FFXIV director reveals why scrapped Time Mage job was never released

Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida revealed that the game originally included plans for a Time Mage job which was eventually scrapped.

Final Fantasy XIV’s roster of jobs only continues to grow with the upcoming release of Dawntrail. The introduction of magic DPS Pictomancer and flashy melee Viper show that the options for players to choose from are constantly expanding.

With each expansion, the devs look to offer two new jobs to the players as the team spends hours upon hours coming up with new ideas and finding ways to explore how they’d work in an MMO environment.

But one such class that never made it into the live servers was the Time Mage, which director Naoki Yoshida revealed was scrapped due to balancing fears and technical challenges.

When speaking to TheGamer, Yoshi-P revealed that the team had plans to implement a mage that could manipulate or play around with the idea of time. This notion has been explored before in the Final Fantasy series, making it an apt addition to the MMO.

However, a Time Mage in FFXIV was never meant to be, as working time-related spells into an MMORPG was a nigh impossible task. Slowing down or speeding up time for all players would “overpower the job”, and make balancing even more challenging.

“In an MMORPG, we can’t stop time, and another aspect is that it would overpower the job. What would be the point of a Time Mage that couldn’t manipulate time?” the director explained.

He went on to say that the amount of recognizable jobs from the Final Fantasy IP has been slowly decreasing, particularly as ideas for new weapons have become a tough issue to tackle. Nonetheless, Yoshi-P says that the team will be looking at more original jobs specific to Final Fantasy XIV going into the future.