With all of the limitations holding FFXIV back, why not make a new FF MMORPG?

[Floortank]

WoW can only claim "Top 3 MMO's" by the fact it has existing players, rather than being actually good...

You've got that right. WOW is the bloated corpse of a dead giant rolling downhill. It is carried by inertia and gravity, not by any living impetus, and what it brings is rotten to the core.

WOW is the reason why we should ignore subscriber counts when talking about how good an MMORPG is. WOW will always have a subscriber base, no matter what, no matter how god awful and terrible the game is. No matter how mind-numbing and empty the content and gameplay is. It is a corpse of itself, devoid of any meaningful or fulfilling gameplay experience, and it is constantly passed to new generations of young gamers who inherit it from their parents who used to play.

[Derio]

Actually there are low end PC specs holding the game back. We just dropped 32 bit support. So raising the specs to at least ps4 level should be ideal with SHB.

However raising the graphics would be a massive overhaul and cost a sizeable amount of money.

It would take a decline in FFXIV popularity to another MMO with higher graphics on a better engine to even make them consider to update the graphics engine.

[OcieKo]

At earliest your looking at FFXVII, FFXVIII, or FFXIX being the next MMO, i suspect well be at almost 7.0 before its even hinted. That's if they even decide to use FF as the primary IP to make it with. Dragon Quest and Star Ocean still perfectly usable IPs for it, tho I'd assume SO has better odds due to DQX not even being localized for western audiences. I'd say we're safe from any MMO announcement til 2023, out of SE at least. I'd also suspect FFXI will be planned to close not long after the next MMO release by SE. I'd speculate 2025/2027 at the earliest for a new MMO, likely 2031/2033 tho.

Blizzard on the other hand... kindof needs something in the next 2 years... When the best announcement of your fan appreciation event is a remaster of a decade and half old game, you got problems. Yes, WC3 Remaster was the best thing out of Blizzcon 2018 imho.

Then Daybreak (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) is in the same ballpark of needing to can EQ1 and start up EQ3 again.

Including KR/RU MMOs is pointless, they pop up and die faster than anything short of Indies on Steam. Few exceptions here and there but, 20 release 17-19 fail within a year, 5 of which are remakes of games that failed in the last 3 years.

[kidalutz]

It's not that they CAN'T do all those things. They have full control over their engine and the tools they use, so they could do all those things. It's that they are choosing not to.

The lack of showing helmets on Viera/Hrothgar is a design choice. They could have made their heads less "unique" and just treat them like the other races, but they chose not to to give us more options (what those options are we don't know yet).

They could do "butt sliders", but they have chosen not to because it would be too much work for what they get out of it (seriously, we don't need butt sliders, that's a rather niche thing).

They could have made a healer but CHOSE not to in favor of balancing the other healers.

What I think you are confusing, OP, are choices vs limitations. There aren't any real limitations other than TIME. And it's how they CHOOSE to spend their TIME, not that they are limited by the engine/code.

This is singularly the most ignorant (in the classical Sense) post I've seen it's also the more impassioned one and one that's in need of enlightenment. So lets start at the top and break it down.

Yes in one respect you are right they do indeed have full control over their development engine. However what you fail to grok is the fact that yes indeed said engine is limited in scope of what it's capable of running before crashing constantly. What people are asking for is the equivalent of trying to cram a current laptops processing works into an Apple II/e it's just not going to happen without severe issues.

The helmets thing may have been chosen but it's not what was originally hoped for by the developers however as they found the deadline looming towards release date they realised just what was being allocated towards it wasn't going to hash with the rest of the game cycle that needed to be completed and chose instead to streamline things as time went on rather than schedule their workers for things that would keep them from their families for days and weeks.(Good on them) They will be finished eventually as much was said by Yoshida just not atm.

And yes people are at the mercy of both time and technology a six year old system is not going to run at the same level as a brand new system nor can it be worked as quickly and reasonably as a newer system.

[Maero]

Not taking sides but their is another factor people do not realize, a good amount of the money made from this game goes to other SE other projects and not re-injected.
I think with all it's quirks and upsets it is still a very successful game so really is a new game needed? Perhaps at the end of it's planned 10 year cycle they will look at something else.

[Floortank]

Will history in some way repeat itself?

In 2005/2006, the director and principle developers of Final Fantasy XI begin working on a secret project for Square Enix.
In 2006, we saw the first test footage of what would later become Final Fantasy XIV.
In 2007, Wings of the Goddess was released.

Wings was kind of a clipped, abbreviated expansion with many of its "new zones" just being reskins of old ones. Dancer was well received, but nearly everything else about it was a steep drop off from the quality of Treasures of Aht Urhgan. It took a good number of patches before Scholar became a decent job. About the only thing worth doing in the expansion was Campaign battles, where you race from zone to zone encountering beastmen armies and random enemy and ally NPCs.

Look for signs of features being clipped or rushed out of a game, and you'll see resources being shifted elsewhere. Which is why I predicted Square might actually be moving resources to a new game. To me, Shadowbringers seems to be a significant drop off from past expansions. I like much of what it has to offer, but when I saw they were pushing incomplete races and not implementing a new healer, the first explanation that came to me was not incompetence but rather a lack of resources.

[spf1200]

Because SE is currently running 3 MMOs and they have stated they can't handle another one.

[Tinibou]

Maybe they cannot handle a 4th one but they can work on one that will replace one of the others.

[RitsukoSonoda]

You've got that right. WOW is the bloated corpse of a dead giant rolling downhill. It is carried by inertia and gravity, not by any living impetus, and what it brings is rotten to the core.

WOW is the reason why we should ignore subscriber counts when talking about how good an MMORPG is. WOW will always have a subscriber base, no matter what, no matter how god awful and terrible the game is. No matter how mind-numbing and empty the content and gameplay is. It is a corpse of itself, devoid of any meaningful or fulfilling gameplay experience, and it is constantly passed to new generations of young gamers who inherit it from their parents who used to play.

Essentially WoW is proof on how good Blizzard's marketing campaign is rather than a measure of their ability to make a quality MMORPG. The base game was literally a bunch of interface and design ideas taken from other MMOs that then had a Warcraft skin slapped on to it.

[Daralii]

Maybe they cannot handle a 4th one but they can work on one that will replace one of the others.

Except XI's been getting more attention lately and its mobile version is seemingly on track, and DQX makes more money domestically than XIV.