Why no Xbox?

[era1Ne]

I don't want an switch port, if this would hold the vision of Yoshi and his team back for 4.X or even beyond, but this is a decision only they can make. For an handheld the console ist decently powerful.

Switch is not strong enough. Switch is, on it's best day, with the benefit of a tail wind and a downhill slope, almost as good as a PS3 was in terms of pure computing power. If SE shoehorn FFXIV onto Switch, we exchange one set of console limitations for another. Switch has more memory than PS3 ever thought of having, but it's CPU/GPU is not particularly spectacular in performance terms. the big number people like to quote about it's GPU capability is for half precision (aka 16-bit) floating point. Half precision FP operations can be used in many circumstances, but really, it's a dishonest way to measure a GPU because half precision is not the primary type of computation that is performed by games on GPUs.

Ultimately, Switch is a tablet pretending to be a console, when it's actually more closely related to the Nvidia Shield which has better clocks and memory.

I wouldn't rule this out completely, because MMO are very, very RAM and CPU dependent and those parts are much stronger in the switch than the ps3 was. RAM would be the biggest boost the switch has over ps3. The GPU is better aswell even in dock mode then the ps3 gpu. Could it run Heavensward? Yes imo, but we don't know the bottlenecks of the updated engine for stormblood, so nobody can really comment on that one before the stormblood release. So while i can understand your concern about the switch beeing not good enough or holding ff14 stormblood back and your comparison to shield, i don't undestand your ps3 example, because the switch is more modern and better in cpu, ram and gpu.