Last time, I covered the system mechanics and basic premise of a fighting game directly inspired by Final Fantasy XIV, and now I am going to create a basic overview and introduction into a roster for the game.
The Importance of Roster Diversity
It's undeniable that one of the major appeals of any fighting game is its roster. If players cannot identify characters they enjoy playing as, whose aesthetic they identify with, or whose personality they connect with, they're likely to drop a game entirely. Even commonly disliked characters, such as Street Fighter's Blanka, have their fans. As such, it's important to ensure the roster is visually and mechanically.
Visual diversity is a critical element I believe many licensed fighting games lack due to the limited nature of their source IPs. Luckily, Final Fantasy XIV has a myriad of playable races and characters with all sorts of different body types, personalities, and capabilities. Unfortunately, however, Final Fantasy XIV is rather lacking in real-world racial diversity, with most major human-looking characters being ambiguously pale. In addition, multiple player race/gender combinations are somewhat lacking in major story representatives, such as the feline Hrothgar.
Mechanical diversity, while generally not as lacking as visual diversity in licensed titles, is a definite must-have. One of the great appeals of fighting games is that with a diverse roster, there's bound to a be a character that "fits one's hands," so to speak. Characters that cover a broad range of archetypes, control styles, and unique tools are important to ensure that everyone is able to find a character they enjoy.
How Roster Diversity Strains Against the IP
While a diverse roster is important, it must be noted that licensed fighting games have an additional difficulty compared to original fighting game IPs, that being the desire to make sure fans of a given character can play and enjoy that character. After all, if Goku was too difficult or unusual for most players in Dragonball FighterZ to pick up and play, many fans drawn in by the IP might not actually enjoy the game. Rather than making sure that the game has a character for everyone, designers are pushed to make sure every character is for everyone.
As seen in Dragonball FighterZ, this results in some pretty hefty homogenization. Almost every character has the same movement speed and options, every character has the same health, and a large portion characters tend to simply be a collection of common tools rather than having a unique central identity.
Funnily enough, the "every character is for everyone" philosophy has been emerging in Final Fantasy XIV itself lately. There's been a not-insignificant amount of criticism regarding job homogenization within the game with many unique tools either being removed or given to all jobs within a role. In the latest expansion (Endwalker) in particular, there's been a shift to make all jobs fit into a specific two-minute burst window instead of each job having their own unique flow.
Creating a Roster Philosophy
While I understand the desire to make sure people can enjoy the gameplay of their favorite character, I ultimately disagree with homogenization as the solution to the problem. Instead, I believe that the game including options that ease the learning process such as solid tutorials and a player-assistance mode can help players enjoy their favorite characters without harming roster diversity.
Now, when it comes to laying the foundation of the roster, I am specifically opting to create functions based off of playable jobs in Final Fantasy XIV as opposed to pulling from character feats in the story. This is for a couple of reasons. The first is that this is an exercise in adaptation and coming up with ways to translate specific mechanical themes from one genre to another. The second is that the capabilities of each character in-story are kept rather vague and we are not given substantial insight into different techniques used by each character. Luckily, almost every job has an important story character tied to them in some way or form. If a job has a story-relevant character, that character will likely be the representative, especially if they are a Scion of the Seventh Dawn.
One difficulty that springs from this is that some jobs, particularly the Healers, don't necessarily have a mechanical identity that would translate well into a fighting game or don't fully utilize the job fantasy in a way that a fighting game can. For instance, the Dancer job has a mechanical identity as a DPS who focuses on buffing others to contribute in a raid while juggling random procs. While characters with random elements are not particularly uncommon in fighting games, there's not really a good 1v1 analogue for raid buffs. As such, some jobs will require pulling more from secondary mechanics or job fantasy rather than primary job mechanics. In particular, the healers will likely require extensive reimagining to fit into a fighting game as party healing doesn't have a place in a 1v1 fighter and the healers generally have few attacks and mechanics to pull from for inspiration.
Balancing Roster Archetypes
One unique challenge that arises from adapting FFXIV's jobs to a fighting game is that just over half of the jobs in the game rely primarily on ranged attacks to fight. As such, I will be taking some liberties with the ranged classes in order to make them feel more substantially different and favor different ranges. Dancer, for instance, will emphasize its mobility and focus more on mid-ranged attacks while Machinist may have a much greater emphasis placed on its various gadgets instead of its gunplay.
In addition, some jobs may be adapted into archetypes that they don't particularly resemble in the MMO in order to increase roster variance. Warrior, for instance, will be adapted into a slow Grappler because the only other reasonable candidate is Monk, which makes most sense as a stance or rekka-based character. This is despite there being only one instance of a player-used grab in the game, being the Monk's Meteodrive Limit Break in PvP content.
Next Time...
I'll be going into detail outlining the various tank jobs and how they will be adapted into a fighting game. Paladin, Warrior, Dark Knight, and Gunbreaker may all have similar tools in the MMO, but their different mechanics, attack patterns, and fantasies lend themselves to some pretty wildly different fighting game functions.
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