In 2017, Synahel received a tip about a real estate offer. A friend’s land was soon to be vacated and put back on the market, and she took the opportunity to grab it as soon as it came back up for sale. A few months later, she used this investment to exchange her land and move to Shirogane, one of the most prominent residential areas of the moment, located in the city of Kugane. If these names mean nothing to you, that’s normal: it simply means that you’re not playing Final Fantasy XIVone of the most popular role-playing games on the planet.
The Square Enix game has carved out a solid reputation in the world of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in recent years. You can follow an adventure with a critically acclaimed scenario, face mythical monsters as a team, craft high-level weapons using advanced craftsmanship… and maintain the garden in front of your personal home.
Shirogane’s Great Sets
To build your house in this fictional world, you need to have a certain level in the game, go to one of the residential areas and buy land. This aspect of the experience is entirely anecdotal and essentially decorative. But MMORPGs are addictive and time-consuming games, with a strong emotional attachment to a universe in which one can spend up to several thousand hours. “There is a certain obsession around that because you still want to have your home in the game”, explains Synahel. In general, video games that allow you to create your home, most often freed from certain material constraints of the real world, are also a loop-hole for urban dwellers living in stressed areas. This is why we find this system in many games, such as ArcheAge, Ultima Online or New World (Published by Amazon).
But, in the case of Final Fantasy XIVthere are, on each server to which players can connect, only seven thousand two hundred plots of land, which is much less than potential buyers: in Europe, for example, the servers have an average of seventeen thousand players high level, according to an unofficial censusan imbalance that persists since many years. Some will therefore be content to occupy a room in a guild house – land belonging to groups of players who have made an alliance – or to own a small plot, when others will want to build their mansion in one of the places. the most sought after in the area. And there, the battle is fierce.
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