A method to the new job madness...Follow

A lot of speculation is getting tossed around regarding jobs. I think we all feel connected to our jobs, but want more. It's hard in FFXI to aspire to max out more than a few jobs unless you're crazy and spend an unhealthy amount of time in game... or have been playing solid for 5 years.

I read one comment, however, that sparked a thought.

What if SE makes it much less of a grind to max out a job's abilities and skills... could we be moving to a system where the goal is to let everyone master more jobs.. (say 10-12), but they simply have a much larger list of jobs to choose from?

I'm sure the balance question is the first to come in... but FFXI is balanced in a way that's different from any other game, and I think they could do it.

Personally, I'd rather do the exp leveling grind of FFXI rather than the quest quest quest "go kill 10 of these for me" from WoW.

If you remove the grind of leveling up jobs you will end up like WoW, where leveling your char has absolutely no meaning and you can level up to max level in 2 weeks. They might as give you a level 80 char on the spot. People seem to forget that this is a MMORPG and that if the developer starts to remove the timesinks it’s like shooting yourself in the foot. Timesinks are in place for a reason and that is to occupy the player as much as possible. Or you can do as WoW is today and that is the average player only stay for 3 month and then leaves the game, that they specifically said they won’t make a WoW clone so that’s out of the question.

Edited, Jun 5th 2009 2:11am by Maldavian

While they did mention that they do not want a WoW clone, they also said they intend to make the game more casual friendly which insinuates less of a grind type game.

I would assume that sub-jobs are going to go away. Most of the grind of FFXI comes from leveling Not just your regular job (or multiple jobs), but the various sub-jobs required for each (melee DDs having SAM, WAR, NIN, DRG, DRK so that they can handle any situation for example). We may still be able to switch our Main Job, and it may be that we might be able to switch our Main Job at any time (ala FFV) outside of combat with some form of time delay (30 seconds or something maybe).

If the Party's White Mage dies and needs a Raise and someone else in the Party has a sufficiently leveled White Mage, just does a quick swap and Raise. This keeps the flow going and far less down time when people die.


This is just wild speculation though. We do know the game is going to be different than FFXI and WoW, it's supposed to be rewarding to all audiences and allow playtimes as little as 40 minutes to as much as several hours. This can only mean that the grind for both money making and leveling will be much less than FFXI current system without being as easy or at least similar to WoWs.

That wouldn't be that bad then... You keep the main job, but you can apply traits from jobs you already learned from.

Everyons starts as a Squire or Chemist (or similar classes like fighter and devout) and then unlocks jobs by mastering elements of previous jobs... I could see that working. I just don't think they are going to have the leveled sub-job thing is what I was getting at. The time required to level multiple jobs to be half the level of the main job is quite time consuming.

Where also forgetting that even if we have to lvl subs it will be quicker do to soloing being viable aswell as faster gameplay. I seriously think that subs wont be a burden. They know there crap and the stuff they arent completly aware of they have help with.

I think it would be cool if it was Dragon Quest 7 was. Your character had a total level, but when changing jobs, each could go up to 8 or 10 rank. So say that even though i was level 30, I had 5 jobs maxed out and could use those abilities at any time. There were also cool job mixed skills. If you played fighter past rank 5, then switched to dancer, you would eventually learn sworddance technique.

The downside I see to something like this is that eventually you would learn everything and become in-game gods.

They never said subjobs would be in. Give me a link to the exact quote or don't spread misinformation.

Anyway in some of the interviews released today they stated that character growth would be a more "natural" progression, that the player chooses what he or she wishes to do each day and his or her character will grow based on how he or she plays. They also stated that "Weapon" was a key word in how character growth will work. Additionally, they stated that they attribute the success of FFXI largely to its job system, and want to work with the core ideas behind the FFXI system to make something entirely unlike the FFXI system.

I cannot really fathom the specifics of how this is going to work, but it's interesting to think about. Perhaps there are no specific "jobs" but the game builds a character progression based on how the character chooses to play? For example what weapons he or she prefers, what quests he or she does, etc. and from that a unique character type grows, just as a person naturally would, rather than locked into some kind of set linear progression. It sounds really cool in theory, but it's hard to say..

The only issue I have with this is would it be set in stone? Say my character ends up growing to excel largely at healing and not much else. Will I have to make a new character a la WoW to play a different type of role? I really, really hope that's not the case, and I don't think it will be as they stated that they wanted to continue the core concept of the FFXI job system.

Edited, Jun 5th 2009 3:59am by Shiinpu