Considering the doubt I had going into the Stormblood expansion, I find it odd, yet comforting, that the fires are still stoked as fiercely for FFXIV for both Pie and me. While getting into raiding and experiencing that little bit of progression has certainly been nice, it's been perhaps even more meaningful to just sort of go slowly through consuming other supplementary elements. We've been taking time to discover the new classes, explore changes to current ones, appreciate in more detail the zones through finding aether currents without a compass, and even re-playing the highlight battles of the expansion.

And in the height of it all, a Netflix show, Dad of Light, comes in based on a true story that revolves around a son getting his emotionally estranged father to play FFXIV with him. At first, I kinda dismissed the idea of watching it because I thought it would be contrived and that the game-centric elements would come off as out-of-place and jarring. One night, we decided to give it a whirl and found it surprisingly engaging, heartfelt, funny, and touching. It just ended up creating this fever-pitch between us about our own hype which has been rather evident in the last couple years of the comic.

It seems that at this point, with their supposed 10 million-strong player base, everything that the FFXIV team touches seems to be gold. It's really amazing to me to think that, in the time since WoW, SOOO many games have been trotted out as potential WoW killers with nowhere even remotely close to their subscriber numbers. So many games that simply looked to crib WoW's style or has one or a couple gimmicks that fell absolutely flat (ugh...and we bought into that hype too >_< ). Now we have FFXIV, revived from the disgraced dead, to become a titan of the MMO space, and I can't help but wonder; when will people start pondering what the next FFXIV killer will be? Or perhaps this game is seen as an aberration- the last in a dying breed of game.