Portraits in 7.0 and Beyond

[Arzalis]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My good faith guess is that the equipment and glamour system has a significant amount of technical debt due to the rushed development of 2.0, and that due to whatever sub-optimal structure that has, the most effective solution to linking portraits with glamour and gear sets was what we have now. I honestly can't imagine what must be going on in the code for this to have been the best solution they could develop, but it suggests to me that the foundation of the game code is in rough shape.

Not entirely sure this is true. Glamour didn't exist until 2.2 and they did a major overhaul during Stormblood. At this point, any technical debt is simply because they don't care to resolve it; not some leftover from rushed development of 2.0 (which was a decade ago, by the way.) Frankly, any 2.0 related arguments fall flat for me after the game has been out for as long as it has, but especially for features that weren't even in 2.0.


That said, yes. The portrait system is a mess and I still can't believe they released it in the state they did and then haven't really addressed it since. I'm also not that surprised because that's really typical SE in a lot of ways. I suspect in like 2-3 years they'll "fix" it by just doubling down on how it currently works. That's the way to complete the cycle.

[LilimoLimomo]

Not entirely sure this is true. Glamour didn't exist until 2.2 and they did a major overhaul during Stormblood. At this point, any technical debt is simply because they don't care to resolve it; not some leftover from rushed development of 2.0 (which was a decade ago, by the way.) Frankly, any 2.0 related arguments fall flat for me after the game has been out for as long as it has, but especially for features that weren't even in 2.0.

To be clear, I am not defending CBU3 when I talk about technical debt. The choice to not address that technical debt is of course theirs; they need own that just as much as they own any of the game's successes.

But it's clear the game has plenty of it. There are just so many places in the game where a developer sees the way something is implemented and has to scratch their head and wonder why it was done in such an unintuitive or overly complicated way. And operating in good faith, I have to assume the reason is "technical debt" rather than "incompetence". Especially because often these systems are so needlessly complex that it would be more work to implement them in this sub-par way than it would be to implement them in a more ideal way; Occam's Razor suggests that technical debt is the reason.