The sad state of customization

[Berethos]

I doubt they built an entirely new engine and game from scratch and released it in just two years.

It wasn't entirely from scratch, as you can tell many of the art assets were re-used/repurposed alongside new stuff. Art asset creation has often been cited (by the devs here and other notable devs, like the ones at Blizzard) as being one of several potential bottlenecks in content creation - if you have enough of that usable (with some minor changes) ahead of time you can cut out a good chunk of time...and when faced with what was viewed as an impossible task at the time, taking any advantage they could get was needed.

Then there's the Noclip documentary that actually interviewed some of the devs, and part of what they talk about is how Yoshi-P went about managing the project in a sort of SCRUM style, with weekly or biweekly "sprints" toward very specific goals. You can get a lot done that way, but it's also draining to do and isn't advisable long-term.

There's also this interview, which is the only citation I've seen (compared to the numerous speculative posts making the claim that what we have now is still the 1.0 engine):

https://gamerescape.com/2011/10/19/g...-is-out-there/

Relevant quote from the article:

Yoshida: First of all.. the current engine like Crystal Tools or the Luminous project, are made more for console games where they’re able to show the greatest level of graphics in a passive environment whereas an MMO is an active environment where, while you still want it to look beautiful, you also have many many people coming together in the same world. You have something like MW3 where the graphics are beautiful but what would happen if you had like 3 or 400 people on the screen at once. Would the engine be able to handle that? So what we wanted was something that could handle more of an active gameplay that we’re aiming for but also be able to provide beautiful graphics and landscapes. We found that Crystal Tools and Luminous would not be the optimal solution for this so that’s why we’re going to develop our own.

One of the reasons we had some trouble with the original launch of FFXIV was because we went through Crystal Tools and it was an engine that wasn’t really optimized for an MMO and so we’re currently working with technologists that are working on Luminous to make us a custom, optimal engine that will work for FFXIV.