FFXIV had it's second anniversary recently, and celebrated it with a pretty interesting in-game event.
The first part of the event was the standard low level FATE. Only the FATE involved defeating rapidly multiplying "bugs" and "regressions", in a nice nod to the challenges faced by the technical team.
In the second part of the event SE broke the fourth wall. A dream sequence sends you to the "Eighteenth Floor", which is a reference to the floor the FFXIV team occupies at SE. There several of the devs are present via in-game avatars but using their real identities. You can talk to each one, and they'll say something about their role and the game.
There's also some potential spoilers about future content.
At the end, the devs all gather around you. Yoshi-P apologizes yet again for 1.0 and promises to keep doing better and listening to the playerbase. And they wish you well.
It's a really sweet event. It's odd, but it's the sort of event that on paper doesn't sound that good, since it explicitly breaks the fourth wall. But it worked quite well even if it was a little hokey. Or maybe it worked because it was a little hokey. It's very nice to see such enthusiasm from the devs.
FF14's events are generally hokey in interesting ways, to break up how serious the main story (usually) is. Like how the FF13 and FF11 crossover events had the actual characters, and the FF11 one let you fight kaiju Shantotto. I also remember that one of the Easter events had you going around disabling ADS units that the organizers were thinking were just pretty eggs to be painted. At the end, someone comes up and thanks you for (accidentally) preventing massive nuclear destruction.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's not forget the New Years celebrations, either!
Well, FFXIV's events are somewhat weird usually. That's certainly true. I do like how FFXIV hits different tones in different sections. MSQ is serious, high fantasy. Hildibrand is outrageous slapstick. Events are just weird.
DeleteBut this anniversary event was a bit more than just weird, verging onto the "mawkishly sentimental" side.