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

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 current state of Final Fantasy XIV. Given the insane honeymoon period the game enjoyed during the pandemic that forced Square Enix to stop selling the game for a minute, I do think that was a long time coming.

But for my money, Final Fantasy XIV has done a good job continuing to do what it does best. We’ve seen some fun dungeons to blaze through, bosses with tricky mechanics, and more bangers courtesy of Masayoshi Soken. And while elements like the handling of Relic Weapons and the rewards for the Criterion Dungeons have garnered some discourse, Final Fantasy XIV is still undoubtedly a really fun game. As the MMORPG gears up to enter its next major story arc after Endwalker, I’m excited to see where it will go in the future.

Will Final Fantasy XIV inevitably win Best Ongoing Game in 2024 as well? I suppose that depends on how Dawntrail pans out. But if that expansion manages to hold our attention, then I’d say it has a pretty good shot. Rejoice in the glory of combat!

The nominees for the best ongoing game of 2023

• Fortnite
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Genshin Impact
• Path of Exile
• Warframe
• No Man’s Sky
• World of Warcraft Classic