Do we want another 10 years of FF14 on this engine?

[Jeeqbit]

Why does everyone have this assumption that the engine is the problem?

It's not. It's related to decisions surrounding infrastructure (dedicated servers vs cloud servers), separation of server machines (such as how you transfer from one server to another for dungeons and the inventory has to be "transferred" with you). These are decisions they made regardless of the engine used and they have pros and cons.

A lot of people attack the graphics, but these are intentional as well and not related to the engine at all. They made higher poly models in 1.0, but they didn't look good next to the lower poly models so they decided to make them all balanced somewhere in the middle with a poly limit they all decided on. The resolution of textures is something that increases with time and the game is 10 years old. A new engine would not mean higher resolution textures. The detail on models and textures is unrelated to the engine because they showed us some very realistic pictures that the engine is capable of and how they are going to increase the light and object limits they had imposed on themselves to support older player machines. The shaders scripts don't ask as much of the graphics card to support older player machines, but they could if SE decided not to care about old machines.

Don't forget that the engine adapted for this game was also used for FF15.

Do we really want another 10 years in this? Or would we rather get FFXIV-2?

The engine can be changed without making an entirely new game. They did it in the transition from 1.0 where a lot of things were preserved including characters.

[PirateRyanG]

The engine can be changed without making an entirely new game. They did it in the transition from 1.0 where a lot of things were preserved including characters.

It is insanely costly to just change a game engine without making a new game. If the relaunch of FF14 failed, Square would have been seriously in the hole.

Switching game engine is costly anyway. Most companies stick to a single engine for a reason. Bethesda have been using Gamebryo (which evolved into Creation Engine) since 1997.

It is rare that companies will just switch engines. Mostly, they use an upgraded version of the previous engine so you don't have to retrain your staff.

Changing engine (and the costs of developing one) will deliver absolutely no benefit.

Upgrading the current engine will.

[Larirawiel]

Rewriting software from scratch is a very bad idea in most cases:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/...ver-do-part-i/

But they could refactor and modernize the engine step by step. Blizzard did this in WoW. They did not replace the engine. It is still the engine, they used in Warcraft 3.


Cheers

[Deveryn]

Why does everyone have this assumption that the engine is the problem?

I wanna answer, but I also like not being banned.