Final Fantasy XIV is a game where the accountant is in the room.

If Dragon Age: Veilguard is a game where HR is in the room...

then Final Fantasy XIV is a game where the accountant is in the room.

EVERY single game mechanic in this game is made in a way where you can obviously see the effects of cost optimization.

Take for instance: why are (high-end) raids so stale and why do they reuse the same patterns over and over again? People think the answer is because they want players to pick up the mechanics instantly. Sure. That's what Yoshi P tells you, which is half-true.

What they neglected to tell you is that a big reason they did this is that it makes the raids easier to balance and debug. Do you remember when there are bugs after bugs at the start of EW, like the housing lottery bugs, the login queue bug, and the TOP bugs? That's because they transferred a lot of their in-house QA elsewhere, and it allows CBU3 to slash production costs for FF14.

Another reason is that doing so allows them to use pre-existing code and animations, thereby allowing them to get away with only having two or three raid content designers, compared to WoW having far more.

Why is deep dungeon just the same concept with a new coat of paint every generation? HoH was barely changed from PotD. EO was barely changed from PotD. Once again, because it's far cheaper to do so.

Why is field content full of FATEs? Once again it's for the same reason.

Innovation is costly, and CBU3 intends to recycle the same ideas again and again until the end of this game's shelf life if they can get away with it.

A huge part of this is also because they cannot afford to hire more programmers. Many SE titles lean into their competitive advantage, which is visuals and graphics. Because they can afford to hire a lot of artists and writers, since there's a ton of them looking for jobs in Japan. Programmers? Much harder. Those would much rather emigrate and work in Silicon Valley. This is clearly reflected in FF14, where for too long we have dungeons that are spectacle over substance. Even in FF16, dungeons are still glorified corridors with next to no substance, especially when you compare it to dungeons from Western action RPGs like GoW: Ragnarok, where they fill dungeons with puzzles and nonlinearity.

This doesn't just affect gameplay content. It also affects job design. They have stated that simpler, homogenized jobs allow them to cut time spent on QA and balancing. And yet we still have results like Pictomancer dominating the caster role anyways, because they are not maintaining the same amount of time spent on QA and balancing, thereby increasing the quality of such balancing. They're just using it as a way to reduce the time spent on balancing to cut costs, so the balancing today in EW and DT is just as atrocious as the balancing in HW.

https://i.imgur.com/KZiCKZB.png

It's really ironic that the issues that delivered 1.0 are the same issues that plague this game today. It's probably not even out of malice, however. Square Enix is a struggling company and they have an extremely hard time finding talent. Therefore, they literally are incapable of making FF14 better than what it is right now. They have to cut costs from FF14 because of their disaster after disaster (in terms of sales): Forspoken, Marvel's Avengers, FF16, Babylon's Fall... At the same time they also cannot find any programming talent that can actually code up all the innovative content that is lacking in this game. So the only thing left to do is to rely on the writers and artists, hoping the spectacle and story can hide the lack of substance in this game. But even the story is now falling...

If you are hoping that they will divert resources back to FF14 or that they'll come up with better, diversified jobs, or come up with amazing improved combat encounters with brand new mechanics... Don't. Square Enix is not in a financial position to deliver any of that for the foreseeable future.

There is a problem somewhere in their team structure or decision-making, at least. Every time that Yoshi-P says something is "impossible" or "too hard", it's extremely suspicious.

Why is it suspicious? Because the whole point of a programmer is to make things that are impossible, possible. Making a 3D world with clouds and grass and flowers was impossible in the 1990s, yet programmers made it possible by thinking outside the box.

Now they come and say it's impossible, even when other games are doing it. There is a clear problem with that. It is the job of programmers and developers to make things possible. Every time they say it's not possible, I can think of a way to do it myself regardless of how much spaghetti code they have and regardless of the potential infrastructure challenges they have. Yoshi-P is being fed excuses by his team.

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Originally Posted by Red-thunder

Do you remember when there are bugs after bugs at the start of EW, like the housing lottery bugs, the login queue bug, and the TOP bugs?

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The bugs then coincided with the Covid lockdown in Japan so... it's been a lot better recently, like it used to be before EW. At the time we had lots of other bugs happen which was not normal, and it seemed pretty obvious why.

But also, those are not good examples:

• Ultimates are probably too hard for their QA team. The best they can do is use godmode.
• The housing issues did not become apparent until released to a very large set of players ie. more than their QA team of just 100 people.
• The login issues are also an example of something that isn't an issue except when lots of people are trying to login ie. more than their 100 QA.

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Why is deep dungeon just the same concept with a new coat of paint every generation?

