodges and once again giving the job an ability you have to cast—something we haven't had since Heavensward. And while tank is by far my least played role, I was really liking what I saw with Paladin's kit.

I don't think it's going to be perfect, and I think there'll certainly be a lot of teething issues when Evercold first launches. It is not going to have everyone on board from the off. Hell, I don't even know if I'm going to like it. It's hard to say based on a snippet of something that's actively in development.

But honestly? It's so refreshing to see Creative Studio 3 trying. Despite Dawntrail being my absolute favourite expansion for encounter design, the stench of stagnation has been all over it. Relatively little has changed in terms of gameplay since Shadowbringers, and that exhaustion is being felt even harder than usual with increasing waits between major patches and a story that hasn't gripped the masses.

And for a long time, it felt like the developer had no intention of switching things up, either. But the keynote was clear: CS3 is listening, and it's making an earnest attempt at changing things. That alone is huge for a company so accustomed to digging in its heels and sticking to the status quo. And it's going to make me a little more open to whatever the future of Final Fantasy 14's combat looks like—better for the studio to try, fail, and work it out from there than to have never attempted to do things differently in the first place.

It's definitely understandable to be apprehensive about what Evolved combat and a game without a two-minute synergy looks like. While the game's story is what draws a lot of people in, the encounter design and combat is what keeps many of us around. But I'm so excited to see CS3 taking a stab at evolution—it's the very thing we've been asking for, after all.

Final Fantasy 14 is my go-to MMO, and just like anyone who has a primary MMO game, I complain about it a whole lot. I do this out of love, not grumpiness: I adore this game and I want it to do better. But like any relationship that's gone stale, I do have a list of complaints that I've talked about on this exact website.

Close to the top of said list? FF14's open world is beautiful but empty, utterly devoid of anything entertaining to do. Dawntrail, with its shiny graphics upgrade, completely hammered this home for me. Here are several gorgeous zones, meticulously designed, pleasant to be around—and I have almost no reason to go and visit them.

It's an enormous waste of potential, which is why I'm utterly delighted to hear that Square Enix is taking aim at it. During last weekend's fanfest, Square Enix proudly made promises to improve both "Public Fields" (that is, the zones you quest through during any expansion's main quest), and the quests themselves.

Director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) stated: "That means adding more dynamic events and more content for players to try out in each area, in order to truly master those areas. And again, with the majority of daily player activity being relegated to the duty finder, public fields can feel kind of lonely and underused—and that's our fault.

"We want to fix that, creating more exciting dynamic content." Quests will also be getting "quality of life" improvements and, one hopes, a little more in the way of excitement actually doing them.

This is, I cannot stress enough, music to my ears. Here's me back in April 2025 having a big old moan about public fields. Most notably, FATEs, which I call out as being dull as a slice of archon bread:

"Other non-hardcore content has suffered from a similar death of innovation. Take FATEs, for example. In Shadowbringers, there was a new rewards mechanic added, but FATEs in Dawntrail feel mostly the same as the FATEs of A Realm Reborn about a decade ago. You go to a place. You either AoE monsters or knock over bosses. You rinse and repeat."

Here's another complaining session I had on this website about society quests: "No, Square, spending 10 minutes every day skipping three NPCs worth of repeatable dialogue and maybe killing like, two things is not how world quests work. You've tried to convince me it is for three whole expansions and it hasn't worked. Please do something else, I beg of thee."

Basically, trust me when I tell you that it feels like Square has reached into my brain and plucked out my exact complaints about the open world—and while we need to wait until Berlin to get more details, here's what I'm hoping for.

An ill FATE

First up, FATEs need to take a look at world quests and public events from games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2—namely, they need to be more dynamic, with a wider variety of activities. Right now, FATEs in FF14 have the same handful of objectives: Kill stuff. Kill one slightly tougher monster. Kill monsters and pick up items to be delivered to an NPC standing three feet away.

There are a couple of other types, like the escort and defend FATEs, but I'll be honest: They're so deeply unchallenging that they're really just the "melt enemies with AoE" events wearing a skinsuit.

Take those other games I've mentioned, for example. World of Warcraft's world quests aren't by any means incredible, but they at least ask you to perform unique activities—a lot of 'em are kill X, get items, sure. But some of them have you skyriding through rings, manning cannons, hopping in vehicles, and so on.

There are more unique world events, too. Midnight also sees you going out into the open world to defend keystones, play tower defense, and knock over world bosses. It also helps that the introduction of the new Prey system gives you an opt-in layer of challenge while you're doing all of these.

Guild Wars 2, meanwhile, has a well-earned reputation for having some of the best open-world activities in the business: Multi-stage events that flow into each other, some of which are incredibly challenging. Take Dragon's End, for example, which was a multi-stage marathon that required coordination over an entire zone to complete.

Basically, there's so much more that Square Enix could be doing if it'd just crib a few ideas from its competitors.

We quest in a society

Other activities, like the society quests, also need a complete reimagining. Society dailies are not that hard to complete. They take all of 10 minutes a pop—and yet, I haven't been keeping up with them. Why? Because they bore me to absolute tears, particularly the ones designed for combat jobs.

I rarely do this as a critic, but the combat society quests are actively bad, and the only good thing I can say about them is that they're over quickly.

These are quests designed to be repeated daily, and yet, a lot of them simply involve a bunch of dialogue and talking to NPCs—I have had rotations of society quests where I've literally just flown to three or four locations, skipped a bunch of dialogue I've already seen before, and gone back. Dailies complete.

Even when you do get to fight stuff, it's usually only one or two enemies—and with absolutely zero bite. I'm barely able to get my opener off before they fall over, most of the time. Compared to the other games I've mentioned, it's profoundly dull.

Imagine if these quests were a little more involved. Imagine if they asked you to do one or two GW2-style dynamic events—or, at the very least, asked you to kill more than one critter in a designated "kill this critter" zone. Society quests are quickly dealt with, but they're supremely boring. The stories they tell are cute, but they're purposefully time-gated by a requirement to do twenty minutes of dopamine-deprived chores every single day for a couple weeks, and I just plainly don't want to.

The only open-world bit of fun I think actually gets players to band together successfully are FF14's hunts—and even then, that banding together isn't organic. Players need to organise "hunt trains" on Discord with specific times and routes to do them officially.

This isn't necessarily a failure of hunts, mind—I think it's good and healthy for some activities in MMOs to require some cooperation—but when the only thing that gets you banding together in the open world with your mates requires hopping on a Discord server and carving out a specific block of your schedule, it's not… great.

There's a reason that when Occult Crescent, Dawntrail's exploration zone (that is, a bespoke area designed by Square to actually have lots of players in it doing stuff) came out, fellow PC Gamer writer and FF14 player Mollie Taylor said it made the game "feel like an MMO again".

And hey, I liked Occult Crescent too—but it's probably not great that it took Dawntrail almost an entire year to reach the point where it feels like an MMO again, huh?

More than anything, I'm hoping for that Occult Crescent feeling on Evercold's release. I'm hoping for reasons to actively go out and get stuck into a broad range of activities in the open world. I want to see these places bustling with max-level characters. I want dynamic, multi-stage events and tough-but-fair boss battles.

Not in a sequestered, instanced zone released months after the expansion itself, but in the areas I actually experienced the main storyline in. We'll have to wait until Berlin's fanfest to see how far Square Enix is willing to go, but if they can pull it off? By golly, we might be so back.

Final Fantasy 14's next expansion, Evercold, was announced during the fanfest over the weekend—and as someone who has had a laundry list of gripes, I couldn't be more excited. Square Enix has finally taken note of the fact the game's formula has grown stagnant, and promised all sorts of overhauls and reimaginings of what the MMO will be in the future.

Among these are "evolved" redesigns of the game's many jobs, both streamlining the amount of buttons they have considerably and making sure they each have a unique job identity. While I was skeptical at first, the actual demonstrations—wherein several jobs were seen to have unique, bespoke mechanics unheard of in FF14's history—has me more than cautiously optimistic.

But one thing does worry me: Square Enix is keeping the old job design available through a "reborn" mode toggle. And while this does make a certain kind of sense (old raids, etc. might simply not work with the new Evolved designs, and players still run those), it also has me a touch worried. Maintaining balance between two sets of over two dozen jobs sounds like a design nightmare.

Speaking at a Q&A attended by PC Gamer's own Andrea Shearon over the weekend, however, director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) states that this decision was motivated by the ill fate of another MMO, Star Wars Galaxies: "If you know about the game, I'm sure you know what happened to it when it did its thing."

"It's thing" refers to a set of "New Game Enhancements" that hit the MMO in 2005. These changes were widely criticised—while they were aimed at modernising the game, they also stripped it of a lot of its charm and complexity. For instance, pre-NGE, Galaxies had dozens of unique professions that let you fill a lot of non-standard MMO roles.

It didn't help that this update came right after the release of a new expansion, which the developer wound up offering refunds for. Players quit the game in droves, and Galaxies slowly crumbled, shutting down operations in December 2011.

Yoshi-P continues: "I actually really liked Star Wars Galaxies and its game design, but they—for the betterment of the gameplay experience, and they were doing it for the players—took an existing system, and they just changed it to something entirely new, and players did not take that very well. And I know people have been referring to it as a very tragic incident."

Yoshi-P sees a very similar hazard in the new Evolved job design: "Counting from the original Final Fantasy 14, we've been around for 15 years—13 if we count from A Realm Reborn—we've been building this game together with players worldwide, and we've been on this journey together, and people have gotten so familiar and used to the system that we have established.

"I knew that I didn't want to just suddenly remove what we've been used to. And that was my decision from the start."

Which is honestly fair. Some of the designs we saw in the keynote were radically different. For instance, the Evolved Paladin's defensive cooldowns allow them to launch counter-attacks if they time the activation of those cooldowns well, like a parry. The Dragoon, meanwhile, has an ultimate attack where it leaps into the air—one where the developers said they were toying with a 90% damage reduction for while active.

These are some radical departures from FF14's deeply homogenized job design, and ones I'm all for: But they would also be a huge shock to the system: "We need to make sure that, of course, we will develop [the] evolved system, but then also let's properly address what we currently have as well. And so that is the direction that I had for them at the start."

Yoshi-P also says that the design of Dawntrail's jobs—Viper and Pictomancer—were also an early sign of this design shift: "I feel that we were already stepping into that Evolved mode, and the more recent job design seems to feel a lot more streamlined, and I feel like it's a very good design.

