It feels a little like everything's on Discord, nowadays. A developer wants to share news about a game? Discord. Want to run a tabletop game? Discord. Want to organise a meet-up in the real world? I kid you not, Discord. I went to a coffee morning this weekend and was flashbanged with an ask for my Discord handle. It is inescapable.
It's not the best to have everything in one spot—it feels like I'm in as many servers as I have hair follicles nowadays, and while I'm waiting for the inevitable Ragnarök (the mythological apocalypse, not the game) of the app with worry, I can now tell you that we've at least, in part, got MMORPG Final Fantasy 11 to blame.
That's as per the app's co-creator and current CTO, Stanislav Vishnevskiy who, in an interview with Famitsu (thanks, Siliconera) revealed that the Discord we know, love, and have 40 servers perma-muted in for emojis was in fact inspired by Square Enix's first MMO (the following quotes are machine translated):
"When I was a student, I was obsessed with Final Fantasy 11, and I made something like a prototype of Discord as software that could be used while playing the game. From there, I moved to California and joined a company called GREE, where I met co-founder Jason Citron. I thought it would be nice to make the communication tool we created available to even more people, so I started developing Discord in earnest."
I can't blame him for just deciding to make his own proto-Discord as a student. As a relatively young millennial, I remember the hallowed days of cassette tapes—as well as the ancient internet's chthonic gods: Teamspeak, Skype, and Ventrilo. They now lie in the bottom of the abyss, as Chronos slew his father, and Hades slew Chronos. Well, I mean, you can still use all three—but Discord's become the default.
I have a feeling that's because, while the progression from the days of dial-up has certainly made voice-chat simpler, Discord is so straightforward you can set up a server with your eyes closed. Trying to use something else is like trying to pitch someone on a search engine other than Google, or a diehard D&D player on a different tabletop system. It's gonna take some doing for very little gain and we're all already there.
What's interesting is, from what I can tell, the creator of Discord's love affair with FF11 (and, naturally, FF14) wa a part of the app's infancy circa 2015-2016: "We used to have so many commands DEDICATED to FF14 numerous different databases at the time," writes user Scarletchild on the r/ffxiv subreddit. "I miss this being something that was known, and when I point it out to people, they don't believe me. You can't even find this sh*t on the Discord wiki page."
I decided to do some digging, and while I couldn't turn up a mythologised about page with a direct name drop, there is this version of the site shared courtesy of webdesignmuseum.org, which has plenty of FF14 namedrops, a couple screenshots, and spoof users with Final Fantasy-appropriate usernames. There's also this AMA from 2015 which promised that same level of integration:
"We want to integrate with Final Fantasy once we get bugs cleaned up. We want to link your Lodestone profile so Discord will show who you are in game. We want to have Discord server owners to sync with FC rosters so permissions are automatically set up. We also want to add slash commands to search items on XIVDB and post them into Discord chat."
Anyway, Vishnevskiy's still playing Final Fantasy, and has been enjoying Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail tremendously even if the reception's been a bit mixed: "I took a week off work," he admits, "most of my jobs are up to level 100. My main job was Machinist, but now I'm playing Pictomancer." Bob Ross comes for us all.
