I spoke to FF14's 'Solo Only', who spent 85 days beating a single raid boss on his own, and I was wrong—that old MMO magic is still alive and well

A while back, I proclaimed that the old-school MMOs we all used to play are dead, and that we have killed them. I still mostly stand by that opinion, but I now have a major exception: The old sense of discovery, community, and mythology in these MMORPGs is alive and well in an air-pocket, deep under a sea of disseminated knowledge: It lives on in challenge running.

I spoke with Final Fantasy 14's "Solo Only", otherwise known as RathGames, who I've been following on YouTube for a while. Rath has been chewing his way through the game's 400+ hour main questline in considerably more time, for one very important reason: He plays the game solo.

No market board, no quest rewards, no AI party members in dungeons—Rath takes content designed for four to eight people and routinely beats the odds, crafting nearly every bit of gear he uses himself. One boss, who has a mechanic that absolutely requires a party, took him 85 days to beat—levelling a job high enough that he could obliterate the fight before a certain death came for him.

The question is: Why? Why any of this? For Rath, it all started with RuneScape: "I played RuneScape a lot of my life, and they have an Iron Man mode. And for a very long time, I had thought about what, if anything, you could do to get that over to Final Fantasy 14.

"One day, I just decided, You know what, I'll just do it. I don't have to think about it any more than I already have. Just log in, make the character."

His challenge running career didn't start with FF14, though. "I just like doing challenge runs in games in general. It's not even something that I'll think about before starting. Like when I first played Breath of the Wild, my first playthrough of that, I came up with the funny little 'I don't believe in ghosts' playthrough."

He managed to dig up a Reddit thread he posted about eight years ago and share it with me: "It wasn't for a video or anything. It was just for me. There was a man in front of me that told me to do some things, and then he was a ghost. I'm not gonna believe anything he says, I'm not gonna do that. I can't interact with these dead people. There's no way Impa is still alive. It's been 100 years. I don't believe any of this.

"That was the first challenge run that I did that I ever put anywhere aside from just in my own head."

Something solo, something new

"Sometimes it's definitely for the bit, don't get me wrong," Rath says, but for the majority of games he plays, he says he likes to do so "during the discovery period. When the discovery period is gone, and everybody has the 'efficient ways' that they want to do things, I will generally ebb towards the efficient way to do it.

"I will push myself towards a discovery period, because I'm doing the stupidest challenge you've ever heard of in your life, because that means I get to explore the game like it's brand new, and I have no idea what I could possibly use."

As someone who loudly, publicly, and professionally proclaimed that the discovery period in MMORPGs was dead, buried, decomposing, and gone, this rang a loud gong in my head. I mention this to Rath, about how MMOs don't quite have the discovery element anymore, and he agrees:

"Absolutely, especially with a game like 14, where there isn't all that much outside of the brand new, big feature releases … There's that very big, fun and exciting discovery period when those happen, and then just like two months later, people have poured so much time into it that every little detail is known."

Rath, in contrast, likes "having a space where I can just slowly figure things out, and get to that old RuneScape feeling that I grew up on," though he's quick to clarify that he likes efficiency, "especially in games that take a lot of grinding. I enjoy knowing what the efficient way to do it is, so that I can save some of my time.

However, "some games I want to have the discovery in, and some games I want to be told what to do. And Final Fantasy 14 is one of those games I always wanted the discovery bit for, definitely."

As for what keeps him motivated? The "obvious one" is his audience, Rath says, and the excitement people gift him when it comes to the next release—as well as the stream-chat company during Solo Only's often-gruelling grinds: "I get to hang out with them while I'm doing the hard bits, so it makes it a good bit easier."

The other is a soulsian sense of joy and pride. "Susano specifically, people can hear it in my voice—it's just: The entire weight of the world has been lifted off of you. Nothing else matters aside from that moment you have done it. It is over … It's the same as when you finally beat Ornstein and Smough in your first playthrough of Dark Souls.

"You've been hitting your head against this boss for three hours, and you keep summoning people, and they all die immediately as soon as they get in. And then you finally do it four hours later. It's that feeling. It's just the more stress and time put into the requirements to get that feeling. I think the bigger it is at the end."

For the love of the game

Solo Only hasn't always been able to follow the exact letter of its own challenge—FF14's main questline does require a mandatory completion of the Crystal Tower, an "Alliance Raid" you literally cannot enter without at least three party members. Rath managed to keep the spirit of the challenge alive, however, by tackling it with other solo-only members of his Discord community, who minimally interacted with each other once they were inside.

That same community—the kind I, once again, loudly proclaimed had fallen by the wayside on this very site not long ago—has been "humbling," says Rath. "not only [to watch them do] the challenge that I created, and enjoy it as much as they do, but also to witness people do things way smarter than me."

In fact, Rath's community's been theorycrafting together, too—like how you used to, before the reign of sites like IcyVeins or info-Discords like The Balance. Which I am not dissing, here—I use both all the time because I, too, like efficiency, but you can't deny that the landscape has changed. In a challenge run, though? You and your mates are on your own.

"For me to get through A Realm Reborn [took] a year … The general solo theory crafting that we have gotten down to now, with all of the (much smarter than me) people that are coming up with cool ideas in the Discord? A Realm Reborn probably takes like a month."

From what I can tell of Rath (and from what he tells me), soloing FF14's helped him get out of the MMO live service rat-race: "I don't have to catch up. I don't have to be [best-in-slot geared], I don't have to worry about getting all my dailies in and then getting the optimal items … I'm not stressing. I'm not trying to be the best possible gamer ever in those dungeons. I'm just having fun."

That old-school MMO feeling, it seems, is behind a door any of us could walk through—you've just got to find the challenge run that sparks your imagination. Rath has some words of encouragement in that regard: "Just give yourself a crazy little idea, go do it for five minutes, find out it sucks, and then move it over a little bit so it doesn't suck.

"I'm not the one that tells you how to play a videogame, and I'm not the one that tells you how to like a videogame. That's all you, y'know? And so whether you decide to manifest that through playing videogames in really weird ways"—Rath gives the example of a 'dog only' playthrough of Skyrim—"somebody's gonna play that and they're not gonna hate it, and they're gonna think it's fun, and they're gonna think it's a great time.

"It's all about what you want, and you have to recognise when you don't want to do it anymore. You have to recognise that things don't always have to be perfect and come with a perfect ending, they can just be done, and that's okay." Words to live by.

Crucially, though, you shouldn't "base your entire experience around whether or not it finds success in YouTube … if that's what you want to try, please do, I don't want to discourage you," but "it will do better if you enjoy the thing you're doing. If you're just doing it to try and have big fancy YouTube fame, it's not gonna go as well 'cause you're gonna hate it, I promise."

While the massive ecosystem—the body—of those old MMOs I used to love simply cannot exist in our modern era, it's humbling to know the spirit is being kept alive, both with Rath's absolutely ill-advised heroes journey, and with other similar challenge-runs. Punk rock didn't die, it just went underground. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some humble pie to tuck into.