Suggestion: Multiple Main Characters

[Unsought]

I love the job system in ffxiv but it takes something away I have always taken for granted. In other mmos, playing other classes means you will have to make more than 1 character. This allows someone like me to make multiple different looking characters of different race/gender/height/build and experience a different feel while playing though the game. Now you certainly can do this in ffxiv but with being able to play all the jobs on one character you would have to be mad to not take advantage of it.

If we were able to have a few character pre-sets we could switch between just like we can with jobs, you would have the best of both. A very ideal and alt friendly job system and multiple characters to choose from. You could even have different characters assigned to different jobs. DRG set to a male Hyur and DNC set to female Au Ra.

I understand most people will probably have a lot of arguments against this like "this is standard for mmos, it breaks immersion/doesn't make sense, my character name won't fit for another gender/race, its unnecessary" and that's fair enough. My only argument against the immersion would be the phial of fantasia. We can already change our appearance, its just more permeant as of now so you lose your previous character design.

At the end of the day, in my opinion this would be a great addition to the game and add a lot of flexibility but then again I'm biased so I would love to hear the opinions of other players.

[solarie]

If i would alter on the system at all i would make it posible to have glamor races. that you can say you have warrior and a black mage. You could have a glamour option that on the glamour card choce race to glamour. So you can be human warrior and lala black mage if you wanted. That is probably the easiest and best way to solve the multiple character problem many "feel the need to have".

[Unsought]

Don't get me wrong I would defiantly prefer it that way as it would be a very familiar and easy to use system but we have to remember square enix not only has to but wants to make money so let me play devils advocate for a bit.

Part of making money is the mog station and one of the items you can buy is the phial of fantasia. Lets just be honest, why would they remove an item that they can currently sell me to solve this problem just to give me an even better version for free. That's my reasoning behind multiple pre-set characters. Once you have made the max number of premade characters (lets say its 2-3), if you want to change after that then you will need a phial of fantasia. That way it doesn't become obsolete. The other solution would be a race glamour that would only be obtained by buying it on the mog-station.

Having said all that I would prefer your suggestion 100%.

[Vencio]

This would greatly undermine FFXIV’s main structure & flexibility.

You cannot apply the same anticipation onto another fantasy setting solely because you were adjusted on another MMO’s world.

I will agree/disagree that there are some aspects of FFXIV I don’t like yet I cannot persuade nor insist to apply a certain method just because my mindset is adjusted from a previous MMO (be it WoW, GA2 etc,.)

[selmon]

I don't get how this suggestion would undermine FFXIV's main structure at all. FFXIV's main structure seems to be to be as flexible as possible. Maybe you could explain that?

Having multiple characters on a server is also a designated feature of this game - one that is even higher priced in the subscription I might add. Yet the game tries very, very hard to not make me want to play a secondary character at all. I can live with not having the bonus exp for the first job or playing through the story twice - the story is fantastic. But not being able to send stuff between my characters is a huge pain and according to this you can't even make your alts tenants of your house without bug using(?): https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...eb2x&context=3 .. just why? Even if you would buy the game a second time and have a second subscription just to circumvent the trading and tenant problem.. all "account-wide" items you buy then will only be available to one character. It's like every solution you find to play multiple characters comes with a different heavy downside.

This topic comes up A LOT and not only from beginners (e.g. see comments there https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ple_charcters/ why people use alts) and FFXIV does not shy back from monetizing other in my opinion much more "lore breaking" things like job-level boosts or the story skip. Add a purchase to have an alt character share it's inventory, stats and jobs with a main, call it "split personality" and boom, job done. It's much less game breaking than the job level or story skips. I would pay 50 or a 100 bucks for a feature like that.

It is very weird to me that a game with such a heavy focus on role playing and a focus of making life easier at all the right places just throws so many rocks in your way of playing multiple characters even though offering the option and letting people even pay extra for it.

[ItMe]

Could be neat, but it would cut into Fantasia sales so I doubt it'll happen : (

[selmon]

Could be neat, but it would cut into Fantasia sales so I doubt it'll happen : (

I don't even think it would, if it's implemented like I suggested: Sell a "Split Personality" item (or "Wandering Mind" or whatever you might want to call it to make sense) for 50 to 100 bucks that lets you sync your characters stats, inventory, jobs etc. to another character you have (so basically your second character only has the name, appearance and the stuff from the character creation screen like birthdate etc on his own but shares the rest with the "main" character). The reasons:

1. Fantasia is not a replacement for switchable characters - if I want to decide which character to play at a whim on a daily basis I would end up spending 60+ bucks a month - that's not feasible, so I can't go that route and I assume that others don't go that route either. My use case is to play different characters of different races and different "personalities" in my head. People that play longer have stated that they e.g. have alts to basically have a male and a female version of their persona (again this would be extremely costly with Fantasia and I doubt people do it). For me personally it would be important that my different characters have different names as well, so for that alone Fantasia wouldn't be an option.
2. Switchable characters are not a replacement for Fantasia either: You won't spend 50-100 bucks just to change your style once, you would still use Fantasia ON TOP of having synced characters, to e.g. alter the hairstyle or do small changes to one of your characters.
3. On top of that there is still the "2 or more characters on a server? --> pay more in subscription fees" mechanic in play - even if the price for that sync option were relatively low (say 20 bucks), you would still have to pay for standard subscription (= 2 bucks more every month unless you go for 3 or 6 month payments which of course too pays off for SE by binding players for a prolonged period of time) since you now have 2+ characters on a server. I would be completely fine with that.

From a programming standpoint I think this would be very easy to implement - it's basically only one character on the backend side for which you just have to save the currently selected appearance name and personal data (birth date..). It would fit very well into how FFXIV does and sell quality of life to players and would in contrast to job or story boosts not even break how the player experiences the game.

Though I would highly suggest to provide a different option for players with multiple characters to share things between them (e.g. giving standard subscribers a "shared vault" where they can share stuff between characters would be a non-breaking and very simple implementation) - that feature alone would incentivize people more to create multiple chars instead of feeling forced to play one and thus bringing more money via standard subscription update.

[selmon]

Though I would highly suggest to provide a different option for players with multiple characters to share things between them (e.g. giving standard subscribers a "shared vault" where they can share stuff between characters would be a non-breaking and very simple implementation) - that feature alone would incentivize people more to create multiple chars instead of feeling forced to play one and thus bringing more money via standard subscription update.

For completeness sake: I think this would be a great change for people who would not be happy with synced stats but want to have their characters be completely different individuals yet being able to share stuff and gil between them (I have read that many people create characters for RP reasons and I suspect that they would still want to invest the time to have characters with different jobs and being completely individual). And I frankly also don't see why this should not be possible or break the game in any way.