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Tbh because people asked for a new deep dungeon. If they asked for a different content entirely it would be different. I think they noticed the problem with EO being the same and they said the one in Dawntrail will have differences.

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They have stated that simpler, homogenized jobs allow them to cut time spent on QA and balancing.

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I haven't seen them state that - it's just extremely obvious that this is the case, that's all.

as much as i hate blizzard i will admit that they understand that in order to make game you gotta throw money at it

FF14 could be the best MMO ever if square would just unclench their cheeks and throw more money at the game, if they spent more money to make the game good more people would sub which will make them more money i guess square has never heard the phrase "you gotta spend money to make money"

stop taking our subs and spending it on games like forspoken that no one wants

also dont take away our lead in order to make other games, FF14 suffered massively because yoshi p was off making FF16 which wasnt even that good

I'll be honest I didn't read much of this bait but this part was hilarious.

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Do you remember when there are bugs after bugs at the start of EW, like the housing lottery bugs, the login queue bug, and the TOP bugs?

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Person thinks "bugs after bugs after bugs" means three bugs :D

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

There is a problem somewhere in their team structure or decision-making, at least. Every time that Yoshi-P says something is "impossible" or "too hard", it's extremely suspicious.

Why is it suspicious? Because the whole point of a programmer is to make things that are impossible, possible. Making a 3D world with clouds and grass and flowers was impossible in the 1990s, yet programmers made it possible by thinking outside the box.

Now they come and say it's impossible, even when other games are doing it. There is a clear problem with that. It is the job of programmers and developers to make things possible. Every time they say it's not possible, I can think of a way to do it myself regardless of how much spaghetti code they have and regardless of the potential infrastructure challenges they have. Yoshi-P is being fed excuses by his team.

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I mean the whole "this is impossible" spiel is clear nonsense with how often they have implemented things that they said was impossible years ago. Sometimes the excuses they give are obviously ridiculous to anyone with a modicum of production code experience. But I really have to wonder whether it's Yoshi P or his team gaslighting him so they can get away with working less.

With all the excuses they give about how their employees need to take a break now and then and their jokes about how they have to tell people not to work too much and to get holidays... it makes me wonder whether the team just doesn't care about meeting deliverables anymore.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Tbh because people asked for a new deep dungeon. If they asked for a different content entirely it would be different. I think they noticed the problem with EO being the same and they said the one in Dawntrail will have differences.

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This is frankly a very poor excuse. In any other game or series, when people ask for new content or a new game, people expect some innovation and some differences. Not a carbon copy with two gimmicks that an intern can whip up in two hours (or maybe a day if it requires new assets, but I mean I've certainly seen no new gimmicks, like the magicites, that used new assets beyond maybe a few icons).

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Originally Posted by ryouma17

as much as i hate blizzard i will admit that they understand that in order to make game you gotta throw money at it

FF14 could be the best MMO ever if square would just unclench their cheeks and throw more money at the game, if they spent more money to make the game good more people would sub which will make them more money i guess square has never heard the phrase "you gotta spend money to make money"

stop taking our subs and spending it on games like forspoken that no one wants

also dont take away our lead in order to make other games, FF14 suffered massively because yoshi p was off making FF16 which wasnt even that good

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You can't expect much when this playerbase melted down over all the criticisms of them spending resources on FF16. Anyone who criticized that decision became a pariah.

It seems that their senior team has moved on to permanently working on new projects. Most of them have not returned after FF16 and are now just working on more unannounced projects.

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Originally Posted by Exmo

I'll be honest I didn't read much of this bait but this part was hilarious.


Person thinks "bugs after bugs after bugs" means three bugs https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...es/biggrin.png

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Today in: person doesn't understand what examples are.


But let me add some more for you then.

· Warrior's SiO randomly healing for millions.
· Bard being unable to use any songs if another bard in the party already used them.
· A change to their netcode causing Ninja Mudras to ghost for everyone not on JP ping.
· Too many ability sounds going off at the same time just disabling all sounds until you restart the game (mostly an issue in frontlines).


TOP alone had several bugs.
·P3 aggro reset while the boss was untargetable, making it almost guaranteed to oneshot your healer.
·Hello World adding so many status effects at once that the game removed your own job and party buffs.
·A bug introduced with the release of Mount Rokkon where players in TOP would suddenly kill themselves when stepping in a tower after they had resolved looper.


Sure the thread is engagement bait but the fact that Endwalker had significantly more bugs than previous expansions remains.

Undeniably, they knew exactly what they were doing when they released the double dye system. Some gear still dyes horribly and some gear parts aren’t dyeable at all.

