Summary
Engaging with other players in an online game while acting as a character is something of a popular niche. It accounts in no small part for the resurgence of interest inGrand Theft Auto Onlinein recent years, and it leads to some incredible player festivities inFinal Fantasy 14.
Roleplayers make Etheirys, the world ofFinal Fantasy 14, a busy place.Like theirGrand Theft Autocounterparts,Final Fantasy’s players maintain a crowded social calendar with multiple events running every day, ranging from shops and restaurants to fighting tournaments and sporting events. Roleplayers have brought the beloved Blitzball minigame fromFinal Fantasy 10to the online experience, they’ve held massive festivals, they host charity events, and they have honed performing arts in the game to something precise and impressive.
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Nyte Snow, owner of the roleplay restaurant Abbiocco on the Crystal datacenter’s Diabolos server, hosts one of the annual tentpole events in theFinal Fantasy 14community, a Feast Reborn. At the end of every summer, owners of all kinds of food venues gather under Nyte’s organization and put on a street fair celebrating food that includes real-world cooking lessons. Snow spoke to Game Rant about the roleplaying community in Etheirys. She credits some of her own success to the way the COVID-19 pandemic changed people’s priorities–a sentiment shared bya theater company inFallout 76.
“I don’t know if it was powered by the pandemic and not being able to go out like we used to or if it’s just the different type of experience players want. It just seems that there’s support for it here and acceptance of it here and just acceptance on a really broad level. You know, people want to hang out with their friends and they want to hang out like in social settings. And there’s less stigma about doing it online now thanks to the pandemic that there was beforehand.”
The Impact of The ‘Thanos Snap’ on A Feast Reborn
After coming from bothWorld of WarcraftandElder Scrolls Online, it’sFinal Fantasy 14’s roleplaying community that Snow loves. One of the most telling experiences Snow had with the community came at the second annual A Feast Reborn. Since long before the game’s rise to preeminence in the MMO space, its servers have been targeted byrecurring directed denial of service attacks, seeking to destabilize them and boot people out of the game.This happened in the middle of Snow’s major annual event.
Snow, who regularly describes herself as a “chicken with her head cut off” in the weeks before a festival, was heartened greatly by the way the community met the moment. Instead of causing chaos–or worse, disinterest–at the event, the attendees, vendors, and performers stepped in where someone was “Thanos Snapped.”
“During A Feast Reborn last year, we had what we calledthe Thanos Snap. The game got hit with a DDoS attack, and like half of the people there just all of a sudden, pokeballed [a colloquialism players use for disconnecting]. Vendors, fairgoers, poof, they vanish on us. 50% of the population, poof, so we call it the Thanos Snap. So suddenly, there were booths that were empty, but there were still people there, and vendors who had more than one person at their booth would slip over to the other booth and manage the other booth for the person who was Thanos Snapped so the roleplay could continue. We saw that kind of community where everybody was just there to support each other and keep things going. My bands vanished. The band that was playing went poof, and one bard stood up and just started playing and kept the music going. I was running the Taco2Go takeaway, because the taco wagon had vanished. You know, everybody was just like, it came together.”
That kind of camaraderie is common in the roleplaying community, and fuels the ambitious events players organize. Another annual event, Mogstock, has had similarsuccess storiesbeing supported both by the community they fostered and by the game’s staff themselves. Both Mogstock and A Feast Reborn are held on the Crystal datacenter, which has become the unofficial hub of roleplaying inFinal Fantasy 14, and in turn help cement its status.
Player Variety Helped A Feast Reborn Become a Success
Crystal’s successes largely grew out of being the datacenter where Balmung, the original and largest unofficial roleplaying server inFinal Fantasy 14, was housed. When the ability to travel between servers on a datacenter was introduced, roleplayers quickly expanded across the entire Crystal datacenter.
Though both Mogstock’s organizers and Snow expressed some exasperation with the oversaturation of night clubs manned by Twitch disk jockeys over recent years, Snow was quick to point out the wide range of roleplayers that exist in the game, and especially on Crystal–anothertrait shared withGrand Theft Autoroleplayers. She even pointed out the way the community is respectful of others regardless of how they find their fun in the game.
“There’s such a wide variety of players in this game. And there’s such a wide variety of roleplay in this game … This is a really friendly community, it’s really welcoming. I know this isn’t like a discussion on whether adult roleplay or erotic roleplay is appropriate in a game or appropriate roleplay period, but I found that the community here is not really all that judgmental of it. If people want to do it, and they’re consenting adults, you know, they can do what they want. And they can work alongside a venue that has a sideline as a brothel or something like that. They have no problem with it, because roleplay is roleplay and there’s no room for judgment.”
Vendors at A Feast Reborn do include several free companies–the guilds ofFinal Fantasy 14–that engage in adult roleplay, though their presentation at the festival is entirely focused on their food. Shoulder-to-shoulder with these companies are bars, fight clubs, museums, and bookstores.
A Feast Reborn will be held just afterFinal Fantasy 14’s 6.5 update, Growing Light, on October 7-8, 2023 starting at 3PM Eastern on the Crystal Datacenter’s Diabolos server, at the Goblet’s 14th ward, plot 35.
Final Fantasy 14is available now for PC, PS4, and PS5, with an Xbox Series X/S version launching in Spring 2024.
