Final Fantasy XIV is new ground for me in several respects - it's my first MMO, my first Final Fantasy game, and the first time I've ever seen a game character use the word "forsooth" and taken it vaguely seriously. At the time of writing, I have almost finished the main story questline of the game's first expansion, Heavensward, and my playtime clocks in around 140 hours.
My main class at the moment is Dark Knight, a heavily armoured tank with a two-handed sword (each class in FFXIV is defined by the type of weapon it uses). As I levelled up, I unlocked a fixed set of abilities in a fixed order - some were gained purely through levelling, others through story quests, but at no point did I choose between sub-paths or assign points to a skill tree. Even my choice of race didn't really affect my abilities; there are minor stat differences between the races of Eorzea, but these differences are small enough that they become irrelevant at higher levels. Steady Night is a hulking, muscular roegadyn, but he could be a diminutive lalafell and nothing would really change about his performance or playstyle.
Now, this isn't as limiting as it might seem. Remember how classes are defined by the weapons they wield? Well, all I have to do is give Steady Night a gun, and he'll switch class to Machinist, a hard-hitting ranged DPS. This easy class-switch ability is one of FFXIV's most touted features, eliminating the need to create multiple "alt" characters to play as multiple classes (and going hand in hand with race choice having almost no effect on class performance). But, as a Machinist, Steady will have the same linear ability progression as any other Machinist. And every other class works the same way.*
Crafting and gathering skills in FFXIV are assigned to their own special noncombat classes. I've also been levelling Steady as a Miner; it's a great downtime activity to keep my hands busy while I listen to an audiobook or hang out on Discord with my partner.
I'm not really building a character - it's more like I'm selecting a prebuilt kit off the shelf, and, if I want something different, I pick a whole different kit rather than modifying this one. This is quite rare in MMOs. It's much more common for classes to have multiple specialisation options, and often there are race-specific abilities, extra skills from particular pieces of equipment, or class-agnostic extras unlocked through some means other than levelling. In theory, there are many different ways to build any given class. There's none of that here.
As an inveterate tinkerer and lifelong fan of "builds" in games, I was expecting to hate this. But I don't. I think I love it, actually.
From a development standpoint, the most obvious advantage of FFXIV's approach is that it makes balancing a lot easier, and my understanding is that the game is generally considered to have pretty good class balance. There is of course a metagame and a rough hierarchy of power, but every video I've watched on the matter, even those aimed at high-end raiding and similar hardcore content, has stressed that no class is completely non-viable. This stands in stark contrast to games like WoW, where certain specs or entire classes often end up being too strong or unuseably weak for a period of time. In extreme cases, the end result can wind up being basically the same as FFXIV's setup, but with the good builds floating in a sea of trap options.
But, as a player, I have also found the lack of choices in character building strangely liberating. I don't need to look up guides on optimal buildcraft, or stress over hunting down specific items with the skills I need. I don't feel like I'm missing out by passing up a cool-looking option in favour of a mathematically correct one. I don't have to worry about being booted from a pick-up group for a suboptimal build; if I keep my gear up to date with my current level on its simple, linear scale, my character is properly equipped and ready to roll. And, in a sense, it keeps me honest. If I die in a dungeon or fail a boss fight, I can't blame it on having a bad build - I have to take responsibility myself. (Or blame the healer, but I've been lucky enough to have pretty good healers most of the time. Except that one White Mage the other day who kept pulling. Not sure what his deal was.)
What I find interesting about FFXIV's approach to class design is that it stands in opposition not only to the wider MMO sphere, but to a trend in games in general. Buildcraft is very much en vogue at the moment, at all levels of game development. At the top end, you have triple-A juggernauts in the mould of Destiny, building themselves around abundant loot and build diversity, to varying degrees of success - the live-service "looter" genre seems to be cursed with terrible launch states, from Anthem to Marvel's Avengers. Indie developers, meanwhile, have seized upon roguelite elements as a kind of secret sauce to brighten up any genre, encouraging players to craft new builds for each run and unlock more options for the next one. And, of course, there's the deckbuilding boom, with collectible card game elements grafted onto everything as developers scramble for a slice of Slay the Spire's pie. Every game seems to ask you to dive into its ocean of options and put together your character, your deck, your arsenal, your experience.
I thought I wanted this. I've always been drawn to the concept of infinite possibilities, of being able to customise my character just so. My previous game obsession, Warframe, snared me with promises of building my frames and weapons in countless fun, overpowered configurations, wrapped in a kitchen-sink space opera setting with a vast iceberg of lore, and... I mean, I did have fun! Warframe's moment-to-moment gameplay loop is really good! But the currents on that ocean of options dragged me in too many different directions, and I found myself losing focus and drifting away. Granted, there were other things about Warframe that frustrated me, chiefly the state of its grind and economy and a frustrating array of disconnected, underdeveloped subsystems, but I do think choice paralysis was a real factor in my losing interest in it.
Final Fantasy XIV's gameplay is much less fluid and dynamic than Warframe's. It's an old-world game in many senses - old-world control scheme, old-world combat system, even an old-world pricing model. The pacing is more sedate, and my character's powers far more restrained. Steady Night's basic 1-2-3 attack combo is never going to break the game's balancing wide open through six carefully selected perks. FFXIV calls its classes "jobs", and that actually feels very apposite: I have a job to do, with a clear job description and the right tools to perform it properly. All I have to do is use them right, and within that goal are so many interesting choices - when to move, where to use abilities, how to deal with a boss's special attacks - that I don't think I need any more of them.
* Technically, there's one class, Blue Mage, with a lot of choices involved. Its gimmick is that it copies abilities from enemies, so it can pick a subset of skills from a gradually growing spellbook. However, Blue Mages are considered separate from the game's "core" classes, and they're not allowed in standard instances, mostly relegated to their own class-specific content. It's best to think of Blue Mage as an elaborate minigame rather than a proper class.
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