The system itself isn’t unwelcome, but it certainly boosts mog station sales. Needing twice the jet black or pure white dyes sure is an awful feeling. Especially with no meaningful way to obtain them ig.
And please, don’t suggest retainer venture coffers. They're just lootboxes.

So we can agree that they know how to make cash from FFXIV, but they don't know how to use it effectively.

I generally agree, but I don't really know what you want anyone to do with this information aside from either keep complaining or unsub.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Today in: person doesn't understand what examples are.


But let me add some more for you then.

· Warrior's SiO randomly healing for millions.
· Bard being unable to use any songs if another bard in the party already used them.
· A change to their netcode causing Ninja Mudras to ghost for everyone not on JP ping.
· Too many ability sounds going off at the same time just disabling all sounds until you restart the game (mostly an issue in frontlines).


TOP alone had several bugs.
·P3 aggro reset while the boss was untargetable, making it almost guaranteed to oneshot your healer.
·Hello World adding so many status effects at once that the game removed your own job and party buffs.
·A bug introduced with the release of Mount Rokkon where players in TOP would suddenly kill themselves when stepping in a tower after they had resolved looper.


Sure the thread is engagement bait but the fact that Endwalker had significantly more bugs than previous expansions remains.

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"New software had bugs" is the fork found in kitchen of our times.

The first rule in software development is There Will Always Be Bugs.

All that the best QA on the planet can ever hope to do is catch 99.9996% of them (the six sigma level) - but that's an unrealistic goal for software development in comparison to manufacturing because of variables outside of their control. So most of the time software teams aim for 4th or 5th Sigma, or eliminating 99.3% to 99.97% of the bugs. That means that out of a list of 1000 features that QA tests, 3 bugs are still gonna slip through. Stuff like the localization from Japanese getting missed in one lone instance last patch is an example - out of the hundreds of lines of dialogue in the patch, one got overlooked. It happens.

For the record, the software team I'm embedded in as a business analyst has over 13,000 JIRA tickets over 10 years, of which about 7800 are bug reports. 700 bugs a year! However, only 3200 of those were client reported, and over a thousand of them were marked as duplicates. 200 bugs a year over 4 releases a year, so about 50 reported bugs per patch. For software with about 300 different components and thousands of features and variables. The QA department is about 4 people. We don't have automation functional testing yet because our code is janky AF and we're too broke to be able to outsource it. So we aim for 4th sigma.... 99.7 bug free. And we kind of get there.

CBU3 is probably still aiming for that 5th sigma level as their goal, but it's a goal and not a realistic demand every patch release. There will always be bugs.

And the bigger and more complex the system, the greater the technical debt, and the greater the likelihood of accidental stuff getting overlooked or unexpected interactions, especially when the servers are stressed beyond their original specifications. (Thinking about the timeout bugs during EW.)

I think CBU3 actually did hit it with FF16. The game on launch had some technical issues from people never having dusted out their PS5s in 2 years and others hating the motion blur, but very few straight up bugs.

I mean I agree with the general sentiment. It's almost impossible to play this game and not see the cost cutting and min maxing of dev time. This is a bad thing.

I will give you an IRL example of why this is exactly what you avoid:

You can hire two contractors to replace your floor:

Both licensed. They both charge 5,000 dollars for the job.

One contractor works exactly 40 hours a week, has an exact time slot available to do your floors, an exact amount of nails, materials, glue and will only tear the existing floor out and put the new one in in a rush and move on the next job. That is a contractor where the accountant is in the room. - In reality the things that were promised were delivered. It's whatever.

The other contractor sometimes works 30 hours a week, sometimes 50, depends on the job. Starts tearing your floor out and notices some imperfections that COULD be overlooked but would be better to repair, he has the materials for it from other jobs and it will cut into his profits a bit but the important thing is to do the job well because he enjoys doing this kind of stuff and takes pride in it. It's not about extracting the max amount of profit at the minimum loss. He then realizes he will need another bucket of glue and calls you and asks you to buy it because while he COULD spread it so thin it will technically work it will start lifting in a couple of years. You end up paying $5,500 dollars for the job maybe. Once he is done the floors feel rock solid and will last for 30 years NP.

Both got the job done as promised. I know exactly who I'm avoiding and who I'm hiring. One didn't have the accountant in the room and the job was so much better for it.

This game is contractor #1. Things are methodical, uninspired, homogenized with barely any novelty or flair.

The people making this game are just collecting a paycheck and going home at this point.

Much of it just seems like minimizing risk for budget and workflow reasons.

If the next MSQ involves making our way through six zones over the course of 100 quests, with many of the objectives just being to go talk to npcs, then the quest designers already know what they’re in for. The budget and timeline are a lot less likely to accidentally get bigger than they need to be.

