File validator on the FFXIV Boot Launcher

[NessaWyvern]

Only solution to repair the game when its files a corrupted by a virus, a hard drive malfunction or internal issues is to uninstall the whole game then reinstall it which can take up to 15hours or less.

For me with my slow rural internet, it takes around 2 days
But yeah, it would be nice to be able to repair files without having to bog down the internet for long periods of time.

[Singularity]

Yes, it would. But you probably don't want to run a file check on the whole dat every time you launch the game. File validations are typically done by taking a hash value of a given file and then comparing it against the hash on the server's side. The game is over 40GB big however, so validating every file would take time, meaning a sensible implementation of this would just run when the player chooses to do so.

The way game mods currently work is bad anyway, you don't really want to write custom stuff in the game files themself.

You could also have it continuously hashing files in the background, verifying each specific file only when the game actually needs to load it, maybe with some heuristic prediction for what the game will likely need next to reduce impact on loading times. That way it doesn't have to validate the entire thing at once and has minimal impact on gameplay.

[LalaRu]

File checkers ain't that useful as you think. I had my BnS install messed with graphics (some buttons won't show here and there, fuzzy images etc) but file checking said everything is ok and no repairs done. At the end I had to delete everything and reinstall to have it all good. Even NC are indie devs, after all!