Disaster in the Darkhold

[Betelgeuzah]

While I admire your constant attempts to paint SE in a glorious light, the sad fact is that this is not newly-developed content. The fact remains that these areas were in the game since open beta. So although it is new to most players, it was not newly created. And since my point was that SE doesn't seem to be developing much new content, then I feel my point still stands.

They may have reimagined pre-existing assets, but obviously nothing was created from scratch. Most of it was reused and makes one wonder if the FFXIV team is understaffed in that particular department at the moment.

I'm not necessarily saying they are understaffed, it just makes one wonder, you know?

It seems you are confused as to how the game was and is developed.

Vanilla areas have been developed pre-release. Even if they are currently not available, the assets are ready and waiting for content to be added to them. They have developed the games like this since vanilla XI. The only difference here is that regions currently inaccessible are not necessarily in the .dats like in XI, because they can make us download them through patches.

Further, as soon as the vanilla or an expansion is released, work begins on the next expansion immediately or soon afterwards. The area asset team is always one expansion ahead while the rest of the crew fills the current areas with content.

Now whether the area team is working on an expansion or the zone redesign (latter most likely), the fact remains that they are developing for far ahead in time. There may be few team members making up new assets for the dungeons, and someone working on environment collision, but the rest of the area asset team is hard at work on things in the far (hopefully not so far) future.

Just to give you some perspective, though, a proper redesign of areas requires as much work as a full-blown expansion pack. Not exactly, but close enough, depending on the scale of changes. Whether its an expansion or redesign we won't see them before the end of the year, and when we do, we'll get everything.

Lastly, if they make you download a new area that doesn't mean it has been created recently. It's an area from pre-release with slight adjustments unless there is an expansion or redesign.