Quote Originally Posted by brinn12 View Post
Just a small correction here. 5.0 patch notes released 24 months after 4.0. Releasing 8.0 in November 2026 is not putting in "a lot of effort". It's putting in no effort at all, considering they've managed to do it in late June before, following the same timeline.
You're ignoring some important context here. They increased the timeframe of each of the major patches. So to release it after 24 months would require releasing it a lot sooner after 7.5 than they normally release a major patch even. The timeframe between final patch and expansion has generally always been longer than the timeframe between major patches, about 5 months until they increased it for Endwalker release.

I think you may underestimate how much they were actually pushing themselves to meet the 24 month timeframe as well, and the intent of it taking longer is to increase breaks, reduce burnout, and increase producitvity and consider the health of employees. This was likely also the case for major patches due to them having a wider variety of content types than they used to.

I remember they said how meeting one of the deadlines was going to be really tough and I think it must have been prior to Shadowbringers they said that, but they were going to do it anyway and crunch hard to keep it in summer. Then they flat out couldn't with Endwalker due to delayed contracts, remote working issues, etc. No doubt it was comfortable having more time so they seemed to stick with it.

So if they released it in November, that would be about 6 months after 7.5, similar to their previous timeframe of 5 months afer the .5 patch.