"So I think with that knowledge that we've built—knowledge and experience and insight—we can start applying [their design] to the existing jobs that we've been accustomed to and have had for these many years." We'll have to see if Square can pull it off, but honestly, even if it's a bit messy? I'm just glad to see Square finally, genuinely experimenting. The enthusiasm is infectious.

Despite the massively multiplayer angle, MMOs can be quite lonely games—and if you play them for very long, you'll learn there are plenty of people who play them specifically to solo as much as they can. That can mean casually clearing the story or going sicko mode by killing a raid boss intended for a fully kitted-out group. But what would, say, Final Fantasy 14 look like as a true solo game? Director Naoki Yoshida, otherwise known as Yoshi-P, wants to hear some ideas.

He said as much during this weekend's Fan Festival (via GameSpot) after he was asked if he'd thought about making a single player version or spinoff of FF14 for players who don't care to play a Final Fantasy game wrapped up in all the MMO trappings that define 14.

"There are still a lot of people out there who look at an online Final Fantasy and they say, 'Well, an online Final Fantasy isn't a real Final Fantasy,'" he said via translation. "While I do love to consider making a standalone Final Fantasy 14, unfortunately the only team that could make a standalone Final Fantasy 14—the best standalone Final Fantasy 14—is the current Final Fantasy 14 team. If we ever retire from Final Fantasy XIV Online, maybe we can do it as our work after retirement."

That being said, he continued with a surprising sentiment: he's open to pitches, with the caveat that he's "half-joking but half-serious."

"If there were people who are interested in creating a sort of standalone Final Fantasy—if you have friends or if you know companies that would like to take on that challenge—we would love to hear from them. … I mean, if someone's passionate enough to want to helm that sort of project, we would love to hear from you."

He also noted that fans of the MMO would probably be annoyed if he got distracted working on a spinoff instead of cooking up more expansions, which is probably true. That said, if you are a fan and have immense resources, experience, and a great idea for a 14-themed solo RPG more in line with other Final Fantasy games, I'm sure Square Enix would be happy to hear you out. Personally, I think they should be turning the solo entries into MMOs rather than the other way around—see how they like it!

I last played now-beloved MMO Final Fantasy 14 in 2014, when it was only a few months old—not counting those first few aborted years prior to its relaunch as A Realm Reborn. I thought it was okay at the time, but it cemented itself as one of the genre's all-time greats with its next few expansions (or so insist several members of the PC Gamer team who still play).

I've mostly watched from the sidelines, glad not to be dumping months of my life into an MMO, but the fiery hand of FOMO has gripped me on occasion—like when I learned that Final Fantasy Tactics designer Yasumi Matsuno had designed a raid for the game, or when Yoko Taro went and did some weird Nier stuff in there.

Today what I'm feeling is not FOMO, but rather fear of the inexplicable. Trepidation in the face of the profound. A flickering terror deep in my gut that the weirdest and perhaps dopest shit to happen in videogames in 2026 might somehow be a raid in Final Fantasy 14, because the game is doing a crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The anime. "Get in the robot, Shinji," Cruel Angel's Thesis, "I'm so fucked up," Crisis of faith: the show, Depression: the show, cool robots, gross robots, everyone clapping—Evangelion is everything and everything in pop culture in the 30 years since has at least a little bit of Evangelion in it, such is its influence. Even a damn train was Evangelion.

It's somehow still as popular as it's ever been, probably because the film series "retelling" of the original show began just a decade later in 2007 and somehow dragged out until 2021. Now Final Fantasy 14's creators have announced "a new alliance raid made with creative input" from the Evangelion filmmakers, called Ghosts of Desire. Will it be just another MMO raid, or somehow cleave the audience into those who weep with tears of joy at the beauty of existence and those who log in figuring to do a spot of the ol' DPS and log off with existential depression?

Comments on the official Final Fantasy 14 YouTube account's teaser trailer for the raid are disabled, as if to say: if this news causes you to experience a psychic break, please go have it somewhere else.

I'm just going to put it out there now: If the raid doesn't end by somehow revisiting the death of Final Fantasy 14's original world but with a giant severed head floating in an ocean of blood, somebody's messed the whole thing up.

The new expansion, Evercold, arrives next year. Judging by the usual Evangelion timelines, we should see the raid sometime in the next decade.

The first Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival for the MMO's next expansion kicks off today. We should be getting a little glimpse at a trailer, the expansion's name, and more than likely producer Naoki Yoshida's usual mind games with a t-shirt that'll give some sort of hint about one of the new jobs.

But first, we still have a whole other patch for Dawntrail to get to first. Patch 7.5 is set to drop on April 28, and as usual we've been handed some preliminary patch notes to comb through in anticipation.

My verdict? There's some ridiculously good quality-of-life changes here. The biggest ones were already revealed in previous livestreams: player housing is getting a furniture limit increase for both indoor and outdoor furnishings, and a whole bunch of dyes are being consolidated so they stop constantly clogging up your inventory.

Housing is still far from perfect, mind. It's still not instanced, and certain items might get culled if a house is full of folks and furni—which potentially scuppers methods a lot of FF14 house designers use like clipping furniture through two storeys to change its function or appearance. But an overall increase is a net positive, and the poor patch of my small house's front garden that's been negleted due to the 20-item limit will no doubt be happy to finally receive some attention.

The same can be said for the dye consolidation. They're all still single use and the premium ones you can purchase with real money are still unconsolidated. Gotta sell those Pure White and Jet Black dyes in the cash shop somehow. But the rest are split into three categories, which is infinitely more manageable for my inventory and retainers than the 100+ dyes we have right now.

Some of the QoL changes are new knowledge to me, though. One of the neatest is the fact that you can finally share hotbars across characters. It's something that might not feel entirely necesary—after all, it's an MMO that prides itself on being able to do everything on one character—but as someone who recently made an alt, it was super frustrating not being able to port over my main's hotbars and UI with the click of a button.

Technically it's still not a click, it's multiple clicks. And a 16-digit share code. It feels a little archaic of the Nintendo variety, but the process does seem to open up the possibility of sharing hotbars and HUD layouts between friends, which will be an incredibly neat use. Especially as someone who has seen some of my friend's hotbar layouts. Please let me fix them now, buds.

Not every change has me jumping for joy, though. I'm admittedly a rather casual PvPer, but the Frontline changes have me raising my eyebrow. Battle High—the thing you accrue through kills and assists, with five ranks that grant you increasing buffs as a reward—no longer deteriorates when you get killed.

You'll also earn a lot more Battle High the further up you go. It feels like a bizarre change that takes a huge part of Frontline's dynamic away—maintaining Battle High is half the fun, and I'm not sure if these changes will actually fix any of the stomping issues the huge 72-player mode currently faces.

There's loads more stuff, including:

• New chocobo interactions, like having them react to pets
• A new 24-player alliance raid
• Bonus Second Chance points on select Wondrous Tails entries
• A new message telling you which emote to use or what weather is required for some of A Realm Reborn's fussier Sightseeing Log entries
• More hats for Viera (a lot of the metal helmets we were missing in the first update)
• Changes to party KOs in deep dungeons
• Loads more gear getting two dye channels

There'll no doubt be more revealed across this weekend's Fan Fest. I hope this sea of QoL changes is the sign of something good. Even if they're not completely perfect, they're a start. And when you've got over a decade of spaghetti code to untangle, better to do it bit by bit.

I've fully entered my raiding era in Final Fantasy 14—I finally cleared my first full savage tier with the latest Arcadion raids, and I'm in the throes of progging my first ultimate (we do Looper, and then we do Looper etc). It's been a learning process of not only what my job does, but what everyone else's does and how they all intersect. Plus, you know, learning all the mechanics.

Has any of that come in handy with this Final Fantasy 14-based logic game that has recently dug its claws into me? Absolutely not, but these daily puzzles are a must-play for anyone looking to flex their knowledge of the critically-acclaimed MMORPG.

Clock Spots gives you eight different jobs spread out in a circle (at their "clock spots", hence the name), with each one having different criteria you need to fill in order to complete the puzzle. One spot might need a job released in a certain expansion, while a healer might have to be positioned with an AOE heal in order to catch other players with low HP.

It's a real test of just how much you know about the game—do you know who has a ground-targeted heal? Or which jobs you learn in Gridania versus Ul'dah or Limsa Lominsa? Or who wears Aiming accessories? Clock Spots has tooltips that you can hover over if you're not a walking Final Fantasy 14 encyclopaedia, but there's also a "blind prog" setting that turns them off entirely, which means you really have to know your stuff.

The puzzles vary in difficulty each day, all thematically named of course with Normal, Extreme, Savage, and Ultimate giving a little nod to how hard a time you might have with it. Clock Spots has only been going for a week as of writing so there's not too many archival puzzles to dive through, but they are releasing daily so you can get a consistent fix.

My times have been pretty average across most of the puzzles. I completely flubbed the April 23 puzzle and walked away with a measly solve time of 7:41, but managed to wrangle every other day at around the two-to-five minute mark.

As someone who is a total sucker for daily puzzles—I am a stout NYT Games enjoyer with Wordle, Connections, the Mini and the Midi practically being a ritual for me at this point—having one which is so specifically catered to my interests has me kicking my feet in pure joy.

I hope Clock Spots carries on for a good long while, and who knows? Maybe all of this random knowledge (I'm sorry, I cannot remember every job with a single-target raid buff), will actually come in handy when I play the actual game, too. One can hope, anyway. I need all the help I can get.

Final Fantasy 14 embarked on a new, multi-expansion story arc with Dawntrail—but in terms of what Dawntrail actually set up, it's all been mostly self-contained so far: With one exception, the Interdimensional Key we picked up during the main story quest. Given how many reflections we've yet to visit, it's a pretty huge get for our Warrior of Light.

Well, looks like we might potentially know where we're going first—that's per the patch 7.5 site, released ahead of the next live letter come April 17. Usually, these sites don't give much away at first, but thanks to a couple of preview screenshots, we might have a solid grasp on where we're going next.

First, there's the patches' dungeon, "The Clyteum". One boss shown appears to be an Ahriman, a voidsent, that's taken over a Garlean mech like some kind of parasite—then there's the raid, "The Unmaking", which has the following flavour text: "Wielding the boundless power of the void, they rise from depths unfathomable─the dread sovereign Enuo!"

