Would you trade new ingame content for an engine upgrade?

[Krotoan]

Why would it have to be one or the other? The people that are responsible for making quests aren't the same team that makes dungeons or raids.

And those people aren't responsible for the overall world map.

And none of those people are likely to be involved in an engine upgrade. Separate people for separate jobs.

There would be no point coding anything for the old engine. Sure art and map layout along with conceptual designers and writers could continue as usual, but anything that had to do with actually implementing those things would have to be done once the upgrade was finalized since there'd either be double work to make it work for the old AND the new which would basically double the workload, or the content would have to be "temporary" , only present in the old version and possible ported to the new at a later date.

Technically you COULD ask them to bloat up the labor or half the content release.. but that's not really what they're asking in the OP. They're asking who'd be willing to full stop pause new content so we could get the upgrade faster. This isn't something SE proposed or even has mentioned, it's a whatif.

And I doubt money to hire more people is an issue at this point with the massive popularity spike recently. What with the sub increase plus the incredibly successful expansion launch, they definitely have the funds to fund a new team.

I don't know why people buy into this kind of thing when a company sais it'll be one or the other. All they're doing is penny pinching and trying to convince you to settle with what you have so they can get away with doing less work.

The company didn't say any of this, this is player speculation. SE, AFAIK, has only said that they're unable to grow the team to make things go faster because of a lack of skilled and compatible talent available. Take that as you may. However I also know that throwing more people on a project doesn't always make it go faster, in fact a lot of times it bogs down workflow and makes it worse.
See brooks law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

during the yoshida era of 1.x the dev team was split in two. one section worked on 2.x while the other gave regular updates to 1.x until its end.
I wouldn't be opposed to that.

This was because it was understood nearly everything done for 1.0 would be outright trashed and didn't need to be ported (with the exception of some titles and achievements). You can't expect the same solution when things that are made for the old engine would be required to be later ported to the new. Basically any content released would exponentially increase workload.

[Xaphire]

I, personally, don't care if the art direction and visual fidelity stays exactly where it is. The big thing needed is updating how the game stores data. While belts did not display on characters, you realize another reason they were removed is for additional armory slots for the remaining gear slots, yeah? That's a problem. The way item appearance data is stored and not being able to have something like log in the UI that just stores every appearance of gear you've acquired for later glamour use - that not being possible is a problem. We're going to get back into the number too big territory eventually as well, provided the game maintains a healthy user base.

The game will need an overhaul eventually, but it probably won't be for graphics.

[Jin-]

Nay sayers can't really complain about character creation limitations and other issues like the limited glamour space and such ^^

[MidnightEquinox]

Engine overhauls are not money limited. They're technology limited. No money in the world would compensate for errors done during an engine transition. It's a very big financial risk.

[Ath192]

Engine overhauls are not money limited. They're technology limited. No money in the world would compensate for errors done during an engine transition. It's a very big financial risk.

Yeah of course. It is also a big financial risk to leave your game as is and hope people don't unsub and move on to newer games when they come out. FFXI still looks like it did in 2005. As a consequence it has lost the majority of its playerbase. It's still around sure, but it would be a shame if the most succesful FF game to date lost the majority of the playerbase because it failed to keep up.

But then again, we may be due for another FF MMO in a few years, and that would be equally exciting. Maybe we are suffering from being too attached to this game when in reality what we need to do is accept the reality that it will be replaced and we need to learn to let go when the time comes.

Personally I love this game, a lot. But I am not willing to do another 10 year arc without an engine upgrade, so if it doesn't get announced I will grind endwalker as much as I can, im getting ready for the ults, finishing the savage tier. Will thoroughly enjoy the Alliance raid series and finish all the quests I can. I will probably retire soon afterwards maybe coming back once or twice a year to finish the MSQ until one day I don't anymore.

But right now, I am a very profitable user I think. I've been subbed all the time, buy the stuff I like from the mog station, I log on daily. The things that give SE a lot of money and makes their MMO feel alive, at least I think.

Not that the MMO needs me or anything, but the sun usually sets on things that don't keep up with the times. At least from personal experience. The question is how many players like me would progressively play the game less because of the stale formula and unchanging technical limitations that would eventually make the game lose its funding and ability to pull off things like this.

I do feel the time is now. They need to announce the next big thing. With its explosion in popularity if they do not reinvest heavily into this game now and just pocket the money then it will never happen.