And I think we see this really conservative mentality in terms of how the game works, too. New features are slow to be implemented, and existing features are slow to be changed, as it can be hard to predict how long those things would take (especially the latter).

On the other hand, it’s hard to know what really goes on behind the scenes. Are they experimenting a lot but not having everything actually get shipped? How bad is the “spaghetti code” that they have to work with? We don’t know for ourselves, but the end result is that a very large part of the content we get is just the same formula, for better or for worse.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

I generally agree, but I don't really know what you want anyone to do with this information aside from either keep complaining or unsub.

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That's the whole point. It's an explanation for why you should unsub. It's obvious to anyone who paid attention to Square Enix over the last few years. This company has all its teams turtle up and milk the same formula over and over again so that a few people like Nomura can waste billions on stupid projects.

They made a huge gamble with A Realm Reborn and that will be the last time they ever make a gamble in CBU3. They need to milk CBU3 over and over again to fund more Forspokens.

To some degree, OP, you do have a point -- but I've played enough budget MMOs to know that FFXIV isn't nearly as egregious as you're making it out to be.
I've played some seriously thin and cheap budget MMOs in my time. FFXIV is not nearly as bad as some of the hot garbage I've sat through before.

Not sure why you talk like you know the decision-making process and plans of the company, though. You sound VERY certain of what is at best some educated speculation.

I don't know about the accountant being in the room, but the game is definitely getting shafted on the financial end and I do believe some of the people who made the game great are being made to work on other projects as well as CBU3 is working on games other than FF XIV.

Aside from gacha games, XIV was probably generally their biggest money maker, and instead of investing into it they threw a lot of that money at projects which either completely bombed, fell to complete irrelevance or just generally didn't make any money due to low sales.

If this is the case, I sincerely hope they don't continue down this path.

I recall a small indy company, Cryptic Studios, using large sums of money from their more profitable F2P games to develop a game called Magic: Legends (based on Magic the Gathering). They abandoned it following it's open beta. An unfortunate byproduct of this was that the Devs that were transferred from their other games to develop this (failed) attempt were laid off.

Then again, their games were all F2P and dependent on gambleboxes - and gambleboxes/expensive bundles were the only things they seemed to want to develop.

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Originally Posted by BoJumbles

To some degree, OP, you do have a point -- but I've played enough budget MMOs to know that FFXIV isn't nearly as egregious as you're making it out to be.
I've played some seriously thin and cheap budget MMOs in my time. FFXIV is not nearly as bad as some of the hot garbage I've sat through before.

Not sure why you talk like you know the decision-making process and plans of the company, though. You sound VERY certain of what is at best some educated speculation.

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You can look at the credits of each expansion and compare the staff lol. A lot of the senior staff are not on recent credits.

If your argument is "where is your evidence of Square Enix saying publicly that they're milking their players while funding other projects" then nothing will satisfy you but it's obvious to anyone with a brain.

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Originally Posted by Carin-Eri

If this is the case, I sincerely hope they don't continue down this path.

I recall a small indy company, Cryptic Studios, using large sums of money from their more profitable F2P games to develop a game called Magic: Legends (based on Magic the Gathering). They abandoned it following it's open beta. An unfortunate byproduct of this was that the Devs that were transferred from their other games to develop this (failed) attempt were laid off.

Then again, their games were all F2P and dependent on gambleboxes - and gambleboxes/expensive bundles were the only things they seemed to want to develop.

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FF14 is just punished by horrible management in SE as a whole. Then again it's not like CBU3 themselves are that much better when they were given full rein to make FF16 but end up making a mediocre style-over-substance game.

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Originally Posted by Red-thunder

That's the whole point. It's an explanation for why you should unsub. It's obvious to anyone who paid attention to Square Enix over the last few years. This company has all its teams turtle up and milk the same formula over and over again so that a few people like Nomura can waste billions on stupid projects.

They made a huge gamble with A Realm Reborn and that will be the last time they ever make a gamble in CBU3. They need to milk CBU3 over and over again to fund more Forspokens.

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Oh okay. Yeah if you dislike the game then you should definitely unsub. I've always said that. In fact I think it's really weird if you don't like the game and are still subbed.

Edit: To go further on that, it's really silly when there are people who expect the devs to make insanely drastic changes to the game like it's a reasonable expectation. No, completely reworking the gameplay to include skill trees or tripling the content output is not a reasonable request and if you're waiting for something like that to happen I'm afraid you're not gonna make it. You've had 5 expansions worth of decision making to figure it out. Something like changing a job icon or asking to convert wondrous tails rewards is an example of something reasonable.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

Oh okay. Yeah if you dislike the game then you should definitely unsub. I've always said that. In fact I think it's really weird if you don't like the game and are still subbed.

