Final Fantasy 14 player harnesses the power of furniture slots to mak…

MMOs stop being games where you go kill mobs for XP and chase fat loot when you discover player housing. Once that bug nips you, they become 3D diorama creation software with a bunch of useless RPG crap tacked on for a few days, or maybe forever, depending on your capacity for rotating couches. I've never been so lost in the sauce that I've recreated entire zones from other games inside an MMO's player housing feature, but then again, I'm just not built for this like X user Miya Shikhu. tbzikra.org

Shikhu shared their latest creation in a post on X Wednesday, and it's an uncannily good recreation of the shelter from hack 'em up third person shooter Pragmata. If you haven't played that game, the shelter is a hub you return to between checkpoints to upgrade your stats and equip new build items. It's got a sleek, futuristic aesthetic and walls of computer screens, all of which have been approximated using Final Fantasy 14's housing props.

"I was playing a different game for a while, but I've come back to FF14," said Shikhu in the post (via X's machine translation). "Everkeep-style furniture is the best! Increased placement limit is the best!"

Based on Shikhu's posts, it sounds like the Everkeep Sofa and similar items are what make this particular illusion tick. Lay out enough white sofas in close proximity and it looks a bit like sci-fi paneling: "The floor couches fit the space perfectly, don’t they? I really like how they turned out," Shikhu said in a reply on the same thread. The players running around in cosplay as Hugh and Diana make for a nice touch that makes the scene unmistakable.

Another part of what makes this work is a recent update which increased the number of furniture items that can be on-screen simultaneously. If MMO player housing has taught me anything, it's that players will continue to cook up projects that boggle the mind, like Dust 2 in World of Warcraft, for as long as these games exist.

On May 7, Double Fine—the developer behind Psychonauts, Keeper, and Kiln, which has been under Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios umbrella since 2019—filed a petition to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board on May 7 (via Aftermath). The push includes all 42 of Double Fine's "regular part-time and full-time employees."

The studio's move to unionize is being organized with Communications Workers of America, the largest media labor union in the US. CWA has been vocal about workers' rights issues at Microsoft, helped establish the first industry-wide videogame union in North America just last year, and has already helped organize locals within other Microsoft studios, such as Activision and Zenimax.

"On May 7, the workers at Microsoft studio Double Fine Productions announced their decision to form a union with CWA to preserve and extend the studio's commitments to creative excellence, diversity and inclusion, and worker quality of life," CWA told Aftermath. The statement explained that workers at Double Fine have requested voluntary recognition from Microsoft as well as representation through the National Labor Relations board via their petition.

"We appreciate that Microsoft has taken a neutral approach and agreed not to interfere in any way with worker's rights to organize unions," CWA continued.

Negotiations for better working conditions can go on for quite some time. Blizzard QA workers just secured a contract guaranteeing increased pay and layoff protections earlier this year, three years after negotiations began. It took the same number of years for QA workers within Raven to get the contract they won last August.

It's all part of a broader videogame labor rights push by CWA. Two months ago, members of the United Videogame Workers of CWA led a march through GDC calling for higher standards across the entire industry in the form of a "Game Workers' Bill of Rights."