[Colt47]

What people want should probably be defined in actual tangible benefits rather than an arbitrary change in base graphics systems. An engine update itself isn't going to solve model issues and from what we've seen so far with Nier and viera: Armor components themselves can shape a model, so asking for model updates on races may be asking for a major overhaul of all existing armor in the game in addition to the base model.

We'd be looking at multiple months of work that would require a dedicated team and probably somewhere in the vicinity of 800 thousand to 1.2 million dollars per year of additional costs. If the company has the money and wants to invest in an "updates team" I'm sure it would happen, but one has to ask if it would also generate money for the company to recoup the costs in the future. I believe the development team is working on model improvements via newer armor for the legs and main body already, which helps utilize existing resources and is more cost effective.

They could probably redo older races in place of introducing newer races, like improve the midlander posture and motions to make them more appealing to players. That would also be a cost effective option that is probably doable in the framework of a new expansion.

[Payadopa]

A longer waiting period is only once, but the shitty glam dresser has been bad since how many years now? lol

[sharknado]

Also it's worth pointing out new game launches this and previous year. Lost Ark, Elder Ring, maybe even New World manages to get into a good position. SE can't just constantly reply for 7.0 or 8.0 questions that things like better glamour system is not possible due to engine limitations. People will play other games and see they can have cool new things and will want them more and more.

[Ultaniku]

I’ve thought about it and talked about it a lot with my FC friends lately. Most of us would be okay waiting a bit longer for new content to have good last upgrade to the game itself. I know I’d have other things to fill that content void if it meant we’d get upgrade to the game itself.

[Shougun]

I, personally, don't care if the art direction and visual fidelity stays exactly where it is. The big thing needed is updating how the game stores data. While belts did not display on characters, you realize another reason they were removed is for additional armory slots for the remaining gear slots, yeah? That's a problem. The way item appearance data is stored and not being able to have something like log in the UI that just stores every appearance of gear you've acquired for later glamour use - that not being possible is a problem. We're going to get back into the number too big territory eventually as well, provided the game maintains a healthy user base.

The game will need an overhaul eventually, but it probably won't be for graphics.

I don't think it's wise to change an art direction mid game, but if we were just talking in general- I kind of hope they can make their next one look more 'art-like' akin to the concept art they use themselves. We've seen recently a lot of anime like visuals done very well in other games, and I'm not saying that exactly, but I think it could be interesting to have a sort of style similar in concept art they've shared (more stylized art style- which can also help it age a lot easier, a nice feature given MMOs tend to last a while). Also helps further reason it's a different game rather than 'new game higher resolution but that's it' sort of deal.

Definitely how memory is handled in this game is the main engine issue I thought of first when reading the thread though (hence I referenced glamour, our housing ward limits also relate to this where some servers have too many houses and others have not nearly enough). Collision / movement could be another nice one, though that depending could be an insane task (depending on how the system was done.. could be unreasonable).

For graphics, of course higher textures and all that would be nice, but generally I think most textures are fine it's just specific ones that are very egregious and if they could fix those it would automatically be better (some of which players have made mods for to fix lol). Personally I'd love to see improvements to the light, water, weather, and flora engines. They're not awful, game isn't ugly, but I can imagine them (in my mind sort of thing) as being fairly meaningful changes to my moment to moment wandering. Such changes also potentially not requiring the update of thousands of textures but more of a system that might be more moldable than memory (so they're more 'do-able' lol).

For terrain I'd love to see them be able to use better LOD assets- like thinking of that very pretty zone in EW that is Zeal (chrono trigger) like... I imagine it would look even better if they had some better distant objects. My GPU should be able to load the entire zone, but I still have pop in and stuff for those grand vista views that I feel a better engine could greatly improve. I'm sure there are other cool tools and expanded features that could also be used to help, not that I'm knocking the team- I quite like FFXIV's environments but to me in general a /major/ reason why I like FF games is the environments and so investing in the power and use of that power for environmental design is always a boon to me. Like it was absolutely great they were experimenting with verticality for the Khoulsia zone, but it was a little sad to hear they tried to get the last bit of the zone 'actually' in the water but the engine was like NO, STOP!!! lol (still cool they were pushing the engine though). I'd prefer when the concept art team and the environment department get together they can just do whatever fills their dreams (which is much easier said than done of course).