Director of Final Fantasy XIV, Naoki Yoshida, told in an interview about a crazy idea that the developers had for the MMORPG’s PvP. Consideration was given to a battle royale mode that would only be accessible to the blue mage job.
Patch 6.1 brought major adjustments and changes to PvP to FFXIV. A new 5v5 mode called “Crystalline Conflict” also celebrated its release and was well received by many players. But the road to get there was long.
The planning phase for this alone took a full year, and the development team conceived and scrapped a whole host of ideas for revolutionizing PvP.
Yoshida says: Director Naoki Yoshida is known to enjoy chatting about the internal development processes within his MMORPG. In an interview with the Japanese online magazine gamer, he said that the development team had some unusual ideas during the planning phase for the new PvP.
Probably the most unusual was the idea of a battle royale mode in which only the blue mage job was allowed to participate:
[…] According to the original plan [zum neuen PvP] there were still various ideas such as “PvP-only-for-blue mages”. The idea was that it should be a battle royale style mode in a huge arena. The arena would then continue to shrink, but instead of picking up weapons, players would use the blue mage’s learn ability and fight with whatever spells they learned.
Naoki Yoshida
For other ideas, the number of jobs allowed for PvP should be reduced from 19 to 8, probably for balance reasons. However, the PvP team opposed it because it would restrict players from choosing their favorite jobs.
This is special about the blue mages: The “restricted job” blue mage has a special place in FFXIV. Unlike other jobs, he can only get level 70 out of 90. Also, he must go out into the world and learn his spells from monsters using their abilities in battle against him.
There are currently 104 spells and they can be anything from basic physical attacks, to CC effects, to overpowered skills that cause instant death. Accordingly, the Blue Mage is not balanced and shouldn’t be, as it is not allowed in most of FFXIV’s “normal” content.
Content that does not allow blue mages also includes PvP. Instead, the blue mages can participate in the Grand Masquerade solo challenge or run some dungeon and raid content up to level 70. But only if they are in a group with other blue mages.
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“Give me a reason to get my blue mage static back together.”
There are these comments: Since the Blue Magic is more of a side content, user comments on Yoshida’s story from the developer’s backroom were scarce, but quite positive.
In a thread on reddit, some users commented that the idea sounds “unironically good”. In the original thread translating the interview from Yoshida, the top comment said:
He should never have mentioned the blue mage battle royale. Now people won’t stop begging for it until it’s released.
zeth07
In the comments below, various users agree with him and comment with “Ok, but I want it” or “That would be the first Battle Royale I would play […]“. The idea seems to find at least some support in the community.
The wish from the community is understandable: One issue that Blue Mage fans have struggled with is the relatively small amount of content the job receives on a regular basis. The level cap increase and new spells to collect have been around once a year until now, and the next blue mage update hasn’t been announced yet.
While Blue Mage groups can enter raid content like Bahamut or Alexander at the appropriate levels, once the first win has been achieved there is no incentive to grind the content.
Reddit user InternetFunnyMan1 comments: “Either give me PvP for blue mages or give me a reason for my blue mage static to get back together.”
“Statics” in FFXIV are fixed groups of players who regularly run content together. The most common form of this are raiding groups that do raid content on a weekly basis. But there are also fixed PvP groups and blue mages also join together to form statics.
A PvP mode for blue mages would be a type of content that theoretically has no end, since every match in PvP is different.
What do you think of the idea of a Battle Royale mode just for the blue mages? Does it sound like fun or something the dev team should rather skip? Tell us in the comments.
Yoshida also announced that his MMORPG will probably not get any of the classic Final Fantasy jobs in the future:
Final Fantasy XIV: Boss of the MMORPG is shattering fans’ hopes for their favorite jobs