Edit: To go further on that, it's really silly when there are people who expect the devs to make insanely drastic changes to the game like it's a reasonable request. No, completely reworking the gameplay to include skill trees or tripling the content output is not a reasonable request and if you're waiting for something like that to happen I'm afraid you're not gonna make it. You've had 5 expansions to figure it out.

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It's rarely the people who feel anger towards the game that unsub.

It's the people that feel apathy. Anger's just the last step before that.

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Originally Posted by Red-thunder

You can look at the credits of each expansion and compare the staff lol. A lot of the senior staff are not on recent credits.

If your argument is "where is your evidence of Square Enix saying publicly that they're milking their players while funding other projects" then nothing will satisfy you but it's obvious to anyone with a brain.

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Staff cycling in and out isn't exactly sign of most of what you said in the OP. It's a potential indicator -- and fodder for speculation, as I said in my initial post.
For instance: members of staff might be able to request working on a different project, it may be based upon internal politics, or they might simply get assigned to a project and have to assume responsibility in perpetuity. I could speculate very strongly in any of these directions and probably find evidence that circumstantially supports my perspective.

As for what my "argument" is, it's twofold:
* That FFXIV is not nearly as staunchly budget-focused as you've represented it, at least in comparison to its contemporaries;
* That while it's safe to speculate regarding internal turmoil, it's irresponsible to speak as if you know for a fact what the internal issues and attitudes are.

I'm just saying, it might be prudent to be a bit more reserved with your conclusion.

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Originally Posted by BoJumbles

Staff cycling in and out isn't exactly sign of most of what you said in the OP. It's a potential indicator -- and fodder for speculation, as I said in my initial post.
For instance: members of staff might be able to request working on a different project, it may be based upon internal politics, or they might simply get assigned to a project and have to assume responsibility in perpetuity. I could speculate very strongly in any of these directions and probably find evidence that circumstantially supports my perspective.

As for what my "argument" is, it's twofold:
* That FFXIV is not nearly as staunchly budget-focused as you've represented it, at least in comparison to its contemporaries;
* That while it's safe to speculate regarding internal turmoil, it's irresponsible to speak as if you know for a fact what the internal issues and attitudes are.

I'm just saying, it might be prudent to be a bit more reserved with your conclusion.

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10/10. Nailed it.

Not that I'm against these conclusions, but asserting them in absence of clarifying evidence may be short-sighted. Could very well be the case that all these things are true, but we should keep the conversation open to future information and remain ready to append our understanding as new details do or do not arrive.

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Originally Posted by Exmo

"New software had bugs" is the fork found in kitchen of our times.

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There were far less game-breaking bugs in prior expansions. So much so that I used to praise SE's in-house QA to anyone who would listen because they reliably delivered product with minimum experience-ruining bugs. I noticed a serious uptick in them during late Shadowbringers and into Endwalker, so I stopped giving that praise. Let's not forget the infamous bug where if you used a certain emote during one of the EW fights, you literally could not leave the boss arena. (Someone help me on that one I cant find a source for it)

How about Amon Ultimate?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eubQwMkM2Hg

But yes, just keep ignoring all the evidence presented to you because it doesn't fit your narrative.

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Originally Posted by Auro_Seldaris

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The older and bigger a body of software gets, the harder it gets to add to it and extend it without introducing bugs. In fact, it actually gets hugely more difficult to improve and maintain as time goes on.

If you were a software developer, you would know that already.

That said, Dawntrail haters tend to accuse others of what they themselves are most guilty of, so I expect you'll also ignore the fact that game development is one of the hardest industries for making software, and that minor bugs which get quickly fixed (yes, all the bugs listed in this thread have been minor) is hardly indicative of an ailing body.

Yeah, yeah, I know, hater bait post by another Highlander Hyur man, but nevertheless, this did get me thinking about something I got talking about with some friends while we farmed old EX trials the other night.

I think part of why this game has a hard time hiring programmers for this game is due to the exclusive proprietary (and old) engine it uses. Whether they hire a programmer fresh out of school or a veteran with 20 years of coding experience, they are going to have to train them both for weeks to months on how to use and work with the system FFXIV runs in, which, if I recall, is the 1.0 engine stripped down and rebuilt, and *that* original engine was made for FFXIII, a game that released in late 2009 and was probably in development for at least a few years before that. In some ways, this game is running on the reanimated corpse of a engine that's probably been around in some fashion since the mid 00s. If you were a game dev looking for work, does that sound like your first choice of a system you'd want to work on? Not I. Sometimes I stop and think it's a miracle this game even functions at all.

