“At this point, I’m thinking we have no choice but to come up with brand new jobs that haven’t appeared in the FF series before”
Final Fantasy XIV jobs have evolved quite a bit since the original release, as the team carefully balances an ever-increasing series of mechanics and concepts.
Speaking on the We Are Vana’Diel Square Enix celebration site, FFXIV producer Naoki “Yoshi P” Yoshida spoke about jobs, and how it’s becoming harder and harder to draw from the source material. He notes:
“Job names are especially tough. (laughs wryly) After all, there’s no point if a job is similar to its namesake in name only; its gameplay experience needs to match their pre-established design too. At this point, I’m thinking we have no choice but to come up with brand new jobs that haven’t appeared in the FF series before. From a system perspective, if the number of jobs is fixed and well-balanced, there’s no need to add more, and adding new jobs would obviously cause a stir. But nevertheless, we always need to add more jobs to keep providing new gameplay experiences.”
It seems like a smart idea to continue to create unique jobs that will not only augment the legacy of XIV itself (and will probably appear in future crossovers or games as “that job that originated in FFXIV): but they also will feel less pressure to live up to an existing foundation (that may or may not mesh with XIV) as a result. Of course, there is still a huge classic well of Final Fantasy to pull from when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV jobs, including a few I whipped up here:
- Time Mage
- Necromancer
- Geomancer
- Calculator (I’d love to see this)
- Beastmaster
There are more! I almost put “Gambler” on that list, but something tells me that a job based heavily around RNG (randomness) would piss a lot of MMO players off. Naturally, there are other routes you could go for to get the thematic feel of the job across. An Onion Knight as an “extra” Blue Mage-esque story job could be a fun exercise, too.
In any case, I see what Yoshi P is saying in terms of reaching a critical mass of jobs. The team has already packed the game with so many different aesthetics that it’s going to get increasingly tougher to keep innovating. So far, they’ve done a pretty decent job!
