[FF14 Mobile]Class Showcase

[Absurdity]

I think that almost any other development team wouldn't feel bound by all these excuses for why things cannot be done. They said themselves they were surprised by how fast the mobile devs can develop this.

This feels like it confirms something I both feared and somewhat expected, that XIV's development is still stuck in 2014. Probably using outdated tools and slow internal processes that actively hamper them, all because "it's how we've always done things."

Iirc similar info came out of Bethesda somewhat recently, where their way of making games hasn't evolved and everything is taking significantly longer than it should.

[Jeeqbit]

This feels like it confirms something I both feared and somewhat expected, that XIV's development is still stuck in 2014. Probably using outdated tools and slow internal processes that actively hamper them, all because "it's how we've always done things."

Iirc similar info came out of Bethesda somewhat recently, where their way of making games hasn't evolved and everything is taking significantly longer than it should.

Take any decade... if I was coding, even in an unfamiliar codebase, it wouldn't take me 11 years to solve the housing issues.

But I do think it's hampered by, ironically, too many team members, contrary to what people on these forums think. You have a separate team for UI, for coding, for design, for concept art, etc. So there is a handshake process where each team does their thing then passes it onto the other for the next step, and feels hampered because they can't just do the entire thing on their own like an indie dev, resulting in literally people who do it alone being faster (like modders).

The UI team for example are probably like "we can only do what our UI tools let us do!"

The coding team are probably like "well we can code it but the UI team might not use it the way we intended it".

But if someone had the ability to just do everything - UI, graphics and coding together - they'd likely just solve all the issues in one swoop, and that's the one strength an indie dev has over all these AAA companies.

We know that SE has fallen into a trap like your example before. They used to hire literal real life models of swords to be made to be imported into the game, while other companies just opened a modeling program and made it based on concept art. Learning they were that outdated compared to other companies in 1.0, it makes me believe they will continue to be outdated in other ways like you said.

[ZXN]

The animations they showed looked fine. Nothing crazy or incredible, just fine, and they'll probably get better depending on how much more effort they plan to put into it / whenever the release date is.

[Catwho]

We know that SE has fallen into a trap like your example before. They used to hire literal real life models of swords to be made to be imported into the game, while other companies just opened a modeling program and made it based on concept art. Learning they were that outdated compared to other companies in 1.0, it makes me believe they will continue to be outdated in other ways like you said.

Square Enix definitely has someone on the modeling team who takes the time to not only think about how each garment they are rendering is constructed, but where the seams and stiches would realistically go. Even in crappy lower resolution stuff like FFXI they did this. As a cosplayer it's something I always appreciated.