FF14 is in a content lul but super popular? Here is why.

[Puremallace]

My dream MMO has the story, visual flourish, enthusiasm, vertical progression, and activities of Final Fantasy XIV, the glamour system, mount system, snappiness, rotations and raid design of World of WarCraft and the crafting, gathering and open world content of Elder Scrolls Online.

Then you can go ahead and keep dreaming. American game developers will never do what FF14 has done and Japanese game developers will never do what the American ones do. Too many conflicting priorities. I have that same dream also btw.

[Shurrikhan]

Then you can go ahead and keep dreaming. American game developers will never do what FF14 has done and Japanese game developers will never do what the American ones do.

...Except XIV did exactly that. ARR was a deliberate imitation of WoW, according to its own producer/director.

It just apparently lacks more capable coders and/or software engineering foresight, hence the vast difference in systems polish.

[DPZ2]

...Except XIV did exactly that. ARR was a deliberate imitation of WoW, according to its own producer/director.

It just apparently lacks more capable coders and/or software engineering foresight, hence the vast difference in systems polish.

Not exactly. True, Yoshi P did point out the success of WoW as something to aim for, and had developers play the game to get a feel for what might have led to that success. FFXIV is still a Japanese MMORPG, and utilizes different code and assets - many of them brought from 1.0. The battle system is different, the glamour system was built long before WoW started using 'collections'.

This game is story driven, with the Warrior of Light (us) in the center of things. When someone like Emet-Selch dies, WE are responsible -- unlike WoW, where story doesn't matter, we aren't the main character and every. single. major. enemy. is killed by long-standing characters who are not us (Can you tell that I am still bitter about Garosh's death ... and don't get me started on the Redemption Arc for Sylvanus "I burned down Teldrassil and enjoyed every minute of it".)

Despite the '[lack of] more capable coders', this game still manages to pump out content at 3 month intervals during an expansion (pandemic schedule aside). The charge of '[lack of] software engineering foresight' is pretty funny considering that Blizzard wasn't handing out information to competitors on what and when, exactly, they were releasing new features. The polish you see in Blizzard might just be due to the fact that the company wasn't trying to recover from a major downturn with a failed game that they were trying to resurrect on a shoestring budget.

I would argue that the game you appear to think a piece of brilliant software engineering is still stuck in the 'grind is good, they'll stick with us despite our 9-month content drought' mindset that is so endearing to those who are now looking for some other MMORPG to call home.

[Shurrikhan]

I would argue that the game you appear to think a piece of brilliant software engineering is still stuck in the 'grind is good, they'll stick with us despite our 9-month content drought' mindset that is so endearing to those who are now looking for some other MMORPG to call home.

Mate, levels of grind has absolutely nothing to do with quality of code.

When I refer to lack of code quality and related design, I refer to things like

• certain skills arbitrarily not being queueable,
• certain UI components locking any and all actions and many another UI component,
• interactable attempting to interact before they've reached interaction range,
• ground-targeting skills accepting/delineating button-holds, thereby causing movement over the selected area (as common when you, yourself, are moving) to prevent any actual click,
• target selection being dependent on collision boxes and the enemy's nameplate, rather than on on-screen vision of the enemy (thereby preventing you from tabbing to enemies too tall for their nameplate to fit on your screen, which can be a considerable issue in narrow spaces as melee, or especially on Ultrawide monitors),
• the range and facing detection being so terrible that for over a year even at 40 ms many a player were forced to turbo their Face Target key in order to hit other sprinting melee players as melee,
• it literally being faster for the team to remake every 1-handed primal caster weapon into a two-hander than for the team to figure out how to code main-hand glamours simply as main-hand weapons that additionally allowed or prevented shield use, instead of definitively 1h or 2h,
• glamours in PvP being "impossible", and not to ever be expected... until 6 months later when the coders finally learned how to retain appearance tags in cross-server content to the extent that WoW had launched their transmogs with.

Now, let's briefly address your strawman. Avoiding the above does not make a game's code "a piece of brilliant software engineering". It just makes it far less terrible at its job.