Snap Emote

[Packetdancer]

Still seems a bit of an excuse, they already did a large portion of the work (creatively at least, I know there is animation bone issues), in game, and they may have had to do some more but to suggest it couldn't have been done seems dishonest, especially since in this case they already made progress towards the final result (or that they've done something similar for another npc in this game, to show precedence that it 'can' be done), but it'll be what it is I guess.

I mean, I don't think anyone's saying it couldn't be done? My point is just that "this thing exists for NPCs, therefore it's absolutely zero effort to make it available for every PC ever" is not true. Could the main dev team have made the emote and put it in as an in-game reward? Absolutely! But is that dev time that could've been spent on something else? Also yes!

In general, the dev team is probably going to try to err on the side of "make consumable content"; the animators on the dev team would probably spend time on animations for the next raid tier's cutscenes, for cutscenes in the Bozjan Southern Front content, cutscene animations for the next MSQ chapter, etc. (Especially with the new tricks we've seen them do with cutscene animations in 5.3, and to a lesser extent in 5.2!)

And moreover, I think that's probably where the majority of the playerbase would prefer they spend their time, given the number of "we want more content per patch" threads that spring up.

So while, yes, the core dev team could absolutely make the existing Emet-Selch emote available for all the races from a technical standpoint, unless someone chooses to do that on their own time, the time needed to flesh out all the other animations is time that will not be available to work on some other task.

The Mog Station team is not working on any of that content, as they are (as has been noted) a wholly separate team; they literally have nothing to do except generate glam, emotes, and mounts.

Would I prefer that stuff like this was available in-game? Yeah, it'd be nice. But if the options are:

1. In-game, but at the expense of some other content.
2. Not available at all.
3. In the Mog Station.

...then I'll take the Mog Station option.

And again, this doesn't account for the complexities involved in pulling content made for the Chinese and Korean cash shops over to the global cash shop; once you have a separate non-Emet-Selch snap that was made for one of the international cash shops, I'm fairly sure it has to be in the global cash shop if it comes over to the global version. For one thing, my understanding is that Square-Enix has to license back content created specifically for the Chinese and Korean variants, and for another, if they put the item obtainable in-game, then unless the Korean or Chinese versions stripped that content back out they'd suddenly have one of their cash shop items available for free.

(Which I strongly suspect is a scenario that is forbidden in some portion of some contract somewhere with the companies running those regional versions.)

It's not that Square-Enix can do no wrong, in other words. (I'm a healer main; trust me, I can tell you plenty of things they've done wrong.)

It's just that all my own personal experience when I was a game dev and dealt with tradeoffs in what extra content was made, and international publishing weirdness, and whatever else all leads me to think "this is Kind of Complicated" when it comes to this specific area. 'cause I know it was Kind of Complicated when I had to deal with it from the other side of the player/dev divide.

So I'm inclined to cut them some slack on stuff like this.