What causes the limitations?

[Ryel]

• Proper physics for clothing, environments, hair, etc.
• Physics playing a part in actual gameplay (this one was stated by Yoshida).
• Raids like CT/ST not being disconnected by loading screens.
• Towns/Cities not being split up, this could also apply to regions.
• This one's just a guess, but mobs not appearing out of thin air, likely a PS3 limitation. Most obvious in Neverreap.
• Giant 200+ metre flying creatures in FATEs, as stated by Yoshida.
• An Afro that doesn't look like ass.

As for the why? Because it's running almost 10 year old hardware, not hard to figure out.

Don't forget that the memory limitations of the Ps3 mean things like the UI take a hit because they need to be able to show the same amount of information on both platforms (no PC/Ps4 advantage), this was actually brought up in relation to the issue with showing party TP and why they had to move UI elements around to accommodate the function.

Honestly there are a large number of issues stemming from Ps3 hardware and before someone comes in with the whole "But XI was on Ps2 etc etc"

XI was released on Ps2 before getting a PC release and was done early enough in the Ps2's lifetime that the devs were able to get a decent amount of mileage out of it before PC's and other MMOs on the market began to overtake it.

This was not the case with the Ps3 which was at the end of it's lifespan when it got a FFXIV release, preventing many major design additions and QoL fixes that are common or standard in most other MMOs on the market from being included.

For the rest there are significant server structure issues apparently preventing things like inventory (unless we buy retainers then they magically fix themselves somehow) and a variety of other features (cross server friendslist, in dungeon /tells) that are also near standard in many other modern MMOs.

I would also be willing to bet this is the reason we haven't received addon support yet either, because if they really plan to stop support for Ps3 around the time of 4.0 then they'll probably try to hold off as long as they can so they don't have to port them over.