Both of these certainly suggest we'll be hopping back to the Void, which is interesting, given we mostly sorted out the Thirteenth back in the Endwalker patch quests—or at the very least, set it on the path to restoration, pouring the light from the First into the void-swarmed dimension.

However, this isn't the last story quest before FF14's next expansion—we'll be getting a patch 7.55 at some point this year with another batch of quests to properly lead into the game's next chapter. There's still time for a zag, but if we take 7.5 as an indication of where 8.0 is going?

Well, signs are pointing to a reunion with Zero and Golbez in the Thirteenth—which is neat. While Endwalker's patch quests felt a little filler-y, I always compared them to the Soul Surrender questline in Heavensward which, at the time, also felt like a side plot. Square's not one to let past plotlines languish in obscurity—and that storyline wound up being the entire foundation for Shadowbringers.

I've had my misgivings about the direction of FF14's story regarding Dawntrail, but given the improvements I've seen in subsequent patches, I'm genuinely excited to find out how the Void's getting involved in the story again—and if it means venturing to a partially-rebuilt Thirteenth? All the better.

Final Fantasy 14 is so very nearly clear of the issues myself—and our fellow FF14 aficionado Mollie Taylor—have been yapping about for years, with its latest patch offerings being really rather good. The studio's new approach to multiple levels of difficulty has, more or less, been a success.

While the somewhat-sluggish release schedule is still a problem, I'm really glad that as a self-described "midcore" player (I did exactly one savage tier with randos and decided I'd had my fill) I've had more to do. This expansion's Deep Dungeon being more accessible, alongside the new Variant Dungeon's optional harder bossfights that aren't quite criterion level? Brilliant moves. There's something to do in every patch, finally.

But the rewards structure? Oh boy.

The good, the bad, and the accessories

Firstly, though, my compliments—The Merchant's Tale might just be one of my favourite dungeons ever conceived in an MMO, both from an aesthetic viewpoint and from the design of its fights themselves. It's visually stunning, a painterly-rendered version of FF14's artstyle that feels like it wandered out of Genshin Impact, splattered with unique textures and adorable little touches.

Baseline, the dungeon's bosses are all excellent, too. A haughty, sleepy genie who keeps flinging a carpet at you; a master swordsman with directional slashes who duels you on a mount; a mermaid that rides its own spear and conducts a choir of freaky ocean critters; and that goddamn whale that kept eating me (call me Ishmael).

The new midcore difficulty, advanced, is also an absolute win. Being able to hop into something that's not a total snoozefest with a mate is brilliant—it's something that requires planning and execution, but not the tactical sharpness of eight other players. Somewhere between a normal and extreme raid in difficulty.

Everyone involved at Square Enix who put The Merchant's Tale together: Its artists, its fight designers, and even its writers? They all deserve their laurels. Which makes it all the more frustrating to find out Square's botched the rewards, again.

Don't get me wrong, I think both of the outfits you can get from the dungeon are lovely—and hey, the emote's cute, but that's about where it stops. A mount, which you used to get for beating all routes on the normal difficulty, has now been relegated to its hardest difficulty, replaced by a sleep mask.

And sure, you can grab some furniture while you're in there—but The Merchant's Tale mostly just throws these annoying consumables at you. Popping open the chests inside isn't all that appealing.

Things get even more dire on the advanced difficulty. It's a ton of fun to do, but what can you buy with your hard-earned Corvosi Brass? Some sunglasses and flowery accessories. The only bonus is that all this stuff's tradeable, so if you wanna turn your runs into gil, it's kinda worth it. Kinda.

You get four Brass for beating all three bosses in the time limit, and 1-12 Brass at the end—though most of the time, you're only going to be getting the 80% chance. So most of the time, five brass. These dinky little accessories cost 12, meaning you'll need to do around three runs of these three (quite difficult!) bosses just to snag one little bangle.

Just give me gear

The real pain point, however, is that none of this stuff rewards gear (outside of giving you tomestones, which you can grind for elsewhere) which I'm just going to come out and say is FF14's biggest crime.

Square Enix has this antiquated notion that players should only get the highest level of gear from Savage raids, and it's weighing the game down bigtime. I do think that, at the time they release, Savage raids should give you your best-in-slot stuff—but these tiers have gaps of months between them.

To give you some perspective, the first savage tier of the Arcadion was released in July 2024. The second in April 2025, and the latest didn't come around until January of 2026. That's one new raid tier every nine or so months. Surely at some point in those nine months of playtime, Square Enix might be happy to go "right, the raiders have had their fun, let's let everyone else have-at"?

I'll be knocking over the rest of advanced just to appreciate the fights, but once I'm done, there's nothing in the list of rewards that really draws me—but if I could get some new pieces of kit, beyond the tomestone grind? You bet I'd be there. It's genuinely baffling to me how Square Enix is still stubbing its toe on this problem—because I think its fight designers are some of the best in the business, and they deserve to have a game that does their good work justice.

Still, we know that Square's taking a look at rewards for its next expansion, including adjustments to tomestones, so I do hope it's something the dev team is keeping in mind. I just hate to see all this good work wasted while they (hopefully, please) figure it out.

We will never get a game quite like 2015's Life is Strange ever again. Ready for the mosh pit, shaka brah? Go fuck yourselfie? I was eating those beans, are you fucking insane? I was eating… those BEANS!? Iconic. Equally as cringe a decade ago as they are now, but it just worked. A small, relatively unknown French studio doing its best to hella capture the essence of American high school life.

At the core of it all was the game's two main characters: Max Caulfield and Chloe Price. Specifically, their relationship (as sapphic or platonic as you well wish) and the ravelling and unravelling of a single week together as Max's newly-unlocked rewind power danced along the timeline of their lives. All of this culminates in the choice for Max to either save their hometown at the expense of Chloe's life, or defy fate forever and see Arcadia Bay destroyed.

Life is Strange is a game that, despite its shortcomings, was an incredibly earnest and heartwrenching tale of teenagehood, tragedy, and consequence. A perfect storm.

One which Deck Nine—who has developed all but one Life is Strange game since Don't Nod's initial debut—has spent the last two years trying to recreate. First with Double Exposure, which brought Max back with new friends, romance options, and time-adjacent powers to explore.

It was a tough job narratively, one I personally found serviceable enough as a staunch Bay over Bae chooser. But it was one which upset many of Pricefield's fans, who felt their decision to save Chloe over Arcadia Bay was minimised. Reduced to a relationship that had drifted apart over a decade, nary a text or occasional hookup to be seen. Something that, to me, feels rather realistic, especially as someone who has journeyed through these games the same age as these two women. But this is also a videogame with magical rewind powers, we can loosen up a little.

And now we're here with Life is Strange: Reunion, the first game to feature Max and Chloe side-by-side since that very first outing 11 years ago. A game that is so clearly Deck Nine's desperate attempt to claw back any good grace with the Pricefield enjoyers that it comes at the expense of every narrative beat set up at the end of Double Exposure, and reduces almost every supporting character to a prop in service of setting up and moving along moments between my two OGs.

Reunited and it feels… okay

This is coming from a fellow Pricefield enjoyer, mind. Did I foolishly direct my romantic interests towards Warren in my very first playthrough of Life is Strange all those years ago? Sure, but I've long since seen the light.

I'm also someone who has never wavered in my decision to sacrifice Chloe. Not all stories have a happy ending. It gives the original game so much more emotional weight, and makes Max's reunion with her in this one far more interesting. A person that she's spent a decade grieving, carving a space out in her heart for, suddenly standing in front of her. It's an incredibly poignant moment—and I admittedly welled up a little when Foals' Spanish Sahara started playing, a reminder of the choice both myself and Max made all those years ago.

The scene gave me high hopes for what Reunion was going to deliver. I'd anticipated fan service and manufactured cutesy Pricefield moments, sure. And they're certainly there. But in pursuit of them, Deck Nine forgot about everything else.

Reunion feels like two stories. The one Deck Nine originally wanted to tell, and the one it felt it had to. The foundations laid with Double Exposure's ending have been demolished. Where I expected Safi's quest to find other people with powers like herself and Max, she instead stropped around campus, hiding her real self in favour of shapeshifting as students and faculty. She toes the line of being interesting—criticising Max's reckless power usage, blind to her love for Chloe to see any external damage she's causing. To Safi included.

Instead it's a bunch of passive-aggressive comments (I rejected her plea for support at the end of Double Exposure, my bad I guess!) that lead nowhere, before the end of the game ties everything up in an incredibly sloppy bow and has her back to her old self.

Where Diamond's nosebleed had hinted towards further cool power-related character development, she's actually entirely absent from Reunion. Relegated to a single (optional) phone call at the very end of the game.

It's all shafted in favour of a mysterious fire that sees the demise of Max's nouveau bestie Moses. And, once again, Chloe. It's admittedly another interesting premise, but one that goes nowhere in Reunion. The eventual climax to who is responsible is awful and nonsensical. A culprit given diabolically little screentime and character development, which makes the reveal a total nothing burger.

But hey! Chloe and Max get to go out on the lake in a little boat at sunset and wax lyrical about their time together as teens. And break into stuff just like they used to. And hold hands. And finally share a little reunion smooch.

They're important moments, don't get me wrong. Ones I loved. But I couldn't help but feel like Deck Nine was carefully tip-toeing towards me to present them. Pricefield kisses in one hand, a white flag waving back and forth in the other.

For me, Reunion's most interesting narrative moments don't even involve Max. Chloe and Moses, and their interactions, are the star of the game. For starters, Moses is perhaps the only Double Exposure character who doesn't feel completely gutted—probably because he fits nice and neatly into Reunion's story—but his dynamic with Chloe is where I got to see the biggest indication of her character growth. Where I get the biggest sense of the kind of woman she's become over on the "alive Chloe" timeline.

And then I'm taken back to a poorly woven story. Attempts to intertwine Safi and Chloe's shared situation. Haphazardly slotting together a fire that has nothing to do with either of them, while also exploring and bringing a critical lens to Max's rewinding, and simultaneously figuring out how to bring it all back to the two who started it all.

Unfortunately, I'm not sold on it. I will always love Max and Chloe, but the characters Deck Nine crafted for Double Exposure deserved better. It's not entirely the developer's fault—the studio is far smaller than it was for the previous game, and I would bet there was a whole lot of narrative pivoting that took place before Reunion's release which has led to a sloppy final product. I just wish Pricefield's farewell had been given the time and care it deserved.

