Just a week or so ago, the Final Fantasy XIV team shared the winning entries from 2022’s furnishing design contest. Those are always my favourite posts to catch up on, because even though very few of them actually get made, there are always so many great ideas that I can’t help but hope to see in game someday.
So today, I figured I’d share some of the highlights from this latest batch!
This outdoor bar area
This year has been very much about doing what we can with our backyard in real life, and something like this delightful gathering place and outdoor bar is the dream. It doesn’t hurt either that I’m terrible at outdoor design in FFXIV, so I always love completed situations like this that make it much simpler!
Though I’m generally not a huge fan of the red brick series because the brick doesn’t dye (only fair, really), the overall look of this furnishing is worth it—especially in how it pairs that red brick with other textures.
MY TWO CENTS
If this gets made, I’d love to see the patio brick as the dyeable section. It already looks like it matches the style of the outdoor brick mats, so that would help tie this new furnishing in with a very popular yard aesthetic.
I just hope the team takes the time to make sure the swatches match properly, unlike what we’ve seen with some of the partitions lately!
This fun hidden lighting
Whoever designed this idea really knows their audience. We gamers love to make things glow, and can’t turn down anything RGB. So just imagine if we could make it happen within our games, too!
I really love the idea of ambient lighting like this within FFXIV because honestly, this is already something people try and accomplish in much more roundabout ways. Having a simple furnishing like this, though it might look wasteful to some, would likely save many high-end designers a lot of time, effort, and item slots.
MY TWO CENTS
Though this design shows just one colour, I hope the team at Square Enix takes inspiration from some of the other similar ideas submitted and adds colour options.
My ideal situation would be if they found a way to somehow make this item—and its glow—match dye options, but I can see a more realistic situation being that we get a set array of colours and have to buy them separately.
This closet door
Okay, a closet door might seem like a really boring option, but hear me out here.
As someone who spends far too much time trying to make in-game designs look like real-life ones, you never really expect them to be as demanding as they are. For example, most of my front door designs take anywhere between five and 20 slots just to do one thing.
Can you imagine my reaction when they brought out the Wondrous Windoor, one item that could do the same thing as those 20 items?
This closet door, though simple, brings me the same kind of excitement. It’s one item that replaces complex designs with a look that fits well enough into what we were trying to do anyway, saving on item slots and allowing us to build bigger than we could before.
MY TWO CENTS
I genuinely hope this follows the example of the Wondrous Windoor and becomes a wall-mounted item so we can just hang closet doors wherever we need them.
As a bonus, I also kind of hope they make it slightly interactive; maybe like the steel locker, so you can open the door and see even a flat image of a closet behind it.
This pool
This furnishing caught my eye on the lengthy list—even in the face of other similar submissions—for a few reasons.
- It’s in the style of Old Sharlayan, a city that knows how to do its water features well
- It reminds me of the little pools you can buy in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
It doesn’t hurt that in general, pools are one of the trickiest yet most highly sought features for yards in FFXIV. Sure, we’ve got ponds, and yeah, they gave us an inflatable pool a couple of years ago in the Moonfire Faire, but there are still major parts of the population that try and build “pools” out of blue-dyed bricks.
They’re valiant efforts, and some of them do look quite nice, but like many of my earlier attempts at kitchen cabinetry, I can’t help but see the houses I used to make out of chalk on my parents’ driveway.
MY TWO CENTS
I hope this one gets made. That’s it. I just want to see it happen and have a pretty pool in my yard.
This patterned partition
One of the fun things that happens to you when you spend a lot of time designing in FFXIV is that eventually, you see things for their potential in weird contexts, rather than as items themselves. This partition is absolutely one of those situations.
On the one hand, I would love to work with a herringbone-patterned wall, especially a dyeable one. I can just imagine how that would look in the more modern designs people do. It would also give people a new option, having diagonal patterns on the wall. That’s something that’s rather limited currently.
On the other hand, I also see a wild amount of potential for dozens and dozens of hobbit hole builds to start cropping up, and I’m here for it.
MY TWO CENTS
I just hope that if this gets made, we can walk through the opening.
I would be so incredibly disappointed if this ended up with an invisible barrier like the Hingan windowed partition.
This hanging trellis
Proper plant usage in FFXIV is something that currently takes up a lot of slots, and it can be really tricky if you’re trying to build something like a trellis out of partitions. It’s far too easy for your plants—most of which are wall-mounted—to end up where you didn’t want them to be!
I like this furnishing idea because like some of the other ones I’ve mentioned, it’s designed to make something that currently takes far too many slots and too much work into something easy enough to do. As a bonus, I think it creates a really romantic atmosphere in the example photo!
MY TWO CENTS
I can see this being the kind of furnishing that people need to use a few of, rather than just one, so I hope the team keeps that in mind when designing it so we don’t see weird alignment or strange snaps.
This day bed
This has to be one of my absolute favourites on this list. It might look plain enough on its own, but just think; put a couple of partitions on the side and a window over the shelf, and you’ve made the easiest reading nook ever.
I especially love how the design creates two shelves’ worth of storage space, and I hope that part carries through design so we can store all our books and knick-knacks.
MY TWO CENTS
