Lack of updates on Viera and Hrothgar.

[Melichoir]

Are you thinking the devs might be working on a Neon Genesis:PSO2 style of update?

Could you clarify? Im not familiar.

What I am under the impression is that they are cutting back development from current content to drop something big in our laps for the upcoming patches/xpac. Consider somethings here:
- Nier Raid will resuse assets broadly, and requires a lot less concept work than a raid from scratch because they already have something to work from. It doesnt mean its easy, but it means it's not as burdensome as a raid from scratch would be.
- Cutting down two dungeons to 1 per major patch. Thats literally a 50% cut in development in that department.
- Mogstation seems to be getting pushed harder (they used Mogstation money to give us more data centers, so having them push it again means they need revenue for something.)
- There has been no word that they cut down their dev team. From what Ive seen on places like Reddit a while back, the opposite seems true, theyre trying to expand their dev team.
- FFXIV ShB is a success, finanically, and currently is a big part of SEs overall income. Letting it degrade or sink doesnt make financial sense.
- There is obvious issues with Viera and Hrothgar in terms of customization. the fact were literally over a year into this xpac and theyve done very little ot address this is out of character. remember, the devs worked overtime behind YoshiPs back to bring us some headwear when they initially told us there wouldnt be any. They couldve easily by now done atleast some things to alleviate the issues the two races face, but almost nothing at this point?
- People obviously want the off sexes. The disappointment was palpable when Hrothgar was revealed. And rather than just catagorizing them both together for cleaner UI, they purposefully made them separate. Bit of a stretch on this one, but this is a deliberate choice. It left open the possibility of it.

Theres a lot going on here that doesnt add up, unless they are planning something. I suspect it will either be a complete fix to hrothgar and viera, and possibly-maybe even the off sexes. But for the latter there is one major hurdle.
The issue with adding races, from what I understood from YoshiP or hte devs mentioning this, is everytime they create a new race, they have to manually fit the armors and gear. All of them. This isnt as big an issue in other MMOs because of how the character creator engine operates. It's more streamlined, where as FFXIV is running off a dated 1.0 engine. It must take them a ton of resources to keep setting up gear individually. This is, also from what I understood, part of the reason why Viera and Hrothgar were a pain in the ass to implement. The best way to solve this would to rebuild the character creation engine from the ground up. This part might be a stretch. It is incredibly expensive to rebuild the character design engine, but doing so would prolong the lifespan of the game, and resolve a lot of the development issues they run into. It would also allow them to more easily implement the off sexes. It is also an item that is in demand pretty much across the board. People want more customization for their characters.

But if they did, it would be a huge selling point for the next xpac and may be worth the cost.

Im not saying this is for sure, but I personally feel like something is up. There's just to many wierd things going on, Covid aside. Again, these are my personal feelings. Im not suggesting this is what is happening for sure. Im am saying that if something incredible isnt on the way, I am going to be sorely disappointed and wonder what the hell the devs were doing with all that spare time and funds.