The Sims 4 is continuing its train of Final Fantasy 14 references, and the latest Easter egg implies that Sim children cannot get over the story-driven MMORPG's most traumatizing spoiler.
The next Sims 4 expansion pack, Growing Together, is due out on March 16, but before launch, the devs have given some of the community's most popular content creators an early look at the new content. YouTuber MsGryphi posted a video breaking down the new build and buy mode items, and one particular object - which you can see at the 27:54 mark below - quickly caught some crossover attention.
This art board features several different designs that swap the drawings around, but they're mostly made in the image of children's crayon drawings. In the corner of one design set, there's a drawing of a blue swallow soaring through space in search of unknown worlds.
Spotted a certain bird in the new Sims 4 expansion! from r/ffxiv
If you're a Final Fantasy 14 fan who's up to date on the story, you may already be crying. If you're not, be warned that Endwalker spoilers will follow.
Endwalker ultimately centers on a character called Meteion. To simplify a 400-hour-long story arc, Meteion is a creature from the ancient past who alternately takes the form of a blue swallow or a young girl. She's sent into the cosmos to seek out new worlds and discover how different alien societies have determined the meaning of life. But she finds only the remains of civilizations that have destroyed themselves, and seeing the survivors despair at the meaninglessness of existence, Meteion triggers the events that lead to the apocalypse players spend Endwalker trying to prevent.
As you'd expect from most Final Fantasy stories, the plot of Endwalker ultimately ends in a more hopeful place than that, but that's a pretty heavy set of themes for a Sim child's fan art to explore.
You might be thinking Final Fantasy 14 fans are reading too much into this drawing of a space bird to call it a reference, and if this were an isolated case, I might agree. But the Sims 4 dev team is packed to the gil(l)s with Final Fantasy 14 players, and these references have been cropping up for ages. One of the game's producers even mentioned one of the new references in a recent tweet.
Fellow Eorzean Simmers! (round 2)~ Has all the news about Growing Together made you *smile* a *ton* ?😉Well, I have some good news for you! Hopefully you'll be *over the moon* to hear, the FFXIV references have not stopped! (this time, much much more subtly... lol) pic.twitter.com/XG5RjoEUYgMarch 6, 2023
This playmat is made by Playing Way and is "guaranteed to make any tiny bun smile a ton." That references Smileton, the dungeon you ran approximately five billion times if you were playing post-launch Endwalker, and the bunny-like Loporrit race whose members are named some variation of "Verbing-way." (The Loporrits are the ones that look like actual rabbits, not the stupid sexy bunny boys and girls that make up the Viera race.)
It's taken a decade, but The Sims 4 might finally be close to the best game in the series.
