forgotten footfalls engraved in ash

05 Aug, 2026

I picked up Final Fantasy XIV sometime mid-2022.¹ I was finishing the final year of my Master degree, except I already knew I would be repeating it, because very little was done. I was in the middle of an internship that was remote and not really my cup of tea. In the middle of all this stress, my gender was having a stroke too. There was no better time for me to fall for a massive time-sink of an MMORPG with free trial up to level 60 including the award-winning Heavensward expansion, and so I did.

It was not the first MMO I attempted, I tried my fair share before. The one I stuck with the longest before was probably RIFT, the one I appreciated the most was Guild Wars 2, while the one I thought had the coolest vibe was Lord of the Rings Online. XIV felt unique to me at the time in that I didn't feel like it was trying to sell me something. It was selling me on the story. The other games were trying to get me to log in daily for some rewards. In XIV, I was logging in to hang out on the bench glitch-moved onto my friends' house gate.

I came out during in the summer of 2022, then sped through the base game campaign, so that in October 2022 I change my character into the girl she was really meant to be. By May 2023 I was done dragging myself through the Endwalker story, which was great, but emotionally exhausting, so before continuing with patch story, I took a few months off just doing Island Sanctuary. Now I'm more or less up to date with everything, but the question remains:

what now?

I came back from the Berlin Fanfest this week, and managed to log back into the game, narrowly avoiding destruction of my in-game house, which I haven't entered in quite a while, because I largely stopped playing.

While my closest friends and I were catching up to the main story, we were somewhat bonded by the ritual of playing treasure maps on Sundays. Now that tradition has mostly waned. Some of them are still playing regularly, be it for savage raids, or relic grinding. I, instead, fell into the trap of "what am I still doing here?" and not because I don't like the Dawntrail expansion. More so, I just felt like I did all I wanted, got most of the story I wanted².

However, most ironically, as I came back from my trip, but still on vacation from work, I logged in, stopped the demolition of my house, and then thought: "oh, what if I clear out some quests I haven't finished", and gained a few levels on a character job I don't care about. What?

Earlier, I mentioned that I had special appreciation for Guild Wars 2. This comes mostly from its somewhat weird design. You don't walk around and pick up quests and clear them. Most quests just get picked up automatically when you're in an area: you see the objective for the given area in the corner, and it's usually to kill $x$ bandits or collect $y$ thingamajigs. The main story is excluded from this and works like a normal quest chain. But if you wanted to work through a complete list of everything, it's pretty easy to get started on it, you just have to run around the map and mash buttons. A question lingers: am I a completionist? What do I want to do in this game? Do I want to craft the cool looking relic for my class? And so GW2 remains on the game shelf and not in active play.

It is joined on my shelf by two other Final Fantasy games I bought, VII Rebirth and XV. I recently finished VII Remake and I really liked how the story was tied together, and how it was rooted in a small number of locations that felt like they had a lot going on with their fairly short list of side quests. Then I launched VII Rebirth, played through the intro chapter³, then got a lecture about a trading card game, a crafting system, a leveling system, and got thrown out into an open world. All of which reminded me of XV: both games have great story and world vibes, but are encumbered with systems that I can't be bothered to care about, that remind me of Ubisoft games in a bad way.

This is not to say that I only play games that have finite end points. One recent counterexample would be Euro Truck Simulator 2, where I've almost hit level 50 on my character, and I just enjoy picking up the game, with police disabled, and wobbling around in a truck with some cargo, marking more cities as visited (the recent Nordic Horizons expansion is especially pretty with its midnight sun/polar day areas). Usually I can just hop on for an hour or two, do one cargo job, then log off and play something else.

A weirder counterexample would be Destiny 2. This is a fairly open-ended shooter game, as much as a recently killed MMO can be. I am behind on expansion story and I've never played any of the raids in there, both of which give me future points to end on. But I find that I enjoy logging in and just doing a little pew pew. One big advantage D2 has over XIV is that the controls don't change much between guns, but the gameplay does, so I can easily try out something else the game has to offer, and it doesn't feel stale even when rerunning the same content.

Destiny 2 is also a funny example of another thing at play in my mind. See, it's always been a game where every 3 months whatever grind you've done becomes worthless, abilities get reshuffled, level caps get increased, and you have to get on the seasonal weekly quests again, or you'll feel like you're missing out. It was peak FOMO when I was playing it, especially with the seasonal content prone to disappearing when the next expansion would come out. But now, it is an officially, formally, dead game. There are no more level caps to increase. Most of the content in the game was reconfigured to provide decent rewards, because nothing more is going to happen. There are still weekly quests, daily quests, endless chase of small bounty quests that get picked up automatically. But they don't feel that relevant anymore. Sure, if you miss the weekly cutoff, you won't get some useful boosts to the level cap chase. But in a dead game, what does it matter? This honestly makes me more interested in playing it than I was for many years now. It's almost as if it's a single-player game that I've always wished it to be.

I've been struggling with two things mainly in XIV.

One is that I main the Scholar job, which has an absurdly simple one-button rotation if your party knows what they're doing. This causes me to doze off in voice chat sometimes. One solution would be to change to something more interesting, but that would take some learning, and more importantly, more leveling. I don't like doing the repeatable content very much, I definitely prefer FATEs over dungeons, but leveling dungeons might just be the most effective way. Another solution would be to wait for Evercold and hope that the new Evolved mode for jobs is more involving and maybe it will be just fine to play Scholar then. Yet another solution: they mentioned at Fanfest that we'll be able to bring two players + two chocobos into dungeons, so maybe that would be less annoying than roulette queues.

My second struggle is that I have a fractional completionist in me (as you heard from the Euro Truck mention) and sometimes I get the itching to do everything there is. But XIV is full of content, and content that does not really feel worth doing. Maybe the yellow quests are good in a world-building way, but from the number of them I kind of doubt it? And relic grind is definitely not the kind of content that makes me feel like I'm doing something fun and useful.

Which, by its phrase, brings me to an interesting observation: I feel bad about repetitive grind throughout the year, but the moment I'm on vacation I'm fine with doing a little useless button mashing? Is it that wasting time on vacation is fine, but wasting time during workyear is not? Is my worksona taking over me? Or is it that I promised myself I'd write more blogs on vacation, and leveling pugilist lets me procrastinate from it?