I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV for nine years, which is a mildly alarming sentence to write down. Nine years is long enough for jobs to change, friendships to begin and end, and hobbies to come and go. Some of my real-life friendships haven’t lasted...
I love a good character creator. Hair? Yes. Faces? Yes. Body options, makeup, tattoos, scars, colours, voices? Yes. Let me rotate the character properly and see what I’m doing while we’re at it. My considered position on character customization is essentially: yes....
An RPG can give you an enormous map, hundreds of NPCs, several cities and enough map markers to make the local cartographer quietly resign. None of that necessarily makes its world feel alive. We’ve all seen game worlds that are technically full of things but somehow...
The kingdom is burning. An ancient evil has returned. Reality itself may collapse by Thursday. Anyway, somebody in the village has lost their cat. We have priorities. RPG side quests have a peculiar ability to derail even the most urgent heroic journey. The main story...
An RPG gives you three dialogue options. You think about what your character believes, pick the answer that feels right, and prepare for whatever follows. Five minutes later, everyone is standing in exactly the same room discussing exactly the same problem, which...
