Branching jobs / Advancements

[Kiurai]

I know why it's near impossible at this point, there's almost 20 classes in this game. No matter how similarly they play to each other right now, there is so many jobs as is, it would be a nightmare to balance due to quantity alone. This is a hypothetical after all I don't think they could ever truly do it due to how the game works but it's more or less food for thought.

[Darus]

I know why it's near impossible at this point, there's almost 20 classes in this game. No matter how similarly they play to each other right now, there is so many jobs as is, it would be a nightmare to balance due to quantity alone. This is a hypothetical after all I don't think they could ever truly do it due to how the game works but it's more or less food for thought.

I don't think this kind of thing would be an actual nightmare though. From a game design standpoint, it would be the most efficient and effective.

Splits would permit for a much more massive amount of classes with less resources, tech demand, and balancing. You'd balanced it based on the core class that the splits are based on and trade less to make a "separate class". A sniper would have more DPS at the loss of bard music benefits and would have some different moves to allow this to be made up. Basically, classes would have so many base skills shared, that there would be very different, but just enough to change the approach to gameplay. Since so little is being altered and it is balanced around a central class, it would not be that much work to balance.

When you consider this from a design standpoint, it's genius, I'm gonna save this little insight for if I ever manage to get a game company going.

[Shurrikhan]

...

While you could save some on art assets here and there over the leveling experience, and any shared quests of course, chances are you're going to have adjust potencies and so forth through job-traits, the same skills will source very different mechanics, and most of the skills will be thematically reskinned from one another by max level. It wouldn't entail any significant increase in design-efficiency by the time we're, as here, a few or more expansions in.