Fan Fest Tokyo

[Tupsi]

They wont be removing Classes, it simply would be too much work.

That's the point of taking 1+ years to work on an expansion pack rather than trying to do it in a 4 month update cycle. They can remove classes by making everything from 3.0 onwards being purely 'job' related and job only additions.

[Nalien]

They can remove classes by making everything from 3.0 onwards being purely 'job' related and job only additions.

Adding no new Classes =/= removing Classes. Removing Conjurer and reworking the entire 1-50 questline to accommodate for that change would be a waste of time. All it achieves is tidying up the clutter that is Jobs without actually doing anything, when the existing redundancy of Classes is perfectly fine. At least, as someone who played Final Fantasy I think it's fine.

There is pretty much only one way I can see them removing Classes without it being a massive waste of development time, and that's by condensing them all down into a Freelancer Job that everyone starts out with and is effectively the same as 1.0s Physical/Class leveling system; You can have Lv50 Freelancer, but your Conjuring Skill can still be a Lv1. You go from being a Freelancer with Lv30 Gladiator and Lv15 Conjuring to unlocking Paladin, effectively meaning no Jobs really have a Class anymore. If they can make Freelancer its own viable option for events then it's perhaps worthwhile, do it the same way all their RPGs manage the Freelancer/Onion Knight Job and just boost its power the more you cap. That could be interesting, though perhaps still a waste of time (almost the exact same thing could be achieved by just giving Classes their own special Freelancer trait which does the same thing).

I find it more likely that Dark Knight is just an "advanced" Job which is "unlocked" by merging two existing Jobs (a system Yoshida mentioned in the past). Rather than getting a Class, leveling it to 30, and unlocking Dark Knight, you get Paladin and Black Mage and you get to take Dark Knight from 1-60. Really doubt they're going to do away with Conjurer and other Classes. If they did such a dramatic reworking of the existing system it would just further send home the message that I'm playing an extended beta right now, though I guess with the time frame they had to rebuild the game I might forgive that.