Quote Originally Posted by Exmo View Post
Combat in this game is conducted through client-server communication. It would be an impossibly large task to rework that to be completely client-side for an offline mode, and for such little benefit at that.
Telling a client program to talk to {server over here} versus {server over there} is actually relatively trivial. The real trick would be convincing the FFXIV launcher to actually launch the server program locally in addition to the client we all know and love.