Massive Multiplayer Online games, or MMO titles, often adapt with patches, events, and expansions to keep the player base interested. While Final Fantasy 14 does its best to entice gamers to keep them coming back for more, fans of the title have a tendency to do it themselves. With fan-run in-game convention Lunarcon offering tons of chances for players to meet up and chat, there was one special guest among them. Todd Howard, or rather, an in-game fake avatar of him.
Lunarcon was a fan-made Final Fantasy 14 convention held entirely in-game. The event offered tons of things for fans to do including contests, item auctions, and the convention even encouraged people to cosplay with their character's avatars. Though, it is not known if the Todd Howard look-alike intended to enter Lunarcon's cosplay contests.
Twitter user @mirihawke ran into the fake during the convention's run, posting about how upon meeting "Todd Howard" she was given a gift of a faded scroll of Oblivion, obviously joking about the Elder Scrolls game of the same name. If Miri fell for the fake's ploy, however, it was made clear that it wasn't the real Todd Howard in minutes with a reply that names the character's creator.
There are multiple layers to the creative joke behind the fun of pretending to be Todd Howard, thanks to some explanation in the post's replies. One fan comments about how hilarious it is that by it being a "faded copy" of Oblivion, it isn't even complete while a different player brings the item joke home by saying that with the copy being faded, that in itself makes it an "elder scroll." Another fan commented that "at least it wasn't Skyrim this time" for another one to chip in that because of that comment, "Skyrime" is being added as a cooking ingredient in the next expansion after Endwalker.
Apparently the fake avatar for Todd Howard has been around for such a long time that photos featuring older versions of the model exist. A gamer who's seen the player in person before has said they once handed out Mudcrabs, a joke on the Elder Scrolls enemy. Twitter user @tetenuko, who's responsible for the avatar in question, has quite a few jokes to keep up the act it seems like.
Luckily this is all in good fun, and Tet is only spending it giving out joke items to those who visit and they leave it at that, rather than actually pretending to be the developer himself. Final Fantasy 14 seems to encourage players to have fun in any way they see fit, considering this situation and the FF14 egg streamer who ate an entire inventory worth of egg items last month.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.