The director of Final Fantasy XIV has shared plans on how the devs want to “strongly differentiate” jobs in the expansions following Dawntrail.
Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail is arriving with two brand new jobs in the form of melee DPS Viper and magic DPS Pictomancer. The pair will both join the roster as new options for players to select in the game’s various battle content, offering more variety in the MMORPG’s gameplay.
However, many players have argued that the game’s jobs have become too similar in recent expansions and that their overall complexity is being reduced too much.
The devs have addressed this player feedback by sharing news that they plan to “strongly differentiate” jobs in the expansions that followDawntrail, with their main focus of the upcoming one being battle content.
Yoshida explained to the Italian outlet Multiplayer that the team often received feedback about job mechanics from players who were unhappy that one had a skill while the other didn’t.
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The most obvious solution was to implement similar skills for each job, but that ran the risk of jobs becoming too alike across the board.
The director explained the ideal would be to create a situation in which each job is equipped with its own skills and can shine in its own unique way, giving players pride in playing.
However, with such a monumental task of reworking jobs, the devs want to wait until the expansion after Dawntrail before implementing these changes.
“By strongly differentiating the Jobs, we will be able to reach the goal we have set ourselves. This is why we would like to take a step back and put things back to how they were before.”
Yoshida also addressed the 120-second window meta, which he believes has made “Job rotations extremely similar”. He explained that the current content in the game is strongly interconnected, so they would like to first work on revamping battle content before moving on to job mechanics.
