What was the reason given for closing console versions of ffxi?

[Alhanelem]

If I'm not mistaken, there's certain aspects of the game they can still provide updates and patches for without actually needing to render anything (and therefore not need to use the PS2 devkits). They recently increased the number of RoE objectives you can have active at a time due to being able to have more data on a character. There are certain aspects like that that still rely on the amount of memory the client has access to, meaning that such QoL updates are affected by the platforms the client is supported on. By taking the limited hardware of the consoles out of the equation, QoL updates can go further.

They can tweak numbers, adjust data, and probably change or adjust game scripts (that is, things like what NPCs do when you talk to them etc, since that's probably done in a simple script language that isn't compiled like the game engine code is). But they can't do more major things like develop totally new battle contents or fix bugs that require altering the core code.

Ah, I missed the memory limitation thing the first time. Still, it's baffling that they could accommodate the limited memory in both consoles for all these years -- even up to the conclusion content -- yet the balance updates and stuff afterwards are a deal breaker. I guess we'll have to wait and see what they're able to do with the updates after that console bottleneck is removed. Call me a pessimist, but I don't really expect much to change/improve afterwards.

It's not really that hard to see.They worked around limitations by doing such things as adding seperate bags (vs making our existing bags bigger). By doing this you limit the amount of memory that needs to be used, since you can never have more than your inventory + 1 other bag open at the same time. Note that you can't move items between two different bags, it has to go through your inventory first. This is because it doesn't load in more item data than is necessary for what I described. If they made our bags 150+ slots, the PS2 wouldn't be able to handle it because that's too much memory being eaten up by the item data.

Also, ps2 and to a lesser extent xbox 360 have not been running without probelms the last few years. Seems every patch they implement new countermeasures against a screen blackout on the ps2 (which is a crash, and probably caused by memory being maxed out)