That moment when you realized......

[Shioban]

Creating assets is a long, long, long process.

Each asset requires a long time to produce;

Pre Production : Concept Design (Look, Use, Lore, Apperance, Animations, Overall Style
1# - High Poly detailed object
2# - High Poly object retopologised into lower poly object
3# - Normal/Height Map of High poly version applied to lower poly object
4# - Low Poly object adjusted and optimised and UV Mapped for texturing. (This can take a long long time to get right)
5# - Specular/Shader Maps applied to lower poly iteration
6# - Diffuse textures (the actual base colours) painted/adjusted and applied.
7# - Testing object/textures in the game environment for irregularities.
8# - Assuming the object needs animations a step by step procedure of hand-crafting the animation to work "as intended"and by hand or procedurally looping it.
9# - Assuming the asset needs to have a skeleton build(or applied), rigged to the skeleton and finally weightd to the joints. (This can take a long long time)
9# - Testing animation in the game environment for irregularities.
10# - Assuming this asset now needs sounds, the process of producing the sounds, applying it to the correct abilities/situation takes time and adjustment.
11# - Assuming this asset is in fact a boss, mechanics, abilities, scripting and timing, damage output and delays on abilities to be created.
12# - Assuming this asset is in fact a unique boss that require its own particle/battle effects, new effects will be programmed/created to suit this bosses abilities.
13# - Pending no problems were found the boss is ready to be implemented into the game.

FINALLY #14 QUALITY CONTROL. - If producer/director (and probably others) Yoshi-P says "nope" then it goes right back down the pipeline.

These assets take a HUGE volume of time to create, this isn't something that was whipped up in a day. FFXIV goes for a very high detail threshold it requires even more time to produce and perfect to this level constantly, hence the constant reuse of assets/animation and even sounds.


The other problem is data. Each one of these assets takes up space, the animations, models, sounds, battle data all take up space.
Reusing assets is common, for a situation where it's appropriate reusing them with a different texture set is perfectly acceptable.

"But in all these other games they had unique ones!"

Lets take WoW for example!

WoW has a very low detail threshold, each boss barely scrape 5-10MB in data overall, (assuming there's no voice-acting). For the most part these assets were simpler to produce as well, leaving the development teams more time overall to create other content.




TL;DR

Assets take a HUGE amount of time to create, for each department to finish its roll can sometimes take weeks to complete. The amount of work and effort that goes into creating the assets for FFXIV:ARR is astounding and something we take for granted a lot of the time, this is a very hefty MMO with a lot of assets, what they've achieved with the time they have and the stringent limitations they put in place, they should be commended not slandered.

Just to add to that, making a concept is a long process in itself. It goes through many iterations, quite a lot of quality control and must be checked with creative leads (who are incredibly finicky and rightfully-so). There's also rigging the game model to be ready for animation, which usually requires someone with specialised skills and a long time to produce (I used to work as a character rigger and animator) - needs to conform to internal standards for the animation team.

Completely forgot about rigging (and that's something I do every week, dont know how I forgot...)