Which is not to excuse any of this, mind, just theorize why some systems are as bizarre, janky, or abandoned as they are. I wouldn't be surprised at this point if, say, the dev that worked on some of the old content that hasn't seen updates in years doesn't even work at the company anymore, and no one even knows how to touch that corner of the code so they just shrugged and abandoned it.

A company like Nintendo also does lots of proprietary hardware and software (for better or worse...), but unlike Square Enix, they have the name cred and clout to do this and still hire talented people to work on their games. I just don't think SE has that kind of clout anymore. Maybe at one point in the late 90s/early 00s, but certainly not recently.

It's a bummer, because I feel like if this game had some stronger bones to build on than the duct tape and prayers of the retrofitted 1.0 engine, we could have a lot cooler things with this game. It is what it is, but I believe with more financial support and a better work culture that can attract high quality talent, SE could absolutely fix the problems and improve a lot of the jank with this game. But... [glances around at the state of the video game industry] yeah, that's never gonna happen, that's not instant money for the board and shareholders.

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

A company like Nintendo also does lots of proprietary hardware and software (for better or worse...), but unlike Square Enix, they have the name cred and clout to do this and still hire talented people to work on their games. I just don't think SE has that kind of clout anymore. Maybe at one point in the late 90s/early 00s, but certainly not recently.

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Just on this side point, SE has a net worth of about $5 billion, Nintendo has a net worth of about $88 billion. At that scale I don't think differences in their staff/hiring options much comes down to brand name.

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Originally Posted by Exmo

Just on this side point, SE has a net worth of about $5 billion, Nintendo has a net worth of about $88 billion. At that scale I don't think differences in their staff/hiring options much comes down to brand name.

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Yeah, that's another factor for sure. The size and money behind the company is part of the clout that can let Nintendo get away with the exclusive licenses and proprietary hardware and software over using more industry standard stuff. I also wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo paid its workers more on average than SE, though that's purely speculation. Point being, the weird SE exclusive engine the game uses probably isn't doing it any favors, but unless they drop another moon on Eorzea and make 3.0, we're stuck with it.

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

Yeah, that's another factor for sure. The size and money behind the company is part of the clout that can let Nintendo get away with the exclusive licenses and proprietary hardware and software over using more industry standard stuff. I also wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo paid its workers more on average than SE, though that's purely speculation. Point being, the weird SE exclusive engine the game uses probably isn't doing it any favors, but unless they drop another moon on Eorzea and make 3.0, we're stuck with it.

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Totally agreed. I think this will be the defining factor for the mobile game - different engine, a clean slate, 10 years worth of design lessons and vision up front, all allowing it to showcase features quicker and more easily than base game ARR.

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

part of why this game has a hard time hiring programmers for this game is due to the exclusive proprietary (and old) engine it uses. Whether they hire a programmer fresh out of school or a veteran with 20 years of coding experience, they are going to have to train them both for weeks to months on how to use and work with the system FFXIV runs in

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While true, a programmer has to adapt to a new codebase whatever company they happen to join. From experience, it can take a lot of time to get familiar with a codebase. You have to learn the structure of the code like the structure of the Square Enix building so you don't bump into walls.

This is why object-oriented programming is so much preferred. It can make it extremely quick to learn and understand the code if everything is in a logical location. Code in C is the worst because random functions can be littered all over the place, with no real logic to it, and that can cause it to take over a month to get your head around it.

It's likely that a new programmer may struggle to understand why a previous programmer did it a certain way, and not be sure how to approach changing it without knocking the stack of cards down, so to speak. Apparently this is the case with the Armoire (which was pretty obvious given how abandoned it's been but I think they confirmed this was done by a different programmer that doesn't work on it now).

Another good example is linkshells and cross-world linkshells. They avoided making a single change to linkshells in the entire time the game has been around, then made an entirely separate UI for CWLS instead of adapting regular linkshells to have cross-world functionality. This is suspicious and seems an obvious case of them not wanting to touch the linkshell code.

A big reason for the graphics overhaul though was so their other developers (like creatives) can use more modern technology for models, textures and animations.

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if I recall, is the 1.0 engine stripped down and rebuilt

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It's not the 1.0 engine (see my signature). They got rid of that entirely and heavily adapted their new engine, which was meant for a single player game, to work for an MMORPG. As far as I can tell, they reused the FF14 engine (or the one it's based on) for FF16.

