When it was impossible to go to real-world plays during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, digital theater boomed. Groups likeFallout 76’s Wasteland Theatre Companyhit the scene and made headlines. One hotspot for the virtual theater community is Square Enix’s blockbuster MMOFinal Fantasy 14, which has a bustling performing arts scene.
From bards to sports, theFinal Fantasy 14community puts on all sorts of events that delight and entertain other players. Among these, one of the most impressive and challenging is staging performances. Game Rant recently spoke with a roundtable of virtual theater experts inFinal Fantasy 14. While there are a lot of benefits to performing in a virtual space, the art form does present unique challenges for actors, scriptwriters, crew, and everyone else involved in staging a play.
The Challenges of Virtual Theater
There’s a lot of work that goes into any performance before it makes contact with its audience. Cast and crew, musicians, and more rehearse for the day they perform in front of a crowd–that applies as much to digital performers as it does to real ones. However, the nature of being an online medium makes virtual theater a unique beast.
ForFinal Fantasy 14, one of the biggest beasts to tame for performers is the game’s intricate, beautiful, and notoriously difficult-to-navigate housing system. While it is an indispensable asset to create beautiful, dedicated spaces for events, it comes with its own baggage.Housing in Etheiryscan be hard to obtain and rather byzantine at times. Rhonwyn Gwynael, manager of The Firebird Theatre, explained some of its limitations.
As everyone who plays this game well knows, we are very limited in the number of housing items we can use. This can get tricky when doing set and lobby/house design. Also, we are limited to only two spotlights, which has compelled us to find workarounds for lighting characters on stage. The other challenge is with housing capacity: as character models begin to disappear when you have more than one hundred characters in a given area, we have to account for the number of cast and crew in a particular show when accepting patrons into the house for a performance.
A lot of those issues have persisted since last year when anotherFF14group,Curtain Call Theatre, detailed the same issues. Luckily for both companies,Dawntrailis addressing at least some of those concerns. Item slots are being added to the housing system that would aid considerably in stage design.
Although not a common issue in the performing arts community, throwing trolls out of the auditorium will be far easier with new venue controls available to free companies coming in the July expansion. Gwynael is relieved at that announcement.
Although they have thankfully been few and far between, we do occasionally get patrons intentionally causing trouble during performances. While we could physically remove these people from the building if this was the real world, our options in game to this point have been limited to stopping the show, waiting them out, and reporting them. We are very pleased to see that there will soon be a method to ban certain characters from entering the estate.
Digital Plays Are a Lot Like a FF14 Raid
Theater expert Agatha Harkness compared the whole process of running a show to that of running a raid. Focus is critical and comms need to be clear and concise. Harkness also raids in the game, and finds the comparison truly striking. The difference between the two is the consequence of a mistake–in a raid, it means a wipe. On stage, as an actor would say, “If you don’t let the audience know, they won’t notice.” That’s not quite as true online. Mistimed macros can become obvious if they’re too out of sync, but for the most part, the truism holds.
Another issue, raised by an expert named Soso, involves the stage itself. In real performances, actors have brightly colored tape on the floor to indicate various stage positions for their movement. That’s not available inFinal Fantasy 14,so the troupes Soso has worked with have had to get inventive.
The blocking phase has some unique challenges–not only for the actors who have to learn the part but for set design…How we’ve gotten around that in the past is by using “stage landmarks” and by using Elixir Bottles. “Universal” landmarks, or landmarks that are most likely going to be in every show, are going to be things like planks on the stage or spotlight edges.
Soso also explained that inFinal Fantasy 14housing, line of sight can be an issue for the audience. Camera angles tend to be placed in such a way that assumes housing is more of a barebones enterprise than a stage needs to be. A lot of stage designrequires advanced knowledge of the tacitly allowed housing glitches, which can make it hard to keep a line of sight from the camera position to the stage.
It’s all worth it, though, when the lights come up on opening night, the experts agreed.
Final Fantasy 14 (2010)
WHERE TO PLAY
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