During the media tour there was a particular interview where the interviewer askes Yoshida to esplain better his vision towards job homogenisation, job identity and the changes he plans for 8.0, and Yoshi P provided a very long and profound answer. Since this has been a very discussed issue whithin the community i feel like it can be very interesting.

In the last Letter from the Producer we talked about Job identity and the desire to address the issue in patch 8.0, while the homogenization of classes is a much discussed problem within the community. Could you comment on this issue and how the new Viper Jobs and Pictomancer fit into this conversation?

I'll start from the end: the new Jobs implemented in version 7.0 were designed in light of the same balancing system adopted for all the others, because our goal is that all Jobs can be appreciated in the same way. We did not take into consideration in their design what our plans and projects for the near future regarding Jobs are. What I can say is that, obviously, when we release new Jobs together with an expansion they are developed by a team that each time carries out that job with more experience, so it happens more and more often that the newer classes seem more and more "complete " compared to legacy ones . There is a big difference, you notice immediately, often the younger Jobs have a lot happening on the gameplay front.

Speaking of the general mechanics of the Jobs and my desire to strengthen the identity of the Jobs, it is still early to cover the issue in detail but there are two specific topics I would like to discuss. When developing the contents of Final Fantasy 14 there are two strongly interrelated elements that must always be taken into account: one is the "Battle Content", or the design of the battles and fights, while the other is the game mechanics of the Jobs.

Regarding Battle Content, we've received a lot of player feedback in the past and I've talked about it often. Let's say that in general we have directed development towards reducing player stress , and as a result we have made certain decisions. One example was growing the size of the bosses' "target" circle, increasing the distance from which you could attack them, to the point that it eventually became too large. Likewise, when it comes to specific mechanics, we received feedback from some players that they didn't like certain mechanics, as a result we decided to no longer implement them. In short, in general from this perspective I would say that we reacted in a defensive manner.

But I believe that as a team we have to face new challenges : looking at the example of mechanics, I am convinced that instead of stopping implementing the less popular ones we should ask ourselves first of all what was wrong with them, how we could fix or expand them. Similarly, as regards the target circle of the bosses, if on the one hand making it larger brings an advantage for the players - because it allows them to attack practically always - on the other hand it makes it much more difficult to express the ability and the talent of the individual player.

Our goal obviously shouldn't be to stress players for the sake of it, but at the same time we must take into account the degree of satisfaction they feel when completing content. I mean that there must be a right and appropriate amount of stress so that the satisfaction at the moment of completion also increases. And this is something we are already working on in Dawntrail and in the 7.x patches , we absolutely don't want to wait until 8.0 but we intend to tackle this challenge immediately.

Let's now move on to the mechanics of Jobs . We often get feedback like, "This Job has a gap closer skill and mine doesn't." The most obvious solution is to implement similar skills for each Job, but doing so runs the risk of ending up in a situation where all Jobs become too similar to each other . Our desire is to create a situation in which each Job is equipped with its own skills, manages to shine in its own unique way, and there is also a sort of pride in playing a particular Job. By strongly differentiating the Jobs, we will be able to reach the goal we have set ourselves. This is why we would like to take a step back and put things back to how they were before.

Another fundamental issue concerns synergies: we chose to align the buff windows within a window lasting 120 seconds, because otherwise it would have been impossible to align the rotations of the different Jobs. But, even in this case, the result was to make the Job rotations extremely similar, and I don't think that's a good thing . So why not act now? The Battle Content and the Job mechanics are strongly interconnected, so we set ourselves the challenge of refining the Battle Content and the battle mechanics first, and then focusing on the Jobs only afterwards.

If we were to rework everything at the same time it would be extremely chaotic for the players, and that's why in the Live Letter I wanted to explain to the players that we will first fix the battle mechanics and give the audience time to get used to it, then only then can we work to make Jobs more exciting. I meant this in the Live Letter, it's the reason the Job work is coming later in the future.

The full interview is on the italian outlet Multiplayer it if you want to read the complete version. It's a very interesting interview overall