"Aiming for the Game to be Reborn for the 2nd time" - YoshiP Interview

[Jeeqbit]

Being an actual video game programmer (on a live service game) I can tell you, from my direct, personal experience spanning a couple decades, that technical debt cannot be dealt with if it's not included in planning and budgets, and that even in my current company that is fairly good at it we still need to work at convincing producers of the necessity of doing it. (and that despite our lead producer being a former programmer himself!)

Honestly, if you are not a programmer yourself, you have no business calling "skill issue" on that.

See, that is what I have observed. Part of me wants to conclude that they aren't good at programming (and I have programmed for decades), but a more distant, long-term observation shows that:

They always focus on the next patch. No employee labor, planning or approval goes into old content whatsoever. So any past features that could use improvement or bringing up to standard, don't get touched for years.

There are rare exceptions to this: the graphics update, old dungeon revamps, and 5 quality of life upgrades per major patch. There are so few of these that they obviously had to go through Yoshi-P's personal approval to even get development time. Any other changes to past features were without approval, and Yoshi-P informed us it was done without approval (ARR flying, viera/hrothgar head accessories).

For that reason, I believe you nailed their exact issue. They don't approve nor assign anyone to care about old content, features and patches, which gradually frustrates the playerbase who are still revisiting older features or content, or where old features are still relevant in modern content (such as battle, UI and targeting system issues).

We have been told for years that is was about "job identity", not technical reasons. One thing where they invoke technical reasons is adding glamour dressers in houses, but even that doesn't necessarily mean "spaghetti code", it could very well just mean "server architecture limitation", in itself not a sign of bad quality, just that the use case doesn't fit the existing technical design.

Agreed; we have only been told it was due to job identity and that they could easily allow it if they wanted. I've personally never seen them use spaghetti code as an excuse but rather server architecture design, and if you check my signature, you will see a link to a video where Yoshi-P denies there is any spaghetti code from 1.0.

I absolutely cannot tell whether the "spaghetti code" thing is real or a myth invented by players.

I believe it's real but I don't believe it's spaghetti code from 1.0. Rather, the modern game was built upon the back of 2.0, and it's changed a lot since 2.0, yet, 2.0 is still the stack of cards on which it was built, and some programmers have left since then.

Examples we can see of this:

• CWLS menu is separate to the Linkshell menu. Likely evidence that they could not salvage the linkshell code, so they made an entirely separate system for it.
• The game was changed to let us visit other worlds and data centers, but FCs are still world-restricted. I suspect this is due to them being tied to the housing system, which is also world-restricted. This is evidence of how 2.0's design is holding things back.
• We have numerous inventories - Armoire, Glamour Dresser, buying quest items via Calamity Salvager, Chocobo Saddlebag, Retainer, Armory Chest and the inventory itself. They all function very differently on a technical level, and merging some of them would not be a simple process, but not necessarily impossible.

All these issues could be solved with things such as database table migrations, or code that converts data upon character login. So either they never assign development resources to do so, or they don't know how.