Destructoid’s award for Best Ongoing Game of 2023 goes to…

destructoid.com:

Final Fantasy XIV. I’m not going to even try to build suspense for our Best Ongoing Game winner. Destructoid has too many FFXIV sickos for anything else to take the crown, which is fitting given that our own Chris “Eorzea’s Finest” Carter was an early adopter of the now-legendary MMORPG.

This, inadvertently, presents a bit of a conundrum in terms of selecting the “Best Ongoing Game” of any year. Live service games typically demand a lot of time. So it’s difficult – if not impossible – to find anyone who has played every entry enough to make a fair judgment. It’s hard enough playing the biggest single-player games of the year, let alone ones with potentially hundreds of hours of things to grind for. Can we really say Final Fantasy XIV had a better year than, say, Warframe?

But funny enough, that same concern also lends validity to Final Fantasy XIV’s crown. We are limited by time, and there have been plenty of other games this year vying for our interest. To still play and even love Final Fantasy XIV under those conditions is a testament to its quality.

Personally, I attribute much of this to just how evergreen Final Fantasy XIV is. While most games live and die by their current season, Square Enix’s MMORPG offers so much that it only kind of matters if it had a good or bad year. Fishing is still a weirdly compelling community activity. Glamour is still the true endgame. Heck, I still haven’t even tried out Eureka, and that was introduced all the way back in Stormblood.

I’m not going to mention names, but at least one of us is on record here for playing Final Fantasy XIV for nearly two years. No, not like they started playing two years ago. That’s their in-game time.

There’s been a lot of discourse this year over the