Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida has revealed a battle royale mode was originally planned for the MMO.
Speaking to Japanese publication gamer.ne (and translated via Reddit), Final Fantasy 14's Naoki Yoshida revealed several interesting nuggets of information surrounding the relatively recent Crystalline Conflict PvP mode. After a year of planning the basics of the PvP mode, the development team apparently toyed with a battle royale mode, where everyone would play as a Blue Mage.
In this planned mode, players would start out in a large arena, and be forced to stay inside a slowly shrinking circle surrounding them. Instead of picking up weapons however, as you'd no doubt expect from countless other battle royale games, you'd use Blue Mage abilities to learn new skills and combat abilities, putting them to the test on other players.
- Final Fantasy 14 lead says if the MMO could have any collab, he'd want a League of Legends one: "A crossover with them would be a dream come true"
- Elden Ring Nightreign director says it wasn't always a PvE battle royale game: "That's something that we tried and we thought it worked well, so it stuck"
Yoshida doesn't explicitly say it, but this planned mode would end up scrapped in favor of the Crystalline Conflict. The mode that evolved from all this planning was finally introduced to Final Fantasy 14 with patch 6.1 earlier this year, tasking two opposing teams to push an objective marker along a track and all the way to the opponents base area to win the game.
Elsewhere in the interview, Yoshida apparently reveals that since the addition of the Duty Support system with patch 6.1, the number of new Final Fantasy 14 players has actually increased. Since the Duty Support system allows players to solo co-op missions like Dungeons with AI companions, it could be that those afraid of playing online with others finally feel comfortable stepping into the MMO.
Speaking of PvP, Yoshida recently revealed the Black Mage buffs will be rolled back in a future patch, which just so happens to be the class the developer mains.
As Final Fantasy 14 raiders tear through the MMO's hardest duty with no healers and then no tanks, the community can only see this going one way: "Now it's time to clear without DPS"
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