Machinist ruined classes forever in Final Fantasy XIV. But don’t entirely blame that job; some of it was just a matter of figuring how how jobs worked at all.
When we learn about our next expansion destination, the odds are nigh-on absolute that we will hear about two new jobs. Probably we will not hear about them at the first Fan Festival because that’s not how these reveals ever work, but I feel rather confident in saying that both of them will start at level 80 and will both be noted as having no associated class. Why? Because that’s been the case for every single job added to the game in every expansion. These things start as jobs and are never ever classes.
This means that the only reason class-based jobs are still technically the majority is because Arcanist is pinch-hitting for two of them. That will almost certainly change with the next expansion. So how did we get here, and where does this leave classes in the first place?
When version 2.0 of the game launched, it was with a single new class, Arcanist. This was the first class that forked into two jobs, both Summoner and Scholar, but the implication seemed pretty clear that this was a first rather than a last. All of the prior classes had a single job, but it seemed like a foregone conclusion that this wasn’t a permanent state of affairs. There were various instances suggesting that, for example, some form of magical sword-user was in the cards for Gladiator, or that Puppetmaster might become a thing for Pugilist.
This was, perhaps, a little undercut by the addition of Rogue. Now, while Ninja had probably been the most requested addition to the game outside of Summoner, we already had a job that used knives and that had two weapon slots. In some ways it almost seemed like a given that Gladiator could fork into Ninja. Instead, Gladiator lost its knives, knives became paired things (even though some of the Ninja weapons are obviously a pair of swords), and we got a new job based on a new class.
But that all changed when Heavensward arrived. And based on later interviews, it changed because of Machinist. The developers couldn’t find a way to make Machinist 1-30 play like its own thing and be satisfying separate from the identity of Machinist, so instead of making the job start with the Musketeer class and move on to Machinist, it just became Machinist starting at 30 and the same was true of Astrologian and Dark Knight.
This… had some knock-on effects. Specifically, that this became… how things would be. Forever.
Now… in and of itself, this isn’t a problem. There’s not something wrong with Dark Knight not starting as Crusader, for example. But it’s resulted in a set of weird edge cases because for most of the game, classes are meaningless. There’s no practical difference between Paladin and Gladiator; there is no other job that spins off from Gladiator, and over times we’ve slowly had characters who previously had more ambiguous abilities fold more firmly into established jobs.
The result is that each new job is a new weapon and there’s no sense of actual differentiation. The main reason classes stick around is that it would be unfair to split Scholar and Summoner now after people got used to them being one thing, and probably something in the morass of legacy code breaks horribly if you just get rid of them altogether. This isn’t helped at all by the fact that at one point the idea was that jobs were for group content and classes were for running around solo, with a much wider range of cross-class abilities that you could use on different classes that theoretically made a difference.
So some of this is just a matter of design creep. It turned out that no, people wanted their jobs to be a thing all the time, and since the game has always erred on the side of longer bespoke rotations, most solo content doesn’t really require you to have a wide array of otherwise irrelevant skills. You can’t cross-class Physick, sure, but how often do you actually need to heal yourself solo in the open world unless you’re making life harder on yourself deliberately?
But it does leave the game feeling weirdly jumbled. Classes are a thing until they aren’t, and then you never have to look back at classes, but technically some of your jobs are leveling a class instead of a job even though the actual class abilities stop happening at level 30. There’s no actual link between the two unless there is, and unlike most of the changes over the years that ensure abilities have found new homes once the old ones were no longer relevant (no one misses TP, it seems), classes are still just sort of hanging out.
What bothers me is not, say, the fact that Red Mage did not ultimately require leveling Conjurer and Thaumaturge and Gladiator. That’s fine. The melange of recurring jobs in the series is an odd one, and it’s not unusual for Red Mage to be a spellcasting powerhouse in one game, a melee/spell hybrid of uncommon utility in another, and completely useless in a third. It’s that the game has this strange lingering system in place that adds nothing and has somehow never been repurposed in any form, which is generally unusual for this game in particular.
And it’s not something I see changing because at this point it would be weird if it did. Let’s even assume, for a moment, that in the next expansion we got a new magical DPS branching off of Conjurer and a new tank branching off of Lancer. How would you manage that? Do you add job quests stretching back from level 30? Do you just add a few new job quests? How do you make leveling meaningful? How do you handle the radical change to the game’s structure at that point?
The game has gone through more than a decade of changes now, and that includes realizing that some ideas just didn’t work out great. Classes vs. jobs were one of them. But that also leaves us with a lot of weird dead ends. It leaves us with oddities like NPCs having handheld pistols all over the place that we have never had access to and no job that uses anything like them, something that pretty clearly was meant as a tease for the Musketeer class we… didn’t have, at launch or later.
And yes, I know, Yoshida has said various times that he sees the designers as being obligated to move forward and make new things instead of worrying about filling in all of these blanks and weird dead ends. But this is one that still bothers me a little bit. We’re never going to get a job using a sword and a pistol in the offhand, and that’s all right, but don’t taunt me with it by making it an NPC-only thing. That just gnaws at me.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to go ahead and speculate about the Final Fantasy XVI crossover we all know is coming. We’ll probably hear about it in Vegas, and I feel like writing about it.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
