How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[TheVigilant]

Kingdom Hearts is not an MMO.

It doesn't have to contend with potentially hundreds if not not thousands of players at a time. Art Style has less impact on performance for for a single player game or small number of players than for a massive multiplayer game. But even moreso you're dealing with characters that can be customized vs characters that have set models or a set selection of variants.

But perhaps art style isn't the right phrase because I consider that to cover things like textures and models and animations. WoW's player models are simpler (models, textures, animations, etc) and less realistic looking that FFXIV's and because of that they have less impact on the game's performance. I'm not saying FFXIV can't be optimized more, in fact I would really like it to be. I find it frustrating that adding something as simple as some new face options to each race is problematic for SE.

Now I can agree with you that it comes down to either the genre or the engine, and not the art style.
Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?