MMO Accessibility (Final Fantasy 14)

I’ve played around 300 hours of Final Fantasy 14 over the past two months. It’s reminding me why I love MMOs, as well as why I struggle to find them an accessible game genre.

A lot of what I have to say in this essay is me talking specifically about Final Fantasy 14, but can fairly broadly be applied to general discussions of MMOs as a genre. If I say something in this article that you don’t feel applies to your favourite MMO… that’s great. I’m aware not every specific here will apply to every game that exists globally within the genre of MMOs, but I do believe that as someone with experience of the genre that most of these accessibility critiques can be applied pretty broadly.

As a player with a coordination based disability, one of the first accessibility barriers that I inevitably encounter in any MMO is dexterity based. Broadly speaking, most MMOs feature a system of abilities on cooldowns, with high level characters expected to manage easily 20 or more inputs during a standard raid. I personally struggle to be precise with that many inputs on PC using a mouse and keyboard, gravitating to MMOs with controller support such as Final Fantasy 14. These can in some ways be a little more mechanically accessible for me, but do still pose barriers during play.

Looking at Final Fantasy 14’s controller based input system, during a raid I need to rapidly switch between ABXY and D-Pad directional inputs, modified using L2 or R2 button holds, in rapid succession. Each face button on my controller controls at least two different abilities, with input order and timing highly important. Certain positions on the controller are also easier or more difficult to reach during gameplay, with moves mapped to the D-Pad for example more difficult to access while also running.

The FF14 controller control scheme also by default only supports 16 moves being available. To access any further inputs requires using R1 to tab to a separate set of 16 inputs, further complicating reaching specific moves in a rush, and adding more commands to each button’s potential layout.

And you generally can’t just overlevel yourself to get through tricky content the same way that you might in a single player RPG, due to certain content forcing you down to a set stat level temporarily. While some MMOs will allow you to play with overlevelled friends in order to just see the story progress, any amount of level sync mandatory content can create a challenging barrier to progression.

The combination of needing accurate and repetitive button presses can be difficult from a coordination perspective, but combat can also be overwhelming in MMOs from a cognitive perspective too.

For even the most basic character class MMO players will need to track and manage multiple cooldowns, on screen meters, status icons, damage areas, and situational moves requiring timing or positioning. A lot of character classes will have abilities with limited time frames for effectiveness, such as tanks popping skills before death to stay alive, or DPS classes attacking a weak spot while exposed. The visual overload of systems to track can get pretty overwhelming, and ignoring one or more of these systems will turn the tide against the player very quickly.

Outside of combat MMOs tend to include further cognitive accessibility barriers such as overwhelming numbers of gameplay systems, mechanics, quests, currencies, and options. Using Final Fantasy 14 as our example, at present in my personal playthrough I am coming up toward the end of the Heavensward expansion content, and toward the beginning of the Stormblood expansion. I’m going to try and summarise the number of open quest threads that I’m trying to juggle at the moment.

My main character, a Dark Knight Tank, is trying to unlock and upgrade something called an Anima Weapon, a blade with a cool aesthetic which changes every time it’s upgraded. I’m working on stage 6 of 8 of upgrading the weapon, with multiple steps requiring large amounts of dungeon grinding to progress through. Dungeon running content that I’ve already completed in the past gets me something called Potetics, which I need to get the materials that I need to upgrade the weapon.

There’s also the main story quest which I need to remember to get back to, but I got sidetracked by a lengthy sidequest chain about a giant time-travelling robot. Don’t get me wrong, the plot was cool, but it took most of a day to complete that quest chain. That gave me a bunch of scrap metal resources which a different NPC let me trade for armour that was a high enough level to progress other content.

There’s been a quest to get a Chocobo companion to fight alongside me that I picked up over 100 hours ago and keep forgetting to return to, because I got sidetracked by this expansion’s Manderville questline, where a big buff man plays detective in a series of comedy missions.

And then there’s my class progression missions, because I picked up a healer and a DPS to be able to take advantage of Duty Roulette offering bonus rewards if you play as an in demand character archetype.

And there’s the Gold Saucer and Moogle currencies, which were both needed to buy a four player rideable mount from Final Fantasy 15, which was only available for two weeks, and each of those currencies have their own mechanics around acquiring them.

And part of upgrading my Anima Weapon required upgrading my standing within a military faction, which set me on a tangent needing to go kill monsters in a hunting log to earn a faction specific currency, which then accidentally led to me getting control of my own small army who I have yet to remember to go back and interact with.

