Yoshi & Team need to man any future FF Onlines

[Roris]

So the engine was finished in 2007 and XIV was announced in 2009, was available to play live at Gamescom that same year and then finally entered worldwide alpha in 2010, so that's only 2 years of working with the finished engine itself to start producing in game content and for the game to reach a "playable" state, the rest of that time they were working with a half baked engine. Again, the rest of those 5 years you keep bringing up were also spent producing all the concepts such as lore, mobs, art direction, classes, the world itself, everything that's still used to this very day that was made by almost the exact same team we have now.

Some people like to act like a single person "saved" the game when the majority of the work creating almost everything about the world, systems, abilities, was already laid out by the previous team including yes, the previous director and producer. The truth is, had this very same team been given more time to flesh out all their concepts and actually finish them and implement all the stuff they already had prepared, the game wouldn't have needed saving. Some can chalk it all up to Tanaka being himself and getting too confident about patching the game later, and sure that might be the case and maybe could have even worked out like it did in XI if they had also kept the game in Japan until its first expansion. This time though, upper management mismanaging their resources not just for XIV but pretty much all their operations until the new CEO stepped in, and the final nail in wanting to rush the game to compete with a WoW expansion, had the bigger influence on 1.0s failure than directorial decisions.

The current lead does however a great job production wise and is good at managing resources. That's one of the main reasons we keep seeing repurposed assets every patch and minimal content stretched out as thin as it can be, that's resource saving at its best.