The Nier series is deeply beloved and, alas, deeply underserved. The last mainline game in the series was Nier: Automata, which came out in 2017—almost one whole decade ago. I mean, there was also Nier Reincarnation, a mobile gacha from 2021, but I feel spiritually obligated not to count that one.

Hopes were raised when in February of this year, an anniversary stream promised "Neir: Automata to be continued," filling fans with the hope that Nier: Automata would… you know, continue. Which is why plenty of Nier fans were understandably bamboozled by an announcement on X about an upcoming Nier project:

The video boasts a "Coming Soon" title screen for Nier: Cosmic Horror, a game that would apparently be featuring a deeply caked-up robot with a tentacle for a head. Bizarre imagery, sure, but this is Yoko Taro we're talking about, the man who wears a moon for a face. I've no doubt that if a new Nier game came out about tentacle robots with perfectly spherical rumps, it'd spend 50 hours both justifying that and making you cry about it.

Anyway, turns out it was all an April Fool's bit, per the Nier X account: "The 'Nier: COSMIC HORROR' announced at 0:00 today is an April Fool's project. We received a tremendous response and caused quite a stir. We look forward to your continued support for the Nier series."

Fans aren't taking it great—there's a spray of crying gifs in the post's comments, interspersed with the occasional .png of Wolverine telling Yoko to, er, experience intercourse with himself. And hey, look—it's easy to give a smug little chuckle and say 'you fools, it's April 1st!' but, to take the side of the fooled here:

This is a beloved series without a proper, non-mobile entry in almost a decade, with a brimming fanbase, who just recently got told the series itself would return. Looking at the post, it's obviously a bit low-budget for an announcement, but the robot design being weird is the furthest thing from a clear-cut joke because again, I say, this is Yoko.

In other words this is one of those annoying April Fools jokes that is just believable enough to make you double-take, hence the existence of this article. It is my grim duty to cut off your supply of copium, and for that I am very sorry.

Anyway—there's still likely a Nier project in the works, but it isn't Nier: Cosmic Horror. Maybe the robot design'll pop up in whatever's in progress over at Square Enix, but as for now, those steel cakes were a lie.

After finishing the great, herculean labour that is attempting to review a World of Warcraft expansion, one thing's been sitting around in my dome—in my estimation, Midnight's an excellent time that's been let down by some rough bugs and messy integrations.

These are things I mention, but overall I've taken them on the chin. And that's mostly because I've been playing MMOs for the better half of my life, at this point. I've seen multiple expansion launches, and absolutely none of them have been clean-cut—the terrible queues of Endwalker still haunt me.

Whether it's server issues or bugs, very few MMO expansions set sail without something going terribly wrong, because these are monstrously complicated, long-lived games. I don't envy any developer or QA tester whose job it is to try and stamp out bugs in a game with over two decades of design intricacies underpinning it.

But despite my sympathies, I also get why people sharpen their pitchforks over this stuff, especially given that many MMOs ask for a paid subscription. Time is money, as the goblins say.

This is especially difficult in games where seasonal progression is a thing—take, for example, a loot bug in WoW that's seen players only getting loot for a specific slot. There's small, forgivable bugs—and then there's bricking a character's progression for their first season of your game. Not good.

But how much is too much? I am asking you, reader of Terminally Online, to pitch in with your opinions, both in the following poll and in the comments below.

I'm personally willing to overlook scuffed nonsense like this, but then again, that's because I'm not much of a hardcore player—I've done Savage raiding in FF14 before, but the gear treadmill isn't the first and foremost thing on my mind. I can, however, see the appeal in wanting to chase that item level deadline.

And there is, of course, a limit. Final Fantasy 14's Endwalker is one of my favourite RPG stories of all time, but I'd be lying if the constant disconnects and queue times didn't eat at me back in the day.

Final Fantasy 14's had its age rating in Japan increased—and it might be because people can't stop taking sexy pictures of their catgirls.

Alright, that's not literally the reason, but it's potentially a root cause. In a recent blog post, Square Enix explained that the long-standing MMO would be increasing its age rating—which is called CERO in Japan—from CERO C to CERO D.

Per the official CERO website, D is the rating given to 17 year olds and above. While the following quote from Square's blog post is machine-translated, the cause for this age bump is pretty unambiguous; "Currently, the 'CERO C' rating necessitates restrictions on the Group Pose function. Therefore, to maintain the freedom of Group Pose and avoid these restrictions, we have decided to change the rating to 'CERO D'."

Group Pose (Gpose) is the game's screenshot functionality which, as a grim consequence of being on the internet for more than five minutes, I am wildly aware is often used by players to take salacious pictures of their characters.

Sometimes, these pictures are well within reason—Final Fantasy 14 is, after all, a game flooded with conventionally attractive adventurers and an extensive glamour system. Other times, players use mods (which are banned by the terms of service) to make things that are unambiguously not safe for work.

It's not certain if the latter, rather than the former, is responsible, but it does make me a bit nervous for the game's modding community. Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) was forced late last year to have a stern, honest conversation with the game's playerbase over mod usage, after shutting down a popular mod drew ire.

As a matter of fact, Yoshi-P said, word-for-word, that if players post screenshots "of their naked character publicly on social media, FFXIV itself may be subject to legal measures by regulators in certain countries".

Given no updates have been issued to the Gpose system itself (or at least, none that would increase the suggestiveness of screenshots you can take with it), I do have to wonder out loud if the modding community might've caused this.

That's not to say the rating isn't "appropriate" based on CERO's past actions—here's an interview from 2012 (via "Thoughts about Making the Video Games 2") wherein Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai complains that: "We had Palutena wearing shorts and made the inside of Wonder Pink’s skirt too dark to see anything.

"Nevertheless, CERO told us the designs were 'sexually provocative.' They were being ridiculous and frankly quite juvenile." In other words, applying this same harshness to FF14 isn't out of character—it's just strange that it took them so long. Gpose functionality has, after all, been in the game since 2015 in patch 3.1. Either CERO dragged their feet, or someone took a wrong turn on X.

MMOs sure can get lonely when you're grinding for loot and experience into the wee hours of the morning. Occasionally you'll run into a stranger and hit 'em with a /wave, or at least get ganked enough to break up the monotony—but that's nothing compared to a real conversation, right? Well, if you happen to play the mostly Japan-exclusive MMO Dragon Quest X, you'll be able to get an even bleaker facsimile of real human interaction very soon.

As reported by Japanese newspaper Sankei (and machine translated by Google Chrome), Square Enix is teaming up with Google to add a "conversational AI" companion called Chatty Slimey.

"When a player talks to Slimey using the chat function, it automatically generates voices and engages in conversation," Sankei explained. "The AI ​​also analyzes information from the game screen, and Slimey may even initiate conversations when a powerful enemy is defeated or a rare item is obtained. A beta test is planned, and applications for participants are being accepted until [March] 30th."

The article includes a quote from DQX development lead Takashi Anzai, who said of Slimey, "new players won't feel lonely wondering where to start playing; it will become their own personal companion." Sankei also quoted Google Cloud global director for games Jack Buser's prediction that AI "will fundamentally change all games in the next three to five years."

This isn't the first time an MMO has toyed around with AI chatbots. Wuxia RPG Where Winds Meet was full of 'em, and it didn't take players long to get extremely weird with their new AI buddies.

While there are eager experiments with this technology happening all over the industry, AI chatbots have proven easy to manipulate in the past, and this all gets especially messy when you throw earnest roleplay and real emotional attachments into the mix. It's possible chatbots have improved since Darth Vader was saying slurs in Fortnite last year, but whether AI should even be in the room when discussing RPGs remains the subject of debate.

World of Warcraft did a pretty brave thing recently, and decided to take an axe to its combat addons. And while I still think there's plenty that needs to be done (I am so sorry, healers, that dispels are now borderline impossible for you) I can mostly see that it did need to happen.

My own specialisation, the outlaw rogue, had an entire slice of its rotation replaced by an addon that told me when to hit a button—and as I've tinkered around with Midnight, I've found that I'm mostly in the clear. Every specialisation in the game has been trimmed down to meet similar goals—to a blurry degree of success.

Even my beloved outlaw is struggling to pump numbers in raids, but given I'm not all that into hardcore endgame content, I've been sitting pretty. Then I tried to level up some alts, and ah. Oh no.

For some context: The other major MMO I play is Final Fantasy 14, and in that game, the two minute meta is king. This means that (more or less) every two minutes, every single job has a burst window. You hit your cooldowns, you play your keyboard like it's a piano for ten to twenty seconds, and you go back to hitting your lazy river rotation until it's go-time again.

Even the exceptions aren't really exceptions. For example, my job of choice, ninja, has two burst windows—one with Trick Attack, and one with Trick Attack and Mug. But one's bigger than the other, and when does that bigger burst window roll around? You guessed it, every two minutes.

This has some limited upsides: It's pretty satisfying to hit your burst buttons and go nuclear on someone, especially alongside all of your party members, and it can be an interesting puzzle to try and slot this mandatory do-things window into your average boss fight.

That's about where the benefits end, though, because the downsides are numerous—to help balance raid content, most jobs are quiet outside of that brief window of exploding things to death. My ninja basically rolls through his three-part combo and occasionally spends a resource, with precious little else to do.

This means that when you aren't in FF14's silo'd, high-spectacle boss fights, things are all over the shop. It also means that anything that doesn't start with you hitting a nasty big bad with all your cooldowns unlocked risks the dreaded drift: The horrible, icky sensation of all your big damage cooldowns getting out of sync with each other.

It just makes it harder to design anything that's not a static boss fight—and for a genre like the MMO, that's generally a bad way to go, because said boss fights are ultimately a humble sliver of your playtime. FF14's yawed so heavily towards that direction, however, it's become an issue in need of actual addressing—eating up some non-two minute jobs, like my beloved paladin, along the way like a horrid design katamari.

That's because of these cooldowns often being force multipliers for the entire group. If your job doesn't deal burst damage in that window, while everyone else's big buffs are rolling, then you'll lag behind to the sheer power of numbers—a flat, sad, sub-par damage profile with no spikes.

One that can't be too highly buffed, lest it spoil the balance of more casual content—the reason a non-bursty class or job underperforms in raids is because everyone's coordinated on that two-minute feeding frenzy, so if you buff them too hard, they get too strong elsewhere where players aren't doing that. It places all of your designers firmly between a rock and a hard place—let certain players struggle, or roll them into the homogenization orb?