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Originally Posted by BoJumbles

Staff cycling in and out isn't exactly sign of most of what you said in the OP. It's a potential indicator -- and fodder for speculation, as I said in my initial post.
For instance: members of staff might be able to request working on a different project, it may be based upon internal politics, or they might simply get assigned to a project and have to assume responsibility in perpetuity. I could speculate very strongly in any of these directions and probably find evidence that circumstantially supports my perspective.

As for what my "argument" is, it's twofold:
* That FFXIV is not nearly as staunchly budget-focused as you've represented it, at least in comparison to its contemporaries;
* That while it's safe to speculate regarding internal turmoil, it's irresponsible to speak as if you know for a fact what the internal issues and attitudes are.

I'm just saying, it might be prudent to be a bit more reserved with your conclusion.

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Yeah virtually all of the senior staff no longer working on FF14 anymore is just because of internal politics LOL

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

Yeah, yeah, I know, hater bait post by another Highlander Hyur man, but nevertheless, this did get me thinking about something I got talking about with some friends while we farmed old EX trials the other night.

I think part of why this game has a hard time hiring programmers for this game is due to the exclusive proprietary (and old) engine it uses. Whether they hire a programmer fresh out of school or a veteran with 20 years of coding experience, they are going to have to train them both for weeks to months on how to use and work with the system FFXIV runs in, which, if I recall, is the 1.0 engine stripped down and rebuilt, and *that* original engine was made for FFXIII, a game that released in late 2009 and was probably in development for at least a few years before that. In some ways, this game is running on the reanimated corpse of a engine that's probably been around in some fashion since the mid 00s. If you were a game dev looking for work, does that sound like your first choice of a system you'd want to work on? Not I. Sometimes I stop and think it's a miracle this game even functions at all.

Which is not to excuse any of this, mind, just theorize why some systems are as bizarre, janky, or abandoned as they are. I wouldn't be surprised at this point if, say, the dev that worked on some of the old content that hasn't seen updates in years doesn't even work at the company anymore, and no one even knows how to touch that corner of the code so they just shrugged and abandoned it.

A company like Nintendo also does lots of proprietary hardware and software (for better or worse...), but unlike Square Enix, they have the name cred and clout to do this and still hire talented people to work on their games. I just don't think SE has that kind of clout anymore. Maybe at one point in the late 90s/early 00s, but certainly not recently.

It's a bummer, because I feel like if this game had some stronger bones to build on than the duct tape and prayers of the retrofitted 1.0 engine, we could have a lot cooler things with this game. It is what it is, but I believe with more financial support and a better work culture that can attract high quality talent, SE could absolutely fix the problems and improve a lot of the jank with this game. But... [glances around at the state of the video game industry] yeah, that's never gonna happen, that's not instant money for the board and shareholders.

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You say that, but Blizzard has managed to make an MMO run on an old-ass RTS game's engine for 20 years now. Yes, there were challenges, such as expanding player inventory space, but at the end of the day, they made it work. FFXIV can't, or more worryingly, won't.

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Originally Posted by Auro_Seldaris

You say that, but Blizzard has managed to make an MMO run on an old-ass RTS game's engine for 20 years now. Yes, there were challenges, such as expanding player inventory space, but at the end of the day, they made it work. FFXIV can't, or more worryingly, won't.

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Blizzard has far better engineers than SE. SE's staff has always been lopsided towards artists, writers, and musicians, since that's SE's competitive advantage. They've always sucked at engineering challenges.

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Originally Posted by Red-thunder

Blizzard has far better engineers than SE. SE's staff has always been lopsided towards artists, writers, and musicians, since that's SE's competitive advantage. They've always sucked at engineering challenges.

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I know that's the rep SE has built for itself since at least FFVII, but given how far video game storytellling has advanced in the past decades (partly due to their own efforts), SE is quickly losing even that competitive advantage.

"Oh, we have really intricate cinematic cutscenes, and awesome music, and an interesting story."

Yeah... so does almost every other game studio now. Everything from gacha games, to looter shooters, to puzzle games. SE keeps resting on their "But we made Final Fantasy The Spirits Within and muh heckin Seven" laurels too much longer, the wider industry is going to surpass them. Arguably, it already has.

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

I think part of why this game has a hard time hiring programmers for this game is due to the exclusive proprietary (and old) engine it uses. Whether they hire a programmer fresh out of school or a veteran with 20 years of coding experience, they are going to have to train them both for weeks to months on how to use and work with the system FFXIV runs in, which, if I recall, is the 1.0 engine stripped down and rebuilt, and *that* original engine was made for FFXIII, a game that released in late 2009 and was probably in development for at least a few years before that. In some ways, this game is running on the reanimated corpse of a engine that's probably been around in some fashion since the mid 00s. If you were a game dev looking for work, does that sound like your first choice of a system you'd want to work on? Not I. Sometimes I stop and think it's a miracle this game even functions at all.

