My new obsession is perfecting my Final Fantasy XIV interface
Final Fantasy XIV has no shortage of content. Raids, dungeons, trials, mount farming, or just good ol’ fishing, there’s always something to do. But between every activity, I find the one thing I keep on doing in Final Fantasy XIV is messing around with the interface.
Since starting the game back in December, I’ve managed to go from A Realm Reborn all the way to Endwalker, the most recent expansion. (Yes, that pace was pretty fast, though sadly not on par with Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.)
In the time since, I’ve learned a lot of lessons: eat food to buff your stats, use retainers to sell unwanted items, and know which ledges are not safe to Dragoon-backflip next to. But in all of it, I keep on messing with my hotbars.
It’s not that the interface of Final Fantasy XIV is clunky; far from it. It’s actually incredibly customizable and malleable, able to do a lot with very little. Actions (read: abilities) can be set to your hotbars, and your hotbars can be laid out in a multitude of ways.
For a long time, I was partial to the long rows of abilities. It feels really good to look at a big lineup of sick moves, and watch them all tick away on cooldowns. It reduced the vertical clutter on my screen too, in exchange for some horizontal space.
While the default interface (on mouse-and-keyboard) puts the rows right dead center with big icons, I found myself slowly eking that lineup further to the right as time went on. As I got more comfortable with my combo timings and rotations, I made the icons smaller and shoved them off to the right, away from the precious center of the screen. Can’t have big buttons blocking the AOE markers, right?
Soon, I was using Ctrl- and Shift- modifiers to spread my growing arsenal of
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