Back to WoW: When I logged out of my outlaw rogue to do some quests on my retribution paladin and my marksmanship hunter, I nearly flinched. Both of these classes (my hunter more than my paladin) had big, bursty windows and hit like a wet noodle outside of them. Ah, cripe.

This is especially a problem for World of Warcraft, mind, because there's a bigger emphasis on world content. You're doing side quests, daily rep grinds, rare hunting, world quests, and let's not forget about the entirely new system, Prey—there's more solo instanced stuff to do as well, like delves. Basically, you're out in the world a lot more, and hitting enemies a lot more to boot.

And when you're on your own, these big explosive windows followed by long, treacle-sticky seconds of quiet are an utter nightmare—I'm flip-flopping between either nuking enemies immediately and disintegrating them into a pile of numbers, or spending long stretches between my haymakers whapping them with a pool noodle.

There is a silver lining, mind. Flattening the damage profiles of the game's specialisations a bit more shouldn't be impossible, and Blizzard—for good or for ill—is a far more reactive studio than Square Enix, who has only just recently caught onto the idea that you can't leave midcore players in the lurch.

Final Fantasy 14's Solo Only is one of my favourite challenge runs ticking over on YouTube right now—mostly because of how utterly improbable it is. For context, RathGames has been taking on the MMORPG on his own without outside help—no market board, no trading, no parties, and no duty support NPCs.

This is a problem, given the main storyline is littered with mandatory bosses and trials designed for four, eight, or sometimes 24 players.

RathGames, who I've had the pleasure of speaking to before, has overcome these obstacles with ingenuity before—for instance, the 24-person Alliance raid Crystal Tower, which one couldn't even queue for without other players, was achieved via other "solo only" challenge run players who kept their interactions to a minimum.

But the latest video, at the cusp of Shadowbringers, is somethin' else. I don't usually provide spoiler warnings for videos like these, but I am about to spoil the end of the following video for you. I encourage you to watch it, but in case you don't have an hour to spare, read on.

The latest task in question was the penultimate boss fight of Shadowbringers, Hades, and the move Captivity. Similar to the Susano fight RathGames overcame with a over-levelled Pictomancer, Captivity places a party member in a jail that needs to be broken via damage by your teammates. Which is a problem if you don't have any.

Captivity can technically be skipped if one manages to get Hades' second phase below 30-odd percent of his health before he finishes casting it, but even after levelling an entirely separate job to level 100 and gearing it out with the best kit he could scavenge, RathGames was still just over halfway there. The game's damage scaling had finally caught up to him: It was an impossible DPS check.

Enter the time-honoured tradition of multiboxing. Sure, RathGames could call for help from other Solo Only challenge runners himself, but that'd be admitting defeat—and while he needed two players' worth of damage, there wasn't anything in the (self-imposed) rulebook that said he couldn't be both players at the same time.

He then proceeds to reveal that, in secret, he'd spent over 193 hours (far shorter than the 1,008 from his first Solo Only playthrough—the wonders of optimisation) levelling up an entirely different character under the same stringent ruleset, doing every single nail-biting, agonising challenge twice, just so he could say he'd done it all himself.

I reached out to RathGames over Discord, and he revealed to me the deep cover he had to enter to achieve this feat, explaining that Solo Saviour "was made last July and took 233 days to prepare"—that journey itself will be its own video.

"[It was] exhausting," RathGames says. "I wanted so badly to tell people, I was so nervous about being spotted while walking around. Really made me feel on edge any time I logged in." In fact, he was in such deep cover, he had to invent an entirely new challenge run just to keep his stream audience occupied and unaware.

"I did need a hiatus to finish Savior. I was nowhere near ready when we hit the wall, I even went and did an entire new challenge, chat commands only, to pad for time." That challenge, mind, was its own special form of purgatory.

As for the time he shaved off the run up to Hades—around 815 hours worth—he credits "not just my knowledge but the entire solo community's! Folks have done an incredible job optimizing the run, and since I knew all the fights already things were a lot easier."

When it comes to adhering cleanly to FF14's terms of use (no third-party programs, in other words), RathGames had to do it the old fashioned way—with fast fingers and a single keyboard: "I alt-tabbed. I had both games on the same monitor, and alt-tabbed every couple seconds.

"Movement was the easier part. The rotations were miserable to learn. I had to make a spreadsheet that had each attack lined up with the other classes' next move after to try and wrap my head around it."

It's an absurd feat—and made all the more cracked by the way in which it mirrors the themes of Shadowbringers itself. At the tail-end of the expansion, the Warrior of Light melds with Ardbert, an alternate-universe version of themselves, to help save both his and their own planets from Hades.

In a sense, RathGames has had to do just that—weaponise the experience of two entirely different solo-only runs to meld together and overcome his foul foe. I cannot wait to see what left-hook strategies he pulls out of his pocket to tackle, as promised, the final season of Solo Only—which will see him tackling Endwalker to tie it all off.

Final Fantasy 14's next big patch, 7.5, will be dropping next month—and in subsequent updates will be adding Beastmaster to the game. Players have been waiting a long time for this'un. Given Square's propensity to announce almost everything in an expansion before its launch, we've known about Beastmaster since (checks notes) two entire years ago. Twelve forfend.

Some more details were announced in today's live letter, and it's a doozy (thanks to the Final Fantasy XIV Discord server for the fan translation).

Beastmaster is a "limited" job like Blue Mage, meaning that it's not something you can play in regular content—rather, it's more of a side-activity you can plug some hours into whenever grinding out your relic weapons gets a bit much.

Wielding an axe and a shield, players will be able to go out into the open world and snag various critters to assist them—both in acquiring more monsters for one's pocket, and in what's likely to be, similar to the Blue Mage, dungeons and duties leading up to level 50. You'll be able to bring three of your tamed beasts with you to help at a time, and each will give you unique abilities to whap trash packs with.

Also FF14's apparently gonna have a roguelike mode—well, technically its second roguelike mode, next to Deep Dungeon.

Details on the new duty, dubbed Crucible of the Unbroken, are relatively slim, but I mean. C'mon, look at that. It's a branching path with nodes. It's giving me the Slay the Spire tinglies. It's probably a roguelike mode, and if it's not, I'll eat my hat—which will make me very sad because I was planning on putting it on the silliest animal I can find.

Game director Naoki Yoshida says: "You can play to just clear, but we also are trying to implement some sort of rankings for those players that really want to go hard at it," adding that "It has a lot of volume."

So much volume, in fact, that it's pushed poor Blue Mage's planned updates to the wayside: "Beastmaster took all our resources/cost so we need to push the BLU update back. I know many of you have been looking forward to BLU updates, and they will come in the future, but we prioritized Beastmaster this time. I am sorry."

While my heart goes out to my Blue Mage-loving mates, I reckon the Beastmaster's still going to be a riot to play—and I love me a rougelike. Final Fantasy 14's patch 7.5 releases April 28, though Yoshi-P says the Beastmaster's coming "a bit further, 7.5x", meaning we might be waiting until June (7.51), July (7.55), or September (7.56) to finally catch 'em all—I mean, er, obtain them in great volume.

We said last year, while comparing the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2, that one of the few advantages the Switch 2 has on the games front is exclusive access to Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster. Well, you can strike that one off the list, because it just shadow-dropped—out of nowhere, no warning, today, holy cow right now—on Steam.

Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster is a high-definition update of the Silicon Studio-developed RPG originally released in Japan in 2012 for the 3DS. An expanded edition, subtitled For the Sequel, followed in 2013, and that version was released the following year in North America, Europe, and Australia with the trimmed-down title Bravely Default.

For those unfamiliar with the tale: "Without warning, the Great Chasm opened a hole in the world. Tiz is the sole survivor of a village swallowed whole by the chasm. In the depths of his despair, he encounters a young vestal named Agnès. Together they set off on a journey with the goal of closing the chasm and freeing the crystals swallowed by darkness. They set off, entirely unaware of the significance of that goal."

Well, who hasn't been there at least once in their lives, am I right? The remastered edition of Bravely Default Flying Fairy features updated graphics, a redesigned UI, an option to fast-forward through cutscenes, "and other modern conveniences." The turn-based "Brave and Default" battle system returns, two new types of minigames have also been added, and—this is the big one—yes, it is Steam Deck verified.

Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster is coming in with a 20% launch discount, meaning you can pick it up for $32/£25.59/€32 until March 26. Publisher Square Enix is also offering a Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster digital art album, viewable through the Square Enix Digital Content Viewer—instructions on getting that rolling are down below.

As someone who covers MMORPGs often for our own column, Terminally Online, it's nice to be able to break from the usual doom and gloom about new MMOs (they really aren't doing so hot) and share some positive news for once. News, for instance, like the fact that Final Fantasy 11 has so many new players it's actually causing problems.

This has led to game director Yoji Fujito having to make an official announcement on the game's pleasingly retro forums: "Once again, we are seeing periods of congestion on the game's servers, this time with the Odin World, so I'd like to take a moment to explain what measures we will be taking to help address the issue."

These measures include stopping players from transferring to Odin, as well as the creation of new characters on the server.

A point of context: Player counts like these are relative to the size of the servers themselves, and FF11's aren't exactly humongous. They're not anything to sniff at, though, either—unless you're World of Warcraft, most smaller MMOs can chug along happily at populations in the thousands, and according to an auction house database site at the time of writing, Final Fantasy 11 has around 87,700 active players.

For context, Star Trek Online has a daily Steam player count of just under 2,000 (not counting people playing it on other platforms). Albion, similarly, has a 24-hour peak just shy of 10,000 on the platform. The Odin server having around 13,000 active players alone means that FF11 is actually quite healthy by humbler MMO standards, and it's very impressive for a 23-year-old game—24, in a couple of months.

It's also not the first time in recent memory that Square Enix has had to do this—back in July of last year, it was Asura that was getting hammered, which is honestly a delight to see. I'm a sucker for the experience of classic MMOs, being recently very taken by Project Gorgon, and FF11 not just surviving, but thriving through its twilight years is genuinely lovely.

The new version of Final Fantasy 7 that Square Enix announced in a boldly detail-free post last January hit Steam yesterday and, well, people aren't happy about it.

In an event scientists are (probably) calling "more predictable than the sunrise," it seems fans rather think Square Enix mucked it all up, so much so that one cadre of modders has decided to use the release as a shoe-in-the-door to angle for a gig at the studio. After all, they reckon they could do better than this.

