As 6.15 Launches Today, FFXIV Players Could Have Had An All Blue Mage Battle Royale Mode

Final Fantasy XIV’s Patch 6.15 launched today, introducing new story content, another tribe quest, and more to the game. That’s great. New content is always good. But, after today, PvP and Blue Mage fans are probably going to be wondering about the things they could have had.

According to an interview with Naoki Yoshida on the Japanese game site Gamer, the XIV team was at one point considering adding an all Blue Mage battle royale mode to the game. Yes. You heard that right, Blue Mages fighting to the last one standing in a massive magical battle. The interview, translated on Reddit, covers a variety of topics, including potential changes to treasure hunts and story stuff that we won’t go into here just in case you’re one of those people who really likes to take your time working through content, but the biggest surprise is definitely what Blue Mage fans could have had if the plans had come to fruition.

It seems the Blue Mage battle royale mode was being tossed around when the developers were working on what eventually became Crystalline Conflict, the new – pretty popular – PvP mode. At the time, the idea was to put Blue Mages into a large arena where instead of picking up weapons, they’d do what they’re built to do, learn skills. As with most games in the battle royale genre, mages would eventually be forced together in an ever-shrinking arena, where they can no longer hide and must fight.

As far as we can tell from the translation, Yoshida didn’t say what happened to that idea – whether they entirely scrapped it or maybe set it aside to look at again later. Perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. There are bound to be Blue Mage-loving PvP fans who would love another reason to break their canes out.