It’s finally happened: Final Fantasy XIV players can get flat walls. Well, they can get flat walls with a poor man’s wainscoting. The better part is that getting your flat walls is literally as easy as just opening the housing menu. Open the menu, hit Interior Design, then click Minimalist Style, and there you go. You now have access to interior styles not locked by your exterior aesthetic and in the last option, you unlock a look that will make any millennial yearning for the modern farmhouse vibes immediately happy.
In my last column, I waxed poetic about just how excited was bout the evolution of the interior choices for housing in FF14. With at least 30 more housing slots now opened up thanks to taking down my partitions, I am the proud owner of flat walls with no extra effort. By removing columns, the developers have walked into the territory of millennial HGTV house hunters everywhere and arrived firmly in the modern minimalist aesthetic. With white oak stairs to the basement and even more space for decorating, modernity has made it into the game.
Now, modern farmhouses and Scandinavian builds can be found in just about every housing ward. In fact, it’s how I found the HGXIV community. From the Magnolia Network and Ikea, users have been looking to turn their houses into modern replicas, and Square Enix has answered. But modernity hasn’t just stopped at the walls. It’s embraced with the addition of new furniture as well.
With new additions that range from a shelve to wicker baskets to a corner seat and even an entire classroom motif and bar setting (with a billiard table, dart board, and boxing ring), it’s easy to see how the game has left a bit of the final fantasy behind. While I’m not entirely mad at it, it’s certainly something that makes the adventure in housing slightly less creative. While this new aesthetic matches what many in the housing community have been chasing,I can’t help but feel a bit let down by the pivot to the modern instead of making more furniture we see in Tuliyollal available.
Sure, there are food items and an adventure knapsack, but the resort-style items in the Tuliyollal inn are nowhere to be seen. The disappointment here comes from not being able to grasp the fun in the dun motif, sure, but more importantly, the Mexican resort-inspired furniture makes it feel like the Latin
American inspiration in art and items has just been pushed to the wayside. My excitement for the new 7.1 housing update lands somewhere in the middle. Part of me is excited about my faux closet, which I can put on the wall to complete a bedroom look, but where is the summer?
Only time will tell what I make with the new changes. At this point, I’ve spent most of my time in three estates: a personal house, a private room in our FC house, and an apartment. That said, the last two are effective storage. While my room in my FC house is at least decorated, my apartment in Shirogane is just storage, and after this update, it’s gotten worse. A partition graveyard has to be a better option for storage than jamming everything you can into your retainer’s inventory and filling an apartment with all of your unwanted things.
In order to use interior design, everything you have placed in the house has to have space in the furniture storeroom. With 200 slots for both, changing the interior of an entirely decked-out abode will take some time. For about an hour, I spent trying to figure out what furniture was going to go into the trash pile known as my apartment, what would be used in the next build and put with my retainers, and hopefully find enough spots in my storeroom to make my change. But much like moving in real life, when I sat down to look at everything, I was surprised by how much I had collected over time.
I meant for this column to be about how I turned my kitchen from cottage core cozy to something that would make Chip and Joann happy, but instead, all I saw was a blank canvas while I organized all of the random things I collected over time. With no real way to make use of furniture you don’t need anymore and have already placed down, I’ve found myself hoarding eight Crystarium benches because maybe Yoshida-san will take pity and let me sell them to an NPC for more than 95 gil. This also meant that I went through my retainer’s inventory, trying to see what I had bought for a low price and planned to sell on the Market Board.
Still, that’s why housing is the true end game. Sifting through your apartment fo garbage in the hope of finding some semblance of an aesthetic to run with that will maybe get some nice words in your guest book. I’m aware that this column is all over the place now, but after talking with the few friends I have that as deep in teh housing game as me, this is pretty indicative of what we’ve been feeling since the update.
This isn’t a bad thing, but it is overwhelming. The housing game has fundamentally changed, and that’s not even taking into consideration the ability to upgrade the zie of your house inside or the fact that you can now dye your exterior.
If you haven’t started to explore housing in FF14, now is a great time. Granted, the furniture market has jumped up again, so exploring your options, getting inspiration, and planning things out will take more than enough of your time. Or if you haven’t changed your house in a long time, what better time to blow it up?
I’m not sure how to close this, but I am sure I’m about to log back in, and try my hardest to find out what to do with the random rugs I bought on a whim and the random trophies that keep taking up space. Maybe I’ll ugly yellow rug one day, or maybe it will live in my garbage apartment until the end of time. Who’s to say?
