Quote Originally Posted by CuteBucket View Post
Yeah, yeah, I know, hater bait post by another Highlander Hyur man, but nevertheless, this did get me thinking about something I got talking about with some friends while we farmed old EX trials the other night.

I think part of why this game has a hard time hiring programmers for this game is due to the exclusive proprietary (and old) engine it uses. Whether they hire a programmer fresh out of school or a veteran with 20 years of coding experience, they are going to have to train them both for weeks to months on how to use and work with the system FFXIV runs in, which, if I recall, is the 1.0 engine stripped down and rebuilt, and *that* original engine was made for FFXIII, a game that released in late 2009 and was probably in development for at least a few years before that. In some ways, this game is running on the reanimated corpse of a engine that's probably been around in some fashion since the mid 00s. If you were a game dev looking for work, does that sound like your first choice of a system you'd want to work on? Not I. Sometimes I stop and think it's a miracle this game even functions at all.

Which is not to excuse any of this, mind, just theorize why some systems are as bizarre, janky, or abandoned as they are. I wouldn't be surprised at this point if, say, the dev that worked on some of the old content that hasn't seen updates in years doesn't even work at the company anymore, and no one even knows how to touch that corner of the code so they just shrugged and abandoned it.

A company like Nintendo also does lots of proprietary hardware and software (for better or worse...), but unlike Square Enix, they have the name cred and clout to do this and still hire talented people to work on their games. I just don't think SE has that kind of clout anymore. Maybe at one point in the late 90s/early 00s, but certainly not recently.

It's a bummer, because I feel like if this game had some stronger bones to build on than the duct tape and prayers of the retrofitted 1.0 engine, we could have a lot cooler things with this game. It is what it is, but I believe with more financial support and a better work culture that can attract high quality talent, SE could absolutely fix the problems and improve a lot of the jank with this game. But... [glances around at the state of the video game industry] yeah, that's never gonna happen, that's not instant money for the board and shareholders.
You say that, but Blizzard has managed to make an MMO run on an old-ass RTS game's engine for 20 years now. Yes, there were challenges, such as expanding player inventory space, but at the end of the day, they made it work. FFXIV can't, or more worryingly, won't.