chasing daybreak

✦ multifandom | fanfic & art | screenshots

final fantasy, dragon age, fire emblem: three houses, baldur’s gate, dragon's dogma 2, elden ring, cosmere, clair obscur: expedition 33, the occasional star wars, & a few other interests. my blog runs on a queue!

• ao3 • writing masterlist • my writing • my art • oc-tober 2025 • ffxiv gposes • dd2 screenshots • gifts/commissions for me • fic recs + reading list

I've been thinking about this a lot recently since I do want to play Dawntrail, but I also have no desire to start paying for a ffxiv sub and log in regularly ever again.

I stopped playing because I was very busy and I needed to prioritize my job over playing an MMO because I am very bad at managing my time in a game that never ends. When you're self-employed and are responsible for enforcing your own work hours it's very easy to tell yourself that you're just going to play for a few more hours, and then get work done.

It's never just a few hours.

Ultimately it was easier for me to cancel my sub and remove ffxiv as a distraction completely. I was pretty burnt out on it when I quit, and the more I thought about it the more I knew I didn't want to play DT at launch. I didn't mean to take this much time off from a game I enjoy, it's just one month rolled into another and then whoops two years went by like it was nothing.

but also think just saying "i didn't mean to take this much time off" like an mmo is job that you clock into and take vacation hours from is a little... hm. dystopian.

And now I kind of have. Anxiety. About picking it up again—not about group content or navigating the chat or messing up mechanics, but more about having it as a thing I feel like I have to play or gpose every day because I'm subbed.

Mods and third-party tools are also a mental barrier—at this point I don't want to spend a lot of time setting things up, I don't want to mess around with it. At all. I don't want to spend more than 10 minutes on it. I don't want the desire to gpose and mess around with fun screenshots to become more important than making fanart and fanfic.

I enjoy having my shaders and limited mods (Aureia needs her half-elezen ears), but one of the reasons I don't tend to return to games I modded in the past—DAI is one of them—is because I don't want to have to re-mod the game. I can't just sit down and play, there's a whole other level of set-up I have to do. I know I don't have to, but it's not as easy as saying "just play without mods." When you started out with a modded experience, it's hard to flip back to the unmodded one. Maybe this is why I primarily prefer playing on console now so I don't have to make that choice.

ffxiv is both a source of great joy and creativity. I would not have started my art journey without it, and I also wouldn't have gotten back into writing fanfic. But xiv is also where I experienced the worst social fandom blow-up I have ever had. Broken friendships suck and take time to heal, but I still have negative feelings about the social aspects of ffxiv and how it changes people. And in some ways it does contribute to my fear that I am going to be ignored or abandoned in-game. Is it a rational fear? Probably not. But it's there.

I feel guilty for even voicing this in the first place since I don't want my aversion to being subbed to make anyone feel bad for staying subbed. I just don't think I am the type of person who enjoys the MMO aspects of the MMO—I like the story and the characters and the world and the lore, but I also need the games I play to have an endpoint. I like having things to work on in a game because I like the feeling of accomplishment, but I don't like when the amount of things to do is infinite and ever-growing because the developers keep adding new material with no end in sight.

I want to wander the xiv world again. I want to go out and harvest a bunch of plants as a botanist in the zones I like with the music on full blast. I want to do gold quests I never did. I want to replay sections of MSQ I enjoy and or job quests I love. I miss sitting in the Crystarium working on my little crafting projects and making a bunch of housing items to sell on the MB. I want to play Dawntrail and see what the next chapter of the game is like.

But I also get a twist in my stomach whenever I think about it and I put it off for another month.

out of context xiv tomodachi life pt 23