Can someone from devopment explain why Eureka was delayed for so long?

[ReplicaX]

the diadem/eureka team (yes... the same team did the 3 fails...)
The palace of the dead team (FUN FOUND!)

Eureka:

• Map design alone is a breath of fresh air (many ppl still don't care)
• Players are now optimizing NM spawning, initial first impression salt of just chaining non-NM pop mobs is now irrelevant unless you just want to solo everything.
• 20 NMs specifically designed for the content and many of them are above S Rank designed hunts and we haven't even gotten to the higher NMs.
• Initial Salt they copied XI, yet it is trace elements of XI and newer content but still with the base grind relic that has been staple FF tradition.

Palace of the Dead:
Content with even more elements of XI's Nyzul Isle only watered down for XIV players. Even the RNG shard trade in is a watered down Nyzul turn in.

Hate to bring some reality in (definitely not defending SE, as the 4yrs of base tome grind is old as hell), but between the initial outcries of Eureka with players just mindlessly grinding trash mobs and the "this is not XI" hate. Many aspects folks consider fun have more elements of XI in them than Eureka. I wouldn't be surprised if the new deep dungeon had elements of XI Salvage or other XI content that was highly successful modernized to fit the XIV formula.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

My guess is that the system-level changes they made (elemental affinity, dynamic affinity changing, chaining changes, new XP tables and splitting calculations, leveling system changes incl. level down, etc.) were a lot more complicated to get working in FFXIV's codebase than people would believe. I highly doubt it's like they had an entire team of dozens of developers working on nothing but this nonstop for years, but probably the amount of staff they have who can make those kinds of system level changes to the server code are very few, and it probably had all sorts of bugs and complications with many iterations just to get to this point.

(This is also why I'm guessing that making the types of changes people are requesting now (adding things on top to make it more interesting) will probably be much smaller in comparison, having built this foundation.)

Of course none of this changes the "that's it?" feeling you're alluding to at all, and that's still a pretty major misfire. But I suspect this will be one of those cases where the work involved will mean a lot more to the people inside the team (who know what was really involved) than to anyone on the outside (who, rightfully, only judge the final result).

Possibly add in the work it took to do the ability to manage teams inside a duty instance...

[Vstarstruck]

My guess is that the system-level changes they made (elemental affinity, dynamic affinity changing, chaining changes, new XP tables and splitting calculations, leveling system changes incl. level down, etc.) were a lot more complicated to get working in FFXIV's codebase than people would believe. I highly doubt it's like they had an entire team of dozens of developers working on nothing but this nonstop for years, but probably the amount of staff they have who can make those kinds of system level changes to the server code are very few, and it probably had all sorts of bugs and complications with many iterations just to get to this point.

(This is also why I'm guessing that making the types of changes people are requesting now (adding things on top to make it more interesting) will probably be much smaller in comparison, having built this foundation.)

Of course none of this changes the "that's it?" feeling you're alluding to at all, and that's still a pretty major misfire. But I suspect this will be one of those cases where the work involved will mean a lot more to the people inside the team (who know what was really involved) than to anyone on the outside (who, rightfully, only judge the final result).

Another thing to consider is that the housing wards and housing changes we got recently were not intended to be released at that point. Those were released in response to the enormous uproar over the Shirogane launch.

It's possible this contributed to Eureka being delayed.

HOW? there is NOTHING in Eureka that takes work! if they had problems with putting the extra level system in FFXIV from a programing level, then they could of simplified it to something like Palace of the dead. There is no excuse for this long wait for no content, none. All Eureka is.. is a breaddead grind for outdated gear.... I am not interested in glams that take this long.

I would rather have fixes to the glam system then this broken place called diadem 3.0

[Squintina]

party
Probably a big chunk of the time was spent on the ability to party and change parties in an instance.

It might seem like a small thing, and one we take for granted, but that was probably a lot of work to figure out.

Because partying inside Eureka is not at all the same party system as outside. It looks the same, but it isn't.

How do I know that?

If you make a premade party outside of Eureka and queue, sure it looks like all it did was take that same party and applied it inside the instance.
However if you change your party members inside (a person leaves, other people join, etc..), that same original party in Kugane remains.
That implies the party system is different between the two

Also anyone who's running ACT will notice that it's having some difficulty telling "party" members alike. Instead it's treating everyone in the whole field equally (leading to some pretty gigantic logs). That also implies that the partying inside is a different system than usual, that was just skinned to look exactly like the old one.

NM

There are 20 datamined fates, so 20 NM. Many of these have unique features (which if you're lagging might be hard to see but those of us who aren't do see them).

Some of them have stack markers, others player-target AOE, others call in reinforcements, etc..

Having fates that trigger based on kills also probably took some development time. There are no fates elsewhere that do so.
Other fates trigger on: timer, fate chain, and NPC talking.

