It was the first new job revealed for Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming expansion Endwalker, but it turns out that Sage was actually the second job designed for the expansion and took longer to be formulated. A recent interview with producer and director Naoki Yoshida from IGN reveals that the job design usually starts from the weapon being used and goes forward from there. The scythe of Reaper had long been requested and thus took only about three months from initial proposals to a fleshed-out design, but Sage went through several iterations and took around half a year, with Alchemist (wielding a medical bag) being an early concept for the new healer.
Of course, in the wake of the game’s digital fan festival, Yoshida has been on the interview circuit across the board. He reassured an interviewer from PC Gamer that there are plenty of additional places for the game to go following the conclusion of Endwalker, ranging from other places across the world players will still not have explored to moving into the past or future of the game world. Meanwhile, an interview from Fanbyte asked about dating the game’s various NPCs, and Yoshida reveals that it’s something the team had actually considered but ultimately declined to do because it wound up overlapping with stories to be told about these individuals. Check out all three interviews for more tidbits about development, delays, and design.We were really having to rack our brains on the Sage idea. Of course there were ideas about, like, ‘Oh, bring over Alchemist,’ and things like that and when we thought about, ‘Okay, so what if we used Alchemist? What kind of weapon would they wield?’
