Lazy Mage Gear

[Vaer]

Why are they still doing this? Didn't they see all the threads from ST about wanting different stuff instead of recolors and different gear for genders?

Its like they dont even read the forums

I believe they touched on it during one of the fanfests. It's a resource issue.

In creating items, the first step is to know the schedule of the version updates. Once the road map for content implementation is set, he checks whether the content requires item rewards as part of the plan for implementation. Then, the practicality of the cost for designers to create the models for the new armor and weapons needs to be determined to decide how items are implemented into content. For example, the hard Ifrit battle has weapons, but the Binding Coil of Bahamut has full outfits of gear.

“While ideally there would be unique graphics for all content, since there isn’t infinite funding for the designers, our focus is to add new graphics for end-game content as much as possible. You can see the cost trade-off, for example, when black mages and white mages have armor that is the same model with color swaps.”

On the game design side, it’s desirable to optimize the number of models added in a single patch to limit the amount of work to be done, so in some cases they look to see if items can be recycled from other titles. That said, in comparison with the original FFXIV, there have already been three to four times more new items created.

Source