Weather and time based monsters
Typhoon sprites show up in gales
Rain sprites show up during rain
Undead show up at night

I don't know if they've done anything like that before, so that might have taken development

Other things we haven't discovered yet?
We still haven't explored the level 20+ areas. They might have their own small quirks that required development time.
After all, we didn't know about the "buff faeries" as they weren't mentioned anywhere, we had to discover them. Maybe there are other things that we still need to discover, perhaps that are better hidden.

[Usho]

We all know our sub money is going to the FF7 remake we know isn't really coming. FFXIV is on the backburner, hence why we keep getting crap delivered to us like diadem 3.0.

[akaneakki]

im pretty sure they searched the fun in it. and at some point they just had to release it without it.

Fun is subjective. I find it fun with my friends from FC/LS and cross server friends. I don't find expert roulettes fun, maybe you love grinding that for months? I like savage, maybe you don't like it?

[Kallera]

Fun is subjective. I find it fun with my friends from FC/LS and cross server friends. I don't find expert roulettes fun, maybe you love grinding that for months? I like savage, maybe you don't like it?

Cool story.

Eureka put me to sleep last night.

Each time I'm reading something like the highlighted part, I wonder: Do you find this content only fun with your friends? Maybe even because of your friends? Because you're doing it with them, maybe even in VoiceChat, talking about some nonsense, while grinding mobs?
Its not meant as attack, everyone is entitled to like different things, but I cant help but wonder: Is this content good and fun enough that you'd enjoy it by yourself? Or is it more the company of your friends that you're enjoying here while Eureka without them would bore you to death aswell in 10 minutes?
Because if it would, its not the achievment of the game that you're having fun with that content - its the achievment of your friends/company. And to spend time with them you don't need Eureka...

Exactly.

[Vidu]

Fun is subjective. I find it fun with my friends from FC/LS and cross server friends.

Each time I'm reading something like the highlighted part, I wonder: Do you find this content only fun with your friends? Maybe even because of your friends? Because you're doing it with them, maybe even in VoiceChat, talking about some nonsense, while grinding mobs?
Its not meant as attack, everyone is entitled to like different things, but I cant help but wonder: Is this content good and fun enough that you'd enjoy it by yourself? Or is it more the company of your friends that you're enjoying here while Eureka without them would bore you to death aswell in 10 minutes?
Because if it would, its not the achievment of the game that you're having fun with that content - its the achievment of your friends/company. And to spend time with them you dont need Eureka...
______________________________________________________________________
As for why the development took so long... yeah, I'd like to know that too...

My personal theory is that a good portion of time actually went into stuff like the party system and the option to invite players inside the instance.

My hope is that they spend the first 6 months desperatly trying to come up with something creative, fresh and new and then gave up on it and had to start from scretch. Wouldnt make me happy but more hopeful for the future that they tried something else before Eureka and used this final concept as "Damn, we got nothing...!" instead of actually believing that this is good content that people wanted.

[AmemeAmeklin]

all the things

Yes, I noticed all of this last night! I think it is a great feat of programming that they did an excellent job of disguising (somewhat to their detriment, clearly). I don't approve of datamining since it takes all the mystery out of the game and spoonfeeds content to people. It's like skipping to the end of a book to see what happens.

I come from super old school MMO land, so I'm more of the opinion that we should remain patient and work our way to the top of this new content before we start judging. I am curious where the story will lead us. It's like in EQ...you start out killing bats in the newbie areas, but end game has you fighting dragons and dodging AoEs (which don't have AoE markers and you can't tell what the dragon is casting without looking at the spell particles :P ).

[Vidu]

It's like in EQ...you start out killing bats in the newbie areas, but end game has you fighting dragons and dodging AoEs (which don't have AoE markers and you can't tell what the dragon is casting without looking at the spell particles :P ).

Honestly, I feel this part of the problem with Eureka aswell: We already did that. We started out killing bats and rats and little crabs in newbie areas. Eureka is meant to be part of the end game that has you fighting dragons.
Its funny how they spend the last 4 years making the normal leveling process easier and, more importantly, filled it with more variety than FATE-grinds (leveling roulettes, increased exp from dungeons, beast tribe dailies, PotD, hunts, the challenge log...) because people (rightfully if you ask me) requested to be able to level in different ways than just mob zerging and now Eureka seems to have turned the clock back in the worst way possible.

I tried Eureka with my paladin - Royal Blade and Holy Spirit at level 70 can hit for 10k. Now, in Eureka, I'm thrown back to hit rats for 1k if I'm lucky. Eureka, in a sense, took away my progress and told me "You know what? Start at zero again!" and thats a bad idea.
When you enter Eureka, you are at endgame. You're not a newbie adventurer who needs to learn the ropes by killing bats.

I know that we need to level up our elemental level because of all that corrupted aether lorewise. Okay, I can roll with that. That doesnt make the whole "grind mobs again" a good gameplay mechanic though - and as much as I want to see the story and like the hidden bits, I'm also not fooling myself over what the core-gameplay here is: Killing bats.