For veteran Final Fantasy XIV fans Endwalker has been a loving thank you note

theverge.com:

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker signifies the end of an era. One story, started nine years ago, has ended with a stunning and heartwarming conclusion, while the promise of a new adventure awaits on the horizon. But Endwalker doesn’t merely mark the end of the Hydaelyn / Zodiark saga. For a few diehard players, Endwalker also provides a final coda for the game Final Fantasy XIV was before it was rebooted into A Realm Reborn.

The original Final Fantasy XIV Online — colloquially known as “1.0” — had a rough release. Reviews at the time said the game “lacked character, cohesion, and joy” and lamented its every feature from the UI to the storytelling. The one thing Tatjana Vejnovic remembers of 1.0 was “[h]ow un-fucking-playable it was.”

“Everything loaded in super slow, and it was laggy as all hell,” she told The Verge.

Lag was one of the foremost complaints of 1.0 players. While the game was visually impressive for the time, the developers sacrificed performance for aesthetics. During 2014’s Game Developers Conference, Naoki Yoshida, game director of FFXIV, talked about some of the things that went wrong with 1.0, citing specifically Square Enix’s overreliance on delivering a pretty game at the cost of performance and content.

Jake Dehlinger recalled being very disappointed in 1.0.

“I spent my middle school years playing FFXI with my friend (shout out to Raphiell!), and we planned to play FFXIV together,” he told The Verge. “The experience was super underwhelming, and I didn’t last very long playing it.”

Dylan Fitzgerald remembered his time more fondly recalling some of the interesting bits of the game’s history.

“Did you know failing to affix materia to a piece of gear used to blow up the entire item? Or that conjurer at