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The even BIGGER issue is that they want them to speak Japanese.

There are lots of people who want to go into video game development graduating from college all the time, but SE is only looking at them from Japan, and in that respect they're competing with every other Japanese company.

I know exactly one(1) high level American programmer who speaks fluent Japanese, and he's bounced around a few studios but was ultimately snapped up by Sony. He does hardware level programming for them; he did a lot of work on the PS5 GPU. He said he would not have gotten hired for his first job with a tiny developer in Kyoto if he did not already speak fairly fluent Japanese when he interviewed.

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Originally Posted by Auro_Seldaris

I know that's the rep SE has built for itself since at least FFVII, but given how far video game storytellling has advanced in the past decades (partly due to their own efforts), SE is quickly losing even that competitive advantage.

"Oh, we have really intricate cinematic cutscenes, and awesome music, and an interesting story."

Yeah... so does almost every other game studio now. Everything from gacha games, to looter shooters, to puzzle games. SE keeps resting on their "But we made Final Fantasy The Spirits Within and muh heckin Seven" laurels too much longer, the wider industry is going to surpass them. Arguably, it already has.

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Oh I agree. But they'll probably not be the first to fall. If there's anyone who might actually fail in the near future that would be Ubisoft. Their time is probably up with Assassin's Creed, and if Shadows is a failure their company will probably have to be sold at a huge discount to Sony or something.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

The even BIGGER issue is that they want them to speak Japanese.

There are lots of people who want to go into video game development graduating from college all the time, but SE is only looking at them from Japan, and in that respect they're competing with every other Japanese company.

I know exactly one(1) high level American programmer who speaks fluent Japanese, and he's bounced around a few studios but was ultimately snapped up by Sony. He does hardware level programming for them; he did a lot of work on the PS5 GPU. He said he would not have gotten hired for his first job with a tiny developer in Kyoto if he did not already speak fairly fluent Japanese when he interviewed.

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The American economy would probably have fallen into a Japanese-style stagnation were it not for immigration. Japan's lost decades and its lack of using immigration to try to correct that stagnation has led to the entire country's labor productivity being in stasis for 4 decades. I wouldn't be surprised if the language barrier is a huge contributor to the stagnation there.

Just to weight in on this its funny how yoshi-p could have been unlocked armor as glam for all class. His excuse for not doing it. He hates seeing casters in plate armor. XD

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Originally Posted by Auro_Seldaris

I know that's the rep SE has built for itself since at least FFVII, but given how far video game storytellling has advanced in the past decades (partly due to their own efforts), SE is quickly losing even that competitive advantage.

"Oh, we have really intricate cinematic cutscenes, and awesome music, and an interesting story."

Yeah... so does almost every other game studio now. Everything from gacha games, to looter shooters, to puzzle games. SE keeps resting on their "But we made Final Fantasy The Spirits Within and muh heckin Seven" laurels too much longer, the wider industry is going to surpass them. Arguably, it already has.

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Just to chime in on this. I'm playing through FF7R and in my honest opinion it's not a great game. It's enjoyable at times and looks pretty, but relies way too much on nostalgia and it's past glory. From what I've seen and heard, the more recent titles aren't that great either

SE has in my opinion stagnated / worked itself into the ground over the past decade and has a bunch of AA studios which try produce AAA-Titles that don't penetrate the market much beyond the established fanbase.

Which in of itself isn't bad, AA-titles are the birthplace of new IP's and franchises after all. The industry has far surpassed them long ago and I, and others too, would do well to temper our expectations from here on out.

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Originally Posted by genuine_stranger

Just to chime in on this. I'm playing through FF7R and in my honest opinion it's not a great game. It's enjoyable at times and looks pretty, but relies way too much on nostalgia and it's past glory. From what I've seen and heard, the more recent titles aren't that great either

SE has in my opinion stagnated / worked itself into the ground over the past decade and has a bunch of AA studios which try produce AAA-Titles that don't penetrate the market much beyond the established fanbase.

Which in of itself isn't bad, AA-titles are the birthplace of new IP's and franchises after all. The industry has far surpassed them long ago and I, and others too, would do well to temper our expectations from here on out.

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I thought the combat system in FF7R is not bad and has pretty good depth. The problem is they don't seem terribly interested in writing a good story and are more interested in padding out the playtime. It's filled to the brim with filler dungeons and the open world is one step away from Ubisoft spam. Rebirth is the epitome of tedium. Remake is probably even worse but at least it ended relatively faster.