Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
Tanaka was in charge of 1.0.

Game development is rarely that simple let's just say that.

None of us know the exact reasons that FFXIV 1.0 was the way it came out, could it have been all on Tanaka? Sure it damn well could have. But there is just as high a chance that Tanaka had the blame shoved on him from above and little is even his doing. The "5 years dev time" could mean anything, it could mean that they worked on XIV 24/7 for 5 years or his team could have been split up for 5 years working on multiple projects within Square Enix, in and out of FFXI, and any other number of projects SE was working on at the time.

Remember this is a "5 years" in where the company was working on a massive number of projects at once many of wich have yet to even see release dates until recently. During this time Square was working on.

FFXIV 1.0
FFXI expansions and content updates
FFXIII (And possibly XIII-2-3)
FFXV (Known as XIII Versus at the time)
FF Type 0

Likely the Crystal tools engine was forced upon him and his team and that layed the groundwork for a poor development scenario. It wasn't built for MMO's and it showed when anything that the development team tried to do before or after Yoshida Stepped in seemingly broke the game and was scrapped. Yoshida was on record multiple times saying "Sorry we can't do that with the current game structure"

Tanaka has no control over this kind of thing, he may have begged and pleaded with the bean counters that he needed a more powerfull platform and servers to work with and may have been denied.

While I say all this it's also possible Tanaka came into work everyday and threw darts at a board to decide wether things like "Fatigue" was a good idea. Laying the blame on him alone is just a bit silly to me, I'd rather put a bit of faith into the guy who previously brought us nothing but blockbusters.

So quoting "5 years, 5 years" is a useless statement as anyone who knows anything about the game world knows that it's not always 100% focus. Look at things like Duke Nukem Forever or more recently The Last Guardian. Games that have been in development hell for years if not stretching into decades. The ammount of time from start to finish means nothing.