Why is the Post-MSQ Content so Passive in Endwalker?

[Jeeqbit]

With no disrespect to Yoshi P., he's not a code developer

He has stated that he understands code. He believes anyone getting into the game industry should have at least had a go at coding something, even if it's something really basic, so that they have a better understanding of how code works. It would be strange to say that if he himself did not have that understanding. Without a little experience of using it, they can have all sorts of wild and vague ideas about how coding actually works.

I'm sure there's some technical debt in the engine they ported over.

There was. The full interview that I have linked clarifies that there was a problem with the collision (fixed now), a problem with chocobos not being regarded as pets and being a party member (fixed now) and I think there was one other thing. But they addressed all of it they said.

They also explained it pretty well. "We rebuilt it from the engine". That means getting a brand new engine and adapting it for an MMORPG. Brand new classes and objects. They most likely ported things over, but for the most part it wouldn't make sense to do it in a sloppy way when the goal should be to make it tidy and object-oriented.

Now there might have been a few odd situations where they had to do it in a sloppy way due to time constraints and these are the situations they told us about but say were addressed.

Also, technical debt is a constant in any codebase. You will have some amount of it no matter how diligent you are.

I agree and that's why I tend to think it's more realistic to call it "2.0 spaghetti code" than 1.0 spaghetti code, because the game has evolved beyond a lot of the original 2.0 principles the game is built upon and that has got to make it challenging to adjust.

And with tight deadlines, people are going to take shortcuts in order to get cool thing out the door before the release window.

I've definitely seen that happen by game developers, but ultimately, if it's such a big issue that it is preventing work on new features or changing existing ones, you would think the programmers would have told their boss. If they haven't told their boss, then what excuse are they making instead for not be able to do things?

Technical debt can also be not just code, but ideas engrained in the design of the data.

I think it's more that, honestly. They have all sorts of ideas and misconceptions. Take the lodestone for example - a website that looks like it's from the early 2000s with blogs and other concepts like it and features that should be in the game.

One of the biggest ones is the "you can't do x, y or z" because "you have to carry the data with you" and "you can't retrieve x item" because "you aren't on y physical server". It immediately makes you think it's a style of thinking or an entrenched idea of how to setup their server structure, because many games don't have those sort of problems and there are all sorts of ambitious ideas I can come up with to solve those problems regardless of how entangled their code is.

Another example is how they said with confidence it's not possible to show on the tooltip that you obtained an item already. I was engulfed with doubt over that and they proved it by doing it shortly after. So mindset seems to be playing a part in it.

Of course, these ideas have shaped how it's all structured and that can be difficult to change, but it doesn't make it impossible to change with data transfers, migrations or bridges.

They could even just let players do the migration by saying "here's a brand new inventory system that is much better, old players can still access their retainers to remove items but they can't add them back in".

It wouldn't surprise me if they end up having to meticulously plan which scenes get The Money and which scenes get the stock stuff.

They do. When designing an ultimate they have limited development resources at their disposal, but they want it to be cinematic so you can enjoy it on twitch (since they expect more people will watch it than actually clear it), so they invest some of their resources into making it look good to a viewer.

In general, they have said they slowly improved the cutscene system to do more than just discuss things like it did in ARR and that they will continue with interesting ideas (like the one where Tesleen becomes a sin eater which they explained in detail at a development panel).