The new version of FF7—now on Steam and GOG—adds a 3x speed mode, the option to disable random encounters, autosaves, and a "Battle enhancement mode" that lets you "recover HP/MP during battles and max out the Limit gauge." It's worth noting, before we get to the complaints, that if you had the older version of FF7 on Steam, you still have access to it. So at least there's that.

At the time of writing, Final Fantasy 7's user reviews sit at an ugly red Mostly Negative on Steam, with fans taking issue with framerate bugs (though in fairness, some report that Square Enix has at least patched a gamebreaking combat speed glitch), texture filtering, and in general the fact it feels like a worse version of the game than a modded copy of the old version.

"OG 2013 release had modders that did all of this already from controller support and button prompts to frames and cheats, but with better visuals and skins," wrote a player named Jamesie Ghost. "I just don't understand how they tested this and said 'Yes, this is the definitive edition of Final Fantasy VII,'" wrote ehs03y3ol.

You know who else reckons modders did it better? Modders. The Tsunamods team—responsible for various FF-related projects, including the Cosmo Memory and Echo S-7—has been tweeting its impressions about the new FF7 version since it dropped. They're unimpressed. "Why did they need to make the backgrounds look worse!" the team posted on its X account, alongside a side-by-side comparison of some FF7 backgrounds. "It's one thing to release a new version that's worse. But to fully delist the better version is just… ehh. We must fix this!"

So confident is the Tsunamods team that it could do better that it's… turned its dismay at nu-FF7 into a job application. "You know what, I'm taking our shot in the dark here. @SquareEnix, hire us. I'm not joking. Our contact info is in our bio," wrote the team.

"We have Programmers, Musicians, 3D artists, 2D artists, Upscale engineers, and we help keep your older games alive. People trust us. Let us help you."

I… somehow doubt this will work, but you know what? There are much worse ideas. I'm a long-time advocate for studios essentially canonising the mod projects that keep their old games alive. I can't fault Tsunamods for giving it a go.

After taking a wee half-year break from Final Fantasy 14, I have been (for better and worse) deep in the no-life trenches since December. I've been sucked straight back into the world of bunny girls and perpetual Limsa Lominsa drama—the kind I dutifully observe from the sidelines, of course. Looks like I'm not the only one waking their Warriors of Light up from an extended nap, either. At least, if this unofficial census is anything to go by.

It comes courtesy of LuckyBancho, who's been running the census for a hot sec now. Like I say, it's unofficial—pulling data from The Lodestone to determine which characters are 'active' through means like newly registered minions and mounts or changes in HP and experience—so it's not to be taken as gospel. But it's still decent enough for a broad view of how the game is doing.

As it turns out, it seems like it's doing pretty well! At least, significantly better than the census conducted back in November of last year. It estimates that we're around 110,000 active characters up from three months ago for a pretty healthy-looking 930,000 Warriors of Light runnin' around. Roughly 60,000 of those are new characters, while the number of returning players (those who were inactive but are now considered active) is estimated to be around 210,000—that's an 80,000 increase from the previous census.

That last stat can likely be partially contributed to the fact that Final Fantasy 14 ran one of its semi-regular free login campaigns a few days after the launch of Patch 7.41—which added the Savage difficulty of the final four Arcadion raids, a new step for the relic weapon, and a new area for Cosmic Exploration.

But aside from that, Patch 7.4 (which released in mid-December) has been quite good. The main storyline is starting to pop down the breadcrumbs that'll lead us to the main meat of the next, currently unannounced expansion. It "completely charmed" fellow FF14 sicko Harvey Randall, and it's also the first time in a while that I've really felt excited about where this game's narrative is going.

It's also the patch that unshackled us from class-locked glamour, letting me finally wear 'Scouting' armor (once locked to Ninjas and Vipers) on my Dancer, since it's often far more thematically fitting than whatever steampunk vibe my actual role-specific gear often touts. I know, it sounds like a wild reason to bring people back into the game, but fashion is the endgame. It is, in fact, a very good reason to bring people back.

And let's not forget the release of the Arcadion Heavyweight raid tier, the conclusion to Dawntrail's excellent raid series that has done a lot of narrative heavy lifting where many felt let down by what the main story offered. It's an excellent tier, too, though the final fight has divided a few folks for being arguably a little anti-climactic. The final Savage fight though? Now that one is an absolute banger, and I've been having a great time reclearing it each week.

They're all big reasons for someone to come back and start playing again—hell, it got me—and with word of mouth quickly spreading about how the patch was actually pretty good, it's no surprise to see people jumping back on to see for themselves.

And like I say, it's a significantly better position than the game's been in recently. Here are some of the previous numbers from LuckyBancho:

• November 2025: 820,000 active characters (two weeks before Patch 7.4)
• September 2025: 880,000 active characters
• July 2025: 880,000 active characters (right before the release of Patch 7.3)
• May 2025: 950,000 active characters
• March 2025: 990,000 active characters (right before the release of Patch 7.2)

So yeah, this is the healthiest we've looked in… well, almost a year. It's good to see so late into the expansion's life cycle, too. Not to doom too hard, but I don't think I was the only one who expected to see a steady decline/stagnating number in the lead up to the next expansion.

I'm sure the number will inevitably go down. Most of the regular raiders will already have all of their gear from the Savage raids, if not very close to best-in-slot. The Variant and Criterion dungeon set to launch with Patch 7.45 won't be that big a pull. People will likely come back to see what Patch 7.5 has to offer story-wise. And if there's an Ultimate raid, that'll keep the hardcore players happy for a bit longer.

There will certainly be a calm before the storm. But for now, I'm happy to see that it's at least a little on the up and up.

As reported by IGN, Neon Genesis Evangelion is getting a new anime series with some serious talent at the helm: Yoko Taro, the creator of Drakengard, Nier, and the 2017 breakout hit, Nier: Automata. Taro will be in charge of the series' writing and overall composition.

The news was announced as part of "Evangelion:30+", the 30th anniversary celebration of Hideki Anno's influential, mind-bending sci-fi series. An official press release about the series on evangelion.jp is pretty laconic, providing no details as to the show's planned story. In addition to Taro, the series will be directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki and Toru Yatabe, with music by Keiichi Okabe, and production split between Anno's Studio Khara and CloverWorks.

It's a collaboration that immediately excited me as a relative casual who's only seen Evangelion's original series without diving into the various movie spinoffs and retellings. Taro's games are well-loved for their memorable characters, oppressive yet imaginative science fiction, and a heaping helping of angst, sexual tension, and psychological drama. They've always very much felt of a piece with anime like Evangelion.

It's been a long time since we've gotten a proper, feature-length game from Taro. After 2017's Nier: Automata, which upgraded his standing from "cult classic game maker" to just "classic game maker," we've seen a series of smaller projects and contributions from Taro.

There's the story-driven Nier mobile game, Reincarnation, which I've heard is cool but remains a blind spot for me⁠—I don't like playing games on a touchscreen. Taro contributed his talents to the card-based RPG The Voices of Cards: The Island Dragon Roars, which was not well-received by PCG contributor Matthew Castle in his 2021 review. For my money, the most notable project of Taro's in the past decade has been Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139…, the 2021 remaster of the series' first entry from 2010.

And by naming convention alone, you can see why Taro is such a strong fit for Evangelion. "Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139…" feels like a first cousin to something like "Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time," the 2021 fourth film in the Rebuild of Evangelion film series. There are currently no public release date or story details for Taro's unnamed Evangelion show.

I've had the pleasure of attending a single Download Festival—one of the UK's biggest rock and metal events going—and I thought I was cool with never attending another. Well, erm, that certainly was the case until about two seconds ago, when the organiser dropped another 14 acts for this year's festival. Among them? Final Fantasy 14-themed rock band The Primals, headed up by the game's composer Masayoshi Soken.

Not that The Primals isn't a real band, mind: they have a full lineup, they've released albums, they've toured. But it's also wild to see a band formed by the composer of Final Fantasy 14 with the express purpose of covering songs from Final Fantasy 14 in a heavier alt style taking to the stage of one of the biggest festivals my little island home has to offer.

For reference, this year's headliners include Limp Bizkit, Guns N' Roses, and Linkin Park and past years have been graced by the likes of Metallica, Slipknot, Fall Out Boy, Iron Maiden, and Green Day as main headliners. It's a pretty big deal! It's also the band's first showing outside of Asia, Fan Festival performances notwithstanding.

I can't help but notice that this year's Download lineup includes Tom Morello and Architects, too. Both have contributed to Final Fantasy 14's soundtrack over the years—Architects lead singer Sam Carter lent his vocals to the last expansion, Endwalker, with its theme song Footfalls. More recently, Morello collaborated with Beartooth vocalist Caleb Shomo in Everything Burns, which featured in the game's latest patch as the theme song to the final fight of the Arcadion raid series.

Both songs are absolute bangers, and there is a teeny tiny bit of me (huffing massive supplies of copium) that hopes one or both will make an appearance alongside The Primals to perform their respective tracks. It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. It's pretty common for artists who've collaborated to perform together at these things. One of my favourite memories of attending Download in 2023 was getting to see Bullet for my Valentine take to the stage alongside Pendulum for their then-new song, Halo.

But I also hope it doesn't happen because I am currently over here being a giant jealous baby who is suddenly ready and prepared to get over absolutely everything I hated about Download. Listen, I love listening to music and walking around all of the different stages, but I also hate shivering in a sleeping bag perched atop a crappy air mattress while some drunken bozo falls on top of my tent at least once a night. Maybe a day pass and a hotel is in order.

I am, ultimately, interested in seeing how well The Primals' specific flavour of 'videogame music but also just very good in its own right' will translate over to the masses. Part of the joy of these festivals is discovering new acts and while Download is no stranger to great-but-niche additions in its lineup, I am curious if The Primals will land outside of its dedicated circle.

If you are interested in seeing The Primals live, they'll be performing at Download on Friday, June 12.

There are plenty of superficial similarities between The Mermaid's Curse and the original Paranormasight, a 2023 visual novel that's quietly built up a reputation as one of the best mystery games of the last few years. There's the artistic style, the spooky tone, the use of an ensemble cast who have nothing and everything to do with one another.

I was happy to see all these things that helped Paranormasight find an adoring yet undeservedly small audience present in this unexpected sequel, because I'm very ready to spend more hours picking through the shattered fragments of meticulously researched horror adventure that blurs the line between fiction and reality. But what I really love about this second game is that everyone, regardless of whether they picked the original apart or are hearing about it for the first time this week, immediately gets stuck in the same bloodstained boat.

