FFXIV: Devs Change New Sage Job Icon Over Phobia Concerns

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FFXIV: Devs Change New Sage Job Icon Over Phobia Concerns

Once again, FFXIV devs take extra steps for the care of their community.


Today, FFXIV Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida (aka Yoshi-P) announced a change coming to the new Sage class. Due to phobia concerns, they've updated the icon for the class to better accommodate some players. Essentially, they've filled in the holes on the symbols that represent the nouliths the class uses. While it seems like a minor change, it's very welcome and nice to see.

With Final Fantasy XIV Online having such a large community, especially with its current boom, there's inevitably a rich diversity of people in it. This is great for so many reasons, but sadly, sometimes members of the community have to deal with their own mental health struggles or phobias. A few weeks ago, the dev team revealed the new Sage job icon, but a number of players expressed their concerns with it. Namely that the holes that appear in the nouliths triggered trypophobia in some people. In short, trypophobia is an “aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps.”

A welcome response

The updated Sage job icon in Final Fantasy XIV.
The new Sage job icon with the old one behind it. Image via Kotaku.

As such, Yoshi-P and his team took quick action and made the necessary adjustments to the icon. Based on his statement, Yoshi-P didn't expect the icon reveal to be that significant of a deal but received a decent amount of feedback about it. He explained the phobia and that severity of reactions varies between individuals.

“But regardless of such differences, you have given us your earnest feedback, and there's still time to change things. Considering also the fact that job icons are prominently visible in the game, and that they also appear on merchandise, we've made the decision to redesign the sage icon.”

At the end of the day, this change won't affect many people but is great to see from the devs. Being sure to tend for all of their community members, even as things are probably stressful working towards Endwalker, shows just how much they care about their community. In today's world, it's something all developers and people could learn something from.