TYFP

Thinking of gaming stories; I’ve been remembering some of my own. One of my favorite stories is a you-had-to-be-there from 2018, during the Stormblood years of Final Fantasy XIV. 

During a seemingly routine quest the player is tasked with defeating 2 red chocobos. Unlike routine quests, this one had two ingredients that when mixed together, caused Yanxia to become the scene of an apocalypse and a bitter battle for survival. Those two ingredients? The first was that the Red Chocobos were not player duty specific, meaning other characters could interact with and therefore be hurt by, the chocobos’ attacks; and second, choco-meteor.

Choco-meteor is a multi-hit tracking AOE attack. The normal strategy to counter attacks like this are to simply run around in a small area until all the hits have been resolved by the server. As long as you are moving you will make it out of the successive AOEs that appear beneath your feet.

This turned into pure mayhem, as on release, thousands of players arrived at the location and caused thousands of red chocobo’s to spawn. The quest area was so full of chocobos and raining fire balls that most players wandering into the area during peak time were simply vaporized before even spawning their own birds to kill.

Even on low population servers, the deaths were almost unavoidable. 

I managed to get my clear by spawning my chocobos, then dodging my way away from the battlefield, careful not to aggo any other birds, where I could safely kill mine. 

While it wasn’t as bad as the corrupted blood incident of World of Warcraft days’ past; the event will live on in memes and stories for years to come.

In fact the memes and general reaction no doubt inspired the Red Chocobo battle in the Bozjan Southern Front.

And living up to the horror stories told by those who survived the original war, the rematch was as gnarly as expected, if not worse. The Hunt for Red Choctober, as the skirmish is called, is a test of mettle (you seen what I did there). The fight is a storm of AOEs, all of which will hit harder and harder than the last if you make a mistake, most overlapping, and with varying tells and graphics. The battle becomes almost impossible to lose with the Lost Reflect action available, however.

It makes me high-five happy that player memes have this impact over the game’s outcome and creation. Granted, MMO’s tend to have a closer relationship between developer and player, and its not really that uncommon to see devs give these kind of nods to their fans.

I think that might be one of the reasons MMOs are my favorite style of game.