The Mermaid's Curse has the confidence to essentially start over, and that means nothing I mastered in the earlier game will help me survive this one.

The focus this time is on mermaids and (I'm pretty sure they left this part out of the Disney movie) the twisted immortality a single bite of their flesh can bring. Not knowing exactly what's going on is considered a normal part of the experience and the script, always fond of prodding at the fourth wall, makes repeated efforts to emphasise that any uncertainty is entirely natural. Characters complain how easy it is to confuse a tangled web of dusty old dynasties, or how annoying it can be when historical records mention someone having a chance encounter with a magical creature and little else, as if the observer just shrugged and let it wander off.

These instances offer acknowledgment and reassurance to stick with the mystery, welcome reminders that you're exactly as confused as you're supposed to be.

I'm not even granted the reassurance of a familiar landmark. Kameshima is a fictional island located in the very real Ise Bay, located about an hour's flight away from Sumida City, whose map I learned in the first game. Kameshima is based on Kamishima, which really is sitting in Ise Bay, and is used as the photographic basis of many key locations in the game.

More than a pretty change of scenery, this relocation introduces a whole new culture and expects me to learn brand new skills, too. Specifically those of the ama—Japanese freedivers whose practice sits somewhere between job and ancient tradition. Their work is inextricably intertwined with the region and the story; in fact they're so important it's not enough to just read about them, I have no choice but to experience their particular style of diving firsthand. Thanks to a playable 3D drowning simulator I slowly learn to appreciate just how rare it is to find and catch a lobster, the importance of not being too greedy (even if only for my life's sake), and the fear of spending too long in the water.

With this new frame of reference all the superstitions and spiritual protections I encounter throughout the adventure, ranging from sewn sigils to small shrines, feel like perfectly sensible precautions. It's also easier to understand the behaviour of the other ama I meet.

I appreciate why some want to preserve their unique way of life and sympathise with another's wish to ditch the old ways when I can recall a diving session of my own where all I had to show for a near-death experience were a few common clams and sea urchins. When the time comes to dive into the depths on mermaid-related matters, I can feel in my bones just how dangerous it is without the game having to say another word.

Using fresh knowledge and skills I've personally accrued along the way—me the player, not me the character—is a recurring theme, and extends all the way to its extensive array of constantly updated reference material. I'll be honest, I tend to politely ignore most in-game databases. They usually come in one of two types: the practical type designed to remind players of things they've already been told but may have forgotten, and the superfluous type designed to tell people what a random character's uncle ate for breakfast last month, down to the exact minute on an invented calendar system.

The Mermaid's Curse follows a different path, choosing to weave its files and the additional information they silently contain directly into the puzzle solving, encouraging me to spontaneously conduct my own extended research—and maybe, if I really pore over the details and piece a few clues together, even pre-empt some huge plot twists. More than just a chance to feel smug, the script actually makes space for my unspoken findings, featuring all sorts of easily missed little nudges, sly glances at the camera, and strange small pauses in unexpected places that all but say "You worked this one out already, didn't you?"

Some major developments exist as open secrets for an excruciatingly long while, the game patiently waiting for the perfect moment to unleash these revelations, meta-torturing me with things it knows I know but refuses to officially acknowledge.

And when these events do finally come to a head their dramatic twists may hinge on me filling in a blank text box, like the kind you'd normally find on an insurance form. Thrilling gameplay? Yes, actually. This is the biggest and most exciting demand a complex adventure can make of a player: everything lurches to a stop not so I can pick Name #3 from a short list, but to manually type in my own freeform response.

What do I know? What have I understood? Have I worked out the true name of this mysterious individual yet?

As I nervously mull over everything I've learned a murderer stands a few feet away. The Japanese names of specific stars, the activities of centuries-old warlords, the importance of aquatic observation… nothing I ever saw or did in the first Paranormasight could have prepared me to crack this case, and I can only take a strange sort of pleasure in how lost at sea I am. This self-contained sequel is a better story, and a better experience, for daring to cast everyone adrift.

You can find Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse on Steam.

Ah, the Holy Trinity. An institution that has stood for time immemorial. That is, since MMORPGs have existed. So more like roughly 25-30 years.

The healer, providing succour to the whole party, and also the first to be blamed when someone dies; The tank, shielding their allies, and the second to be blamed when someone dies; Lastly, the DPS, who get to cosily hide until someone looks at the meter.

The Holy Trinity is something seemingly inescapable unless you're Guild Wars 2, and even then, there are still support builds backing everybody up, or tankier builds to help smooth things over. You have some variants on it—MMORPGs like City of Heroes slap on 'controller' to that number, FF14 has the Dancer, which gets a huge chunk of its damage from buffing others, and WoW has the Augmentation Evoker with the same gimmick.

But for the most part, someone's gonna be hitting hard, someone's gonna be taking the damage, and someone is gonna be standing between the party and an untimely death.

I myself have history with all three—and in my current MMO of choice, FF14, I play just about everything in casual content because hey, I might as well mix things up. But I'll always come back to my damage dealers, mostly because I'm inescapably drawn to rogues and ninjas. I like to stab things and be agile, what can I say?

Most MMORPG player bases are the same. Take a look at WoW or FF14, and you'll find the lion's share of classes dedicated to DPS, both because you only generally need one tank and healer for a dungeon (more for a raid, but the ratio's still skewed in favour of damage dealers), and because let's face it: Who's playing an MMO to accept personal responsibility? Not me.

But you are not the general gaming public, you're readers of PC Gamer. You're the cream of the crop, the tip of the top, the belle of the ball. You are good at videogames. And no matter what anybody tells you, I am not buttering you up so you'll respond to this questionnaire block. I am, however, curious to see if our readership leans one way or the other.

Sick to death of the holy trinity? Got some tank-related gripes to get out of your system? Exhausted by the weight of carrying a whole raid on your healer's shoulders? Feel free to hop into the comments below to share your woes.

I know you've done a million Final Fantasy 14 events already and may hit Skip Cutscene when given the chance, but hear me out: this year's Valentines Day celebration is the best seasonal sidequest FF14 has had in ages. And you should do it before it's gone.

All you have to do is help the holiday NPC Astrid by successfully decorating five overly extravagant cakes in time for the annual "Valentione's Day" celebration. The instanced task is available to solo players, pre-made parties, or matched with strangers. I know it doesn't sound like the usual high-stakes affair that's suitable for Warriors of Light, but don't judge the sidequest too hastily. As long as you don't complete the challenge alone, it rules.

The Pâtisserie—the Valentine's Day limited instance—is patrolled by mobs of hostile, sugar-flinging mammets. You can defend yourself with a special duty action, but their conic AoEs retaliate with a stun and cost you precious seconds in the race to decorate enough Valentione cakes.

The goofy minigame is a messy trial of "don't stand in the shit," like most FF14 encounters, but the premise feels more Mario Party-lite than big boss battle. It's chaotic, kind of like that TLC show, Cake Boss. But instead of a foul-mouthed man from eastern New Jersey, I get to be an even fouler-mouthed cat girl from Limsa Lominsa.

I'm kidding, it's actually way better and the most fun I've had playing FF14 with strangers in a while. My usual experience is to load into a duty, greet the party with a friendly "\o," then fall into my job's usual role. But I ran The Pâtisserie three times—that's two more times than required—and every run had chatty players stopping to joke around or gpose at the end.

I know we've had communal jump puzzles and cute Halloween events in the past, but this year's Valentione's Day sidequest felt like a nice refresh of an otherwise monotonous chore. It's not very often a shared FF14 goal doesn't have me stressed as hell and clenching my jaw, so it was nice to goof off and make a few fleeting friends. It's been ages since FF14 reminded me it's an MMO, and that the formula requires some degree of socializing.

The Final Fantasy 14 Valentione's Day celebration is also stacked with rewards, so if not for some baking camaraderie, then at least do it for the glam. Every run of The Pâtisserie yields event currency based on your performance, and you can trade those tokens for the 2026 goodies. This year's rewards include two outfits, three orchestrion rolls, and new seasonal furnishings I'm not ashamed to stick in my Eorzean abode. Finally.

If you want to try the Final Fantasy 14 Valentione's Day celebration, you've got until Monday, February 16, at 7 am PST to queue up. It begins in Old Gridania (X: 10.2, Y: 9.4) by speaking to Astrid and accepting 'The Icing on the Cake' quest. You'll receive 150 Valentione's Day Chocolates for completing five cakes. It's enough to trade for every reward with some extras to spare.

I've spent an undisclosed, embarrassing number of days playing Final Fantasy 14, and Steam says I've got 370+ hours logged in Phasmophobia. So, what better way is there to lure me into your Eorzean personal quarters than with a Final Fantasy 14 housing tribute to Phasmophobia's most beloved map?

There isn't one; that's the perfect formula. And it's what @ww_Yuki_www has done with their recreation of Phasmophobia's haunted house, 6 Tanglewood Drive. The screenshots posted on X look like something straight out of the co-op horror game—so much so that I assumed they were regular ol' Phas screenshots and almost kept scrolling.

They pasted in video camera and digital thermometer assets from Phasmophobia, but I'm not noting that as a wag of my finger. It's impressive that they so easily blend in, and once I started inspecting the craftsmanship, I couldn't stop playing an FF14-themed game of I Spy with all of the furnishings.

Picking apart intricate builds is just one of those delightful aspects of being an FF14 housing sicko. I'm fairly certain the white light is the Steamed Shumai tabletop item after it's been fully consumed, and that's no ceiling fan hanging above the couch. It's just four Antique Wall Shelves and a Metal Work Lantern in a trench coat.

I also love that this is Phasmophobia's smallest map staged in the largest Final Fantasy 14 house size, and it (understandably) looks like they didn't build the basement or bedrooms. I'm assuming that's due to the MMO's system constraints, but this is impressive as is. Most space in Final Fantasy 14's biggest lots goes unused thanks to the limit on furnishings—you can only have 400 items placed indoors at a time—so players often wall off entire floors of their mansions to create smaller, more detailed spaces like the Tanglewood build.

Yuki has another example on a smaller scale with their recreation of Level 974 from The Backrooms in a Final Fantasy 14 apartment. It may not look like it, but I guarantee the build takes up all 100 of the studio room's furnishing slots.

Resourceful and crafty players have been forcing the MMO's fairly limited housing system to misbehave and "float" objects since A Realm Reborn, but they've only gotten more creative over the years as Square Enix adds new furniture and architecture. Browse any FF14 housing enthusiast's work, and you'll most likely find dozens of items mashed together to create something new. There's an art to forcing dozens of Zabuton Cushions underground, painting them grey, and calling it a stone floor, y'know?

