Quote Originally Posted by Raven2014 View Post
I would disagree with this assessment if Yoshi's and his team are the same people from 8-10 years ago.
A lot of them actually started moving away during Heavensward and Stormblood. They began just overseeing and training new staff to work on Stormblood onwards, while the rest of them were working on FF16. Yes, they were doing FF16 that long ago, contrary to all who believe they only did this during Endwalker. FF16 was more or less complete by Endwalker and its team largely disbanded during Endwalker leaving a smaller team to make the DLC.

Even if we pad in another 3-5 months to assume the 2.0 developement had begun prior to 1.0 shut down. That's still ~15month for them to create a 40-60h of content that was packed in the 2.0 launch.
That's a wholly unfair comparison:
  • They got their best staff from across Square Enix to suspend their other projects to frantically adapt their new engine (meant for Single Player games) to work for an MMORPG.
  • They had so many staff working on it that they worked on 2.0 while still making patches for 1.0. In a way they kept up this habit by making patches for expansions while working on the next expansion.
  • Yoshi-P kept a spreadsheet of how long they took to do tasks that accounted even for bathroom breaks and mathematically optimized it so they could remake the game in just 2 years (it normally took longer to make a good game, especially an MMORPG). This wasn't healthy for his team (most likely why after 10 years he decided to increase the gap between patches).
  • They reused a lot of assets and salvaged lore and designs. Let's be honest - this is what made it possible to finish ARR as quickly as they did. Things like the Twelve were designed going back to 2005. Many of the ARR dungeons, textures, models, area concepts, characters and feature inspirations were salvaged from 1.0.