Star Wars Galaxies’ tragic fate caused FF14’s devs to keep the old job designs available for Evercold’s overhaul: ‘Players did not take that very well’

Final Fantasy 14‘s next expansion, Evercold, was announced during the fanfest over the weekend—and as someone who has had a laundry list of gripes, I couldn’t be more excited. Square Enix has finally taken note of the fact the game’s formula has grown stagnant, and promised all sorts of overhauls and reimaginings of what the MMO will be in the future.

Among these are “evolved” redesigns of the game’s many jobs, both streamlining the amount of buttons they have considerably and making sure they each have a unique job identity. While I was skeptical at first, the actual demonstrations—wherein several jobs were seen to have unique, bespoke mechanics unheard of in FF14’s history—has me more than cautiously optimistic.

But one thing does worry me: Square Enix is keeping the old job design available through a “reborn” mode toggle. And while this does make a certain kind of sense (old raids, etc. might simply not work with the new Evolved designs, and players still run those), it also has me a touch worried. Maintaining balance between two sets of over two dozen jobs sounds like a design nightmare.

Speaking at a Q&A attended by PC Gamer’s own Andrea Shearon over the weekend, however, director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) states that this decision was motivated by the ill fate of another MMO, Star Wars Galaxies: “If you know about the game, I’m sure you know what happened to it when it did its thing.”

“It’s thing” refers to a set of “New Game Enhancements” that hit the MMO in 2005. These changes were widely criticised—while they were aimed at modernising the game, they also stripped it of a lot of its charm and complexity. For instance, pre-NGE, Galaxies had dozens of unique professions that let you fill a lot of non-standard MMO roles.

It didn’t help that this update came right after the release of a new expansion, which the developer wound up offering refunds for. Players quit the game in droves, and Galaxies slowly crumbled, shutting down operations in December 2011.

Yoshi-P continues: “I actually really liked Star Wars Galaxies and its game design, but they—for the betterment of the gameplay experience, and they were doing it for the players—took an existing system, and they just changed it to something entirely new, and players did not take that very well. And I know people have been referring to it as a very tragic incident.”

Yoshi-P sees a very similar hazard in the new Evolved job design: “Counting from the original Final Fantasy 14, we’ve been around for 15 years—13 if we count from A Realm Reborn—we’ve been building this game together with players worldwide, and we’ve been on this journey together, and people have gotten so familiar and used to the system that we have established.

“I knew that I didn’t want to just suddenly remove what we’ve been used to. And that was my decision from the start.”

Which is honestly fair. Some of the designs we saw in the keynote were radically different. For instance, the Evolved Paladin’s defensive cooldowns allow them to launch counter-attacks if they time the activation of those cooldowns well, like a parry. The Dragoon, meanwhile, has an ultimate attack where it leaps into the air—one where the developers said they were toying with a 90% damage reduction for while active.

These are some radical departures from FF14’s deeply homogenized job design, and ones I’m all for: But they would also be a huge shock to the system: “We need to make sure that, of course, we will develop [the] evolved system, but then also let’s properly address what we currently have as well. And so that is the direction that I had for them at the start.”

Yoshi-P also says that the design of Dawntrail’s jobs—Viper and Pictomancer—were also an early sign of this design shift: “I feel that we were already stepping into that Evolved mode, and the more recent job design seems to feel a lot more streamlined, and I feel like it’s a very good design.

“So I think with that knowledge that we’ve built—knowledge and experience and insight—we can start applying [their design] to the existing jobs that we’ve been accustomed to and have had for these many years.” We’ll have to see if Square can pull it off, but honestly, even if it’s a bit messy? I’m just glad to see Square finally, genuinely experimenting. The enthusiasm is infectious.

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