Before we had better alternatives, I used to spend hours vaulting beds into the air with the glitch so I could use their underside to create decorative ceilings. I'd toss in a few indoor ponds too, just so I could force the player camera to do what I wanted at the right angle, and usually end the build with a tragic misclick to break the whole thing.

Third-party tools have (understandably) stepped in and become more popular to circumvent that pain, but you didn't hear that from me.

Much like my terminally online colleague Harvey Randall, I love player housing in just about any MMO, and find some charm in FF14's limitations. Regardless of the approach, the creative solutions borne from finicky physics and furnishing restrictions make for some seriously imaginative builds that I've spent countless hours touring. Screw an actual TV, I want to see solutions like Yuki's—two Dance Poles and a flipped Ironworks Tool Set.

It's become a bit of a running joke in the Final Fantasy 14 community that the MMO will never get Blitzball, with the game's director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) playfully scolding players during Dawntrail's pre-release when talking about Gold Saucer updates. Well, jokes on him, because Blitzball's actually alive and well in FF14.

I have been to a match (big up the Buccaneers), cheered in a crowd, and even gotten myself a special novelty hat, all without a single lick of game code actually dedicated to it. The Etheirys Blitzball League (also known as the EBL) is a roleplay community that hosts and runs in-game tournaments of the fantasy sport.

After attending a game, I simply had to see how it was done—and as it turns out, Blitzball has an entire rules document dedicated to it, one that's over 140 slides long. It's essentially its own TTRPG system—there are lanes, classes, mechanics for blocking, diving, tackling, and even taunting.

Yet despite being complicated, the end result is shockingly fast-paced. Which, as I have explained to me, settling in for a conversation with the EBL's showrunners and rulesmasters, is thanks to a clever use of the game's raid marker system, a /random chat command (which rolls a number between one and 1,000), countdowns, and in-game macros that help keep time.

"What the audience doesn't see is we have an entire channel behind the scenes," Lakaera, who has had a hand in the game's ruleset for years, explains: "All the players are drawn into it, the captains, the referees, everyone who's organizing it. It's constantly ticking down."

"It makes it look like the players just inherently know when the turns go. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there's an entire mechanism we have to run these macros that say: 'We're starting this phase, we're starting that phase, timer up, that sort of thing.'"

When a player wants to take an action, they'll also usually activate their own pre-prepared macros: Given this is roleplay, they add a lot of sauce to 'em for flavour, but no-one's waiting for anybody to write anything down and, bar a couple of pauses to sort out rules disputes, Blitzball moves along real fast for something that takes place entirely in a chat window.

'Blitzball fever'

Inquiring into the history of the sport, I'm told by Ffon, fellow staff member, developer of the system, and co-founder of the EBL itself, that "We weren't actually the first organisation to do this.

"A lot of us here originally came from an organization called Menphina Madness, or the Hydaelyn Blitzball Association (HBA)—they were running Blitzball essentially since the start of Stormblood, when swimming was unlocked."

Ffon describes something called "blitzball fever"—basically "once you start playing, you just can't stop", which is unfortunate, given the HBA was soon to dissolve: "We only had two games because they played a double elimination tournament bracket, so we were very quickly eliminated." Ffon got a taste, and that was that.

The EBL, then called the "offseason", quickly became a home for lost Blitzball players when the HBA closed its doors: "We had a mass migration of players that flooded over into the offseason … We put our heads together, and we developed a crew, and we decided, 'Okay, we're gonna start a league of our own.'"

Lakaera tells me it was a huge task: "We managed to put this thing together in the span of about four months. That's the format, rules evaluation, scheduling, getting the teams and the art assets done. We were essentially putting in like, work-hour hours—like eight hours every other day getting this set up."

Over the years, the EBL's made seasonal rules changes, too—they added a split to the outer lanes, switched up the turn order to make positioning more important, added new position-dependent skills, and more. In fact, tinkering with the blitzball ruleset has become such a project that the server itself has a dedicated testing team, says Ffon:

"In season three, we started to introduce getting more active public feedback, and that developed to the 'open mechanics development' role that we have on the server now. [People with that role] act as our play testers."

'Dice tell a story'

The real sauce, like with most roleplaying, is the feeling of being part of a bigger story—in case you're unfamiliar, blitzball players aren't just sports enthusiasts. They bring their own characters, with their own backstories, personalities, and traits, to the game: Adding this pastime as a chapter in the history of characters some of them have been writing for years.

As I speak to Luka, another staff member, their enthusiasm is infectious: "It just brought so many different people together—it allows you to make new friends and connect with new venues and guilds, and slowly, your character grows side by side with your team or with your fellow blitzers.

"I've watched so many people step beyond their comfort zone, [who were] encouraged by everyone in the EBL to try new things that they thought they never would—that I honestly thought I never would. The only reason I started playing was because Ffon asked me and it seemed interesting … I even run a team now.

"You have teams and whatnot that you can get behind very much like in real life—I'm a Hawaiian Warriors girl, even though our asses are never going to go to the Super Bowl. I'm a Buffalo Bills girl, they're never going to get there. But you rally behind the team."

Ffon agrees, stating that he's seen people really come into their own by engaging with the community and taking the leap towards playing themselves: "On top of just being able to play Blitzball (despite Yoshi-P's wishes, we will die in defiance) … You're learning skills here that you can take elsewhere, like time management, event organization, creativity and plot."

That's not to say the games themselves, and the stories they tell, aren't exciting either. In a way that had me nodding along as a long-time TTRPG nerd, Lakaera explains that the same tension between dice and narrative that can be found in systems like D&D can also be found here:

"Just like with a tabletop system like D&D, dice tell a story, and this is very much an instance of being able to experience dice telling a story—a player managing to roll really high to break through a bunch of players blocking them to take that last-minute shot, situations like that."

For example, Ffon tells me about a make-or-break shot, a fatal dice roll that decided a match: "We're gonna go back to the year 2023, it is day two, where we introduce four new teams. One of these matches is the Radz-at-Han Radiance versus the Azim Steppe Nadaaminators. We are tied three to three, so this means we go to our overtime rules. It's a 5v5 shootout, best of five wins. We tie again, which means we now need to go to sudden death."

In sudden death, both captains meet in the centre of the field and play a final blitzoff to try and score a goal—no goalkeepers, no extra players, it's akin to a duel in the wild west… just, y'know. With a Blitzball. "Everyone's eyes are on Lakaera and myself. Blitzoff happens. Lakaera rolls a 774, I roll a 775. One over on a 1d1000 system."

To give you an idea, the odds of rolling above Lakaera's 774 aren't too bad, around 22.6%. The odds of rolling exactly one higher, though? Literally, well, one in 1,000.

Capell, another staff member, recounts plenty of similar hype moments in their career as well: "I've [played] a lot … The moments that are most hype are definitely the ones where—for example, I remember someone was blocked by three individuals in the midfield, but despite that (the dice roll how the dice roll) they managed to make the shot and score despite being blocked by three people."

Ffon chimes in: "It was three blocks, two dives, and the goalkeeper had a +30 to catch," explains Ffon, "Whereas the [shooting character] only had a +5 bonus. So they rolled a 105, but they spiked past everyone."

'We all want to be heroes'

The EBL has made some real-world impacts, too—not just in bringing people out of their comfort zone, but also with actual charity drives for groups like Extra Life, which funds treatments and healthcare for children's hospitals. One staff member, who helps to head up a lot of these initiatives, tells me it's a point of pride not just for the good they do in the world, but the good it engenders in others, too.

"Everything that we do with the charity is a proud moment … It was (as far as doing charity work, doing stuff for others) about the feeling that it cultivates in oneself.

"I know that sounds really cheesy, but I think the proudest moment is seeing that feeling develop in others and that feeling spread, and everyone really become passionate about it and embracing it as 'this just isn't an add-on to Blitzball, this is part of a Blitzball for our community'."

Kaisa explains—and this is an opinion I share—how MMOs can arm people who otherwise might not have the means to do good in the real world, too: "It can be really hard in-person sometimes to feel free to have that kind of connection with each other … but gaming, where we all have this shared passion, we're already kind of connected.

"It becomes a little bit easier, especially for those who have social anxiety, or might be neurodivergent—as far as [Blitzball goes], it really is about how, when you do stuff for others, it makes you happier. It makes your life better. You then start to be more kind, even outside of the game, you start to think more about the world. It does have those ripple effects … Every year, everybody's like, okay, what are we doing for charity?"

I take a moment to paraphrase current Critical Role DM Brennan Lee Mulligan, who once said that roleplay in TTRPGs can be training or practice to "do the brave thing", and Kaisa agrees wholeheartedly:

"That's the foundation of roleplay, or even playing fantasy games—in our daily lives, we're often confronted with limitations. 'You can't do that, you can't do this,' and everybody wants to kind of imagine what's possible with fewer restrictions. … We all want to be heroes."

Blitzball and beyond

Turns out, blitzball isn't the only sport people want to act out in FF14, either, as Capell tells me: "Not just Blitzball has come out of this RP community, but a bunch of people who came together [including myself] have built a community based around professional wrestling."

There's also a chocobo racing league, an upcoming magitek racing league—the RP community in FF14 is a web of connections, events, and organisations of players doing some incredible stuff."

As a matter of fact, the EBL's started an entire network, as Lakaera explains: "We started something called ESN, or Etheirys Sports Network … We've kind of left it as an open forum now to make it a hub where the different sports organizers can communicate, potentially discuss cross-promotion or different ways to cooperate with each other, and voice what their schedules or plans are so that we can collaborate smoothly and exist in the same ecosystem."

The way the sport's brought this slice of the FF14 community together really is a marvel. "We have people from all over the shard, it's not a single server," another staff member adds. "People come together to celebrate Final Fantasy 10 and bring in their own creativity, fun, their personality, into it.

"What makes it special is in the sense of belonging that forms along the way, where strangers become friends and shared passions turn into lasting bonds, and everyone feels like they're part of something bigger."

If any of this sounds like any sort of fun to you at all, I highly recommend—if you're playing on the US Crystal data center—to check out the Discord for yourself. "We always welcome people," says Ffon, "Even if you want to learn how to play, if you just want to be a spectator, if you just want to be a wallflower—we love our spectators—we love people that just help spread the word about what we do."