My point is, regardless of the specifics, MMOs by design often end up putting a somewhat overwhelming number of objectives on a player’s plate at once, or at least make it very easy to accidentally load oneself up with a web of incomplete tasks. This can cause an intense amount of cognitive load for the player, as well as making it pretty difficult for neurodiverse players like myself to feel like everything’s under control enough to put the game down confidently.

On top of the above there’s additional cognitive stress placed on players by FOMO, as well as external pressures which can help foster compulsive player behaviour patterns.

Many MMOs will feature time limited special events, with limited time access to desirable cosmetics, encouraging playing to avoid missing out on the new cool collectible that all your friends are going to be showing off in game.

Then there’s the pressures to play more of the game than you otherwise might – You’re paying a subscription fee, meaning you should really make the most out of playing this game rather than playing something else instead, and there’s the social pressure to keep up with your friends so that you can talk about the things they’re finding exciting, rather than constantly trailing behind them, encountering content that they’ve long since stopped being interested in discussing.

All of these FOMO aspects can make playing an MMO become an all consuming hobby, because doing a different hobby instead with a period of your free time feels like you’re wasting that time. I know for me I’ve been putting off other games I’ve been meaning to check out, but I’ve also been going to the cinema a little less, playing fewer boardgames, and making less of an effort to organise meeting up with my IRL friends. If I weren’t 2 months deep into an MMO I know I probably would have tried organising at least a couple of boardgame days with friends, but having an MMO on the go makes it way too easy to just let a weekend melt away chipping away at the big complicated list of FOMO tasks that are all half complete.

And to be clear, I’m having a great time playing Final Fantasy 14. Outside of the struggles with input complexity and the times where the cognitive load has been upsettingly stressful, there’s a really interesting story and set of gameplay mechanics here. I’m having a really lovely time socialising with others while playing, and the game’s community has been super welcoming. These can all be true, at the same time as I feel myself struggling with the all consuming overwhelming pull of the genre.

There’s also accessibility barriers present in MMOs that spawn from the cooperative multiplayer nature of the genre, namely cognitive and anxiety barriers based on group performance. If I’m playing a piece of raid content with other online players, I am inevitably being depended on to successfully execute my role in the party, or risk causing other players time to be wasted. If as a healer I fail to keep the party healthy enough to survive an undogable attack and we have to restart a boss fight, that’s going to cost other players their time. If I fail that same aspect of that same fight 3-4 times in a row, there’s inevitably going to be stress involved in feeling pressured to improve quickly.

There’s also a number of unspoken rules and expectations that are often not directly taught by the game systems, but are expected knowledge within an MMO’s community. In Final Fantasy 14 for example, as a tank I’m expected to do something called going “Wall to Wall”, where rather than fighting each group of enemies as we approach them, I should simply draw their attention to me as the tank, and then keep running forward through the level, getting multiple sets of enemies to follow me deeper into the level, so that we can fight a larger group mob all at once, so that area of effect attacks can be more effective. That’s not taught by the game, and it can be a bit stressful when more experienced players appear in text chat demanding you play your class in a different way, using terms that you’ve not previously heard for unknown mechanics.

Lastly, there’s always the possibility with an MMO that you might hit a skill ceiling. I know that if I’m eventually asked to use too many mandatory moves on a single character at once, I’m going to start struggling a lot more that I currently am, very quickly. While hitting a skill ceiling can happen in any game genre in theory, MMOs are uniquely tailored to spiraling mechanical complexity, and uniquely lengthy experiences. While it broadly sucks in any game to hit a skill ceiling and struggle to make progress, doing so as much as 300, 400, 500 hours deep into an MMO is a uniquely painful experience, given the sheer amount of time invested up to that point in the narrative.

None of this is to say that MMOs can’t be an accessible genre, or that I’m not enjoying my time with Final Fantasy 14, I very much am. The story’s great, I’m having a lot of fun with the Sage’s more involved barrier healing mechanics, I got to be a knockoff Pokémon Trainer called a Beastmaster, and I love the little koala minion that hangs out on my shoulder. MMOs can be a huge amount of fun, but I can’t deny that they still cause me some stress and anxiety from time to time while playing.

I’m mostly just glad that my job happens to be reviewing video games on the internet – If not for the fact that my job obligates me to try out unique video games every week, I can totally see how I would have fallen much further and faster down the Final Fantasy 14 rabbit hole than I have.