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Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very personal MMORPG column. Every different week, I’ll be sharing my ideas on the style, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we have all taken with no consideration, and, sometimes, bringing in visitor writers to speak about their MMO of alternative.
Some time again, I proclaimed that the old-school MMOs all of us used to play are lifeless, and that now we have killed them. I nonetheless largely stand by that opinion, however I now have a significant exception: The outdated sense of discovery, group, and mythology in these MMORPGs is alive and nicely in an air-pocket, deep below a sea of disseminated information: It lives on in problem working.
I spoke with Final Fantasy 14’s “Solo Only”, otherwise known as RathGames, who I’ve been following on YouTube for some time. Rath has been chewing his manner via the sport’s 400+ hour most important questline in significantly extra time, for one crucial motive: He performs the sport solo.
No market board, no quest rewards, no AI get together members in dungeons—Rath takes content material designed for 4 to eight individuals and routinely beats the chances, crafting practically each bit of drugs he makes use of himself. One boss, who has a mechanic that completely requires a celebration, took him 85 days to beat—levelling a job high enough that he could obliterate the fight before a certain death came for him.
The question is: Why? Why any of this? For Rath, it all started with RuneScape: “I played RuneScape a lot of my life, and they have an Iron Man mode. And for a very long time, I had thought about what, if anything, you could do to get that over to Final Fantasy 14.
“One day, I just decided, You know what, I’ll just do it. I don’t have to think about it any more than I already have. Just log in, make the character.”
His challenge running career didn’t start with FF14, though. “I just like doing challenge runs in games in general. It’s not even something that I’ll think about before starting. Like when I first played Breath of the Wild, my first playthrough of that, I came up with the funny little ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’ playthrough.”
He managed to dig up a Reddit thread he posted about eight years in the past and share it with me: “It wasn’t for a video or something. It was only for me. There was a person in entrance of me that instructed me to do some issues, after which he was a ghost. I’m not gonna imagine something he says, I’m not gonna try this. I am unable to work together with these lifeless individuals. There’s no manner Impa continues to be alive. It’s been 100 years. I do not imagine any of this.
“That was the first challenge run that I did that I ever put anywhere aside from just in my own head.”
Something solo, something new
“Sometimes it’s definitely for the bit, don’t get me wrong,” Rath says, but for the majority of games he plays, he says he likes to do so “during the discovery period. When the discovery period is gone, and everybody has the ‘efficient ways’ that they want to do things, I will generally ebb towards the efficient way to do it.
“I will push myself towards a discovery period, because I’m doing the stupidest challenge you’ve ever heard of in your life, because that means I get to explore the game like it’s brand new, and I have no idea what I could possibly use.”
As somebody who loudly, publicly, and professionally proclaimed that the invention interval in MMORPGs was lifeless, buried, decomposing, and gone, this rang a loud gong in my head. I point out this to Rath, about how MMOs do not fairly have the invention component anymore, and he agrees:
“Absolutely, especially with a game like 14, where there isn’t all that much outside of the brand new, big feature releases … There’s that very big, fun and exciting discovery period when those happen, and then just like two months later, people have poured so much time into it that every little detail is known.”
Rath, in distinction, likes “having a space where I can just slowly figure things out, and get to that old RuneScape feeling that I grew up on,” although he is fast to make clear that he likes effectivity, “especially in games that take a lot of grinding. I enjoy knowing what the efficient way to do it is, so that I can save some of my time.
However, “some video games I need to have the invention in, and a few video games I need to be instructed what to do. And Final Fantasy 14 is a type of video games I at all times wished the invention bit for, positively.”
As for what keeps him motivated? The “apparent one” is his audience, Rath says, and the excitement people gift him when it comes to the next release—as well as the stream-chat company during Solo Only’s often-gruelling grinds: “I get to hang around with them whereas I’m doing the exhausting bits, so it makes it a superb bit simpler.”
The other is a soulsian sense of joy and pride. “Susano particularly, individuals can hear it in my voice—it is simply: The total weight of the world has been lifted off of you. Nothing else issues apart from that second you’ve accomplished it. It is over … It’s the identical as once you lastly beat Ornstein and Smough in your first playthrough of Dark Souls.
“You’ve been hitting your head against this boss for three hours, and you keep summoning people, and they all die immediately as soon as they get in. And then you finally do it four hours later. It’s that feeling. It’s just the more stress and time put into the requirements to get that feeling. I think the bigger it is at the end.”
For the love of the game
Solo Only hasn’t always been able to follow the exact letter of its own challenge—FF14’s main questline does require a mandatory completion of the Crystal Tower, an “Alliance Raid” you literally cannot enter without at least three party members. Rath managed to keep the spirit of the challenge alive, however, by tackling it with other solo-only members of his Discord community, who minimally interacted with each other once they were inside.
That identical group—the type I, as soon as once more, loudly proclaimed had fallen by the wayside on this very web site not way back—has been “humbling,” says Rath. “not only [to watch them do] the challenge that I created, and enjoy it as much as they do, but also to witness people do things way smarter than me.”
In reality, Rath’s group’s been theorycrafting collectively, too—like the way you used to, earlier than the reign of web sites like IcyVeins or info-Discords like The Balance. Which I’m not dissing, right here—I take advantage of each on a regular basis as a result of I, too, like effectivity, however you may’t deny that the panorama has modified. In a problem run, although? You and your mates are by yourself.
“For me to get through A Realm Reborn [took] a year … The general solo theory crafting that we have gotten down to now, with all of the (much smarter than me) people that are coming up with cool ideas in the Discord? A Realm Reborn probably takes like a month.”
From what I can inform of Rath (and from what he tells me), soloing FF14’s helped him get out of the MMO reside service rat-race: “I don’t have to catch up. I don’t have to be [best-in-slot geared], I don’t have to worry about getting all my dailies in and then getting the optimal items … I’m not stressing. I’m not trying to be the best possible gamer ever in those dungeons. I’m just having fun.”
That old-school MMO feeling, it appears, is behind a door any of us may stroll via—you’ve got simply acquired to search out the problem run that sparks your creativeness. Rath has some phrases of encouragement in that regard: “Just give yourself a crazy little idea, go do it for five minutes, find out it sucks, and then move it over a little bit so it doesn’t suck.
“I’m not the one which tells you the way to play a videogame, and I’m not the one which tells you the way to like a videogame. That’s all you, y’know? And so whether or not you determine to manifest that via enjoying videogames in actually bizarre methods”—Rath gives the example of a ‘dog only’ playthrough of Skyrim—”someone’s gonna play that and so they’re not gonna hate it, and so they’re gonna assume it is enjoyable, and so they’re gonna assume it is a good time.
“It’s all about what you want, and you have to recognise when you don’t want to do it anymore. You have to recognise that things don’t always have to be perfect and come with a perfect ending, they can just be done, and that’s okay.” Words to reside by.
Crucially, although, you should not “base your entire experience around whether or not it finds success in YouTube … if that’s what you want to try, please do, I don’t want to discourage you,” however “it will do better if you enjoy the thing you’re doing. If you’re just doing it to try and have big fancy YouTube fame, it’s not gonna go as well ’cause you’re gonna hate it, I promise.”
While the huge ecosystem—the physique—of these outdated MMOs I used to like merely can not exist in our trendy period, it is humbling to know the spirit is being stored alive, each with Rath’s completely ill-advised heroes journey, and with different related challenge-runs. Punk rock did not die, it simply went underground. Now when you’ll excuse me, I’ve acquired some humble pie to tuck into.
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