SE, the dev team needs some more resources.

[SaberMaxwell]

Reminder their job and combat design team has 4 members. Four. Members. For seventeen jobs. Not even one member per role. To paraphrase Sebazy: "Don't ask what the healer designers are doing, because they just don't have any."

[official_coconut]

How is it even possible to have 4 people try to balance 17 jobs on their own? That sounds like a nightmare on top of whatever other duties they might have.

[Lauront]

Marketing got a large chunk of the funding that's for sure. If I remember correctly they had multiple billboard advertisements and etc in times square. Not to mention having 'spiderman' be part of their commercial.

And the whole Dad of Light thing, which is another form of marketing.

[yukiiyuki]

Yup, the issues he raised all ultimately resolve to resources. He stated they cannot be simply solved by throwing more money or people at them but a lot of people are misconstruing that to mean that they don't amount to problems of that nature. Perhaps the translated statement was not worded too well, but those things he highlighted in section 1 are ultimately resource issues.

People either are not understanding what he is saying or are being disingenuous in using "This is a complex problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing more money or people at it, as it impacts both debugging and QA" to try infer that it is not a resource problem in its nature.

Ultimately as a consumer I am interested in the end product and not so much the excuses on why they can't do X, Y or Z, which I can't really verify. At the moment, I am enjoying the game but there are plenty of aspects to it that are less than ideal and in time those may lead me to re-evaluate if the game is worth my time, if they are not resolved.

In particular, lack of progress in regards to high res textures being the key issue for me.

Thats complex problem, but for fixing any of that - they need bigger team. Maybe even building new engine from the scratch is better idea, than trying to explain new workers how this 1.0 frankenstein works.
But the real question is why our textures is so bad, modders can give us 2k textures on faces, but devs somehow can't? Maybe its a good idea to hire freelancers outside of Japan?

[Mahrze]

Reminder their job and combat design team has 4 members. Four. Members. For seventeen jobs. Not even one member per role. To paraphrase Sebazy: "Don't ask what the healer designers are doing, because they just don't have any."

Um, sorry to be so random between the armchair executives and developers but is there a source confirming its only 4 people working on jobs? outside of a credit list or such?

[Lauront]

Thats complex problem, but for fixing any of that - they need bigger team. Maybe even building new engine from the scratch is better idea, than trying to explain new workers how this 1.0 frankenstein works.
But the real question is why our textures is so bad, modders can give us 2k textures on faces, but devs somehow can't? Maybe its a good idea to hire freelancers outside of Japan?

That last thing is potentially what they're trying their best to avoid and why this is such a difficult issue to solve. Reading between the lines, it seems to be an issue of resource availability (as in, they have the money but even so they can't find the requisite manpower given the terms under which they want to hire them.) As to why modders can do it, whereas it presents a challenge for them, well I imagine that is because of the sheer scale of assets that would need to be converted and then made to fit on the existing models. They did not future proof the stuff they created so it is not an easy matter to resolve... but all the same, I'd like to see it happen.

He keeps semi-joking about how he'd love to take a meteor to it all again. I wish he would!

The shards and the Source all need to be rejoined, after all >: )...

[Barraind]

That's what the XIV dev team is facing, in my opinion. It takes a lot of time to properly integrate new staff and get them working at the pace of existing experienced staff.
Any new staff they added right now would likely not be capable of truly easing the workload on the existing devs for a year or more.

The flipside of this being that if you dont add people as you know your project scope is growing, burnout of one major contributor could mean you're never going to get back on track.

Squeenix isnt exactly built well for hiring anyone with experience to step in. They dont hire non-Japanese speakers in that office, or for any of those design teams (something Yoshi has said repeatedly) and they're required to train from the ground up.

[Seniade]

Um, sorry to be so random between the armchair executives and developers but is there a source confirming its only 4 people working on jobs? outside of a credit list or such?

Probably just from the credits. The problem with that though, is the video game industry is not unionized and doesn't have a set standard on credits listings.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/329003/How_bad_crediting_hurts_the_game_industry_and_muddles_history.php

I can tell you from first hand experience, not all people that worked on a game are necessarily listed in the credits. And it's not just a Western companies thing either, Nintendo (at least in the past) had a habit of not listing contract employees, they would even tell you "that's our rules, it's non-negotiable".

[Ayuhra]

Um, sorry to be so random between the armchair executives and developers but is there a source confirming its only 4 people working on jobs? outside of a credit list or such?

I'm not an armchair developer, I'm a real developer. Not for SE, but I am the director of a game that is live and has continuous updates and I have a list of other games with my name on them under my belt at this point so I do have SOME insight into how these things go.

I grew up inside the industry, too, so I know people.

My point is don't assume everyone is an "armchair developer". Games don't magically fall out of the sky, people make them. People like the ones we're talking about in this thread.

There's dozens of us! Dozens!

[mario710]

I'm not an armchair developer, I'm a real developer. Not for SE, but I am the director of a game that is live and has continuous updates and I have a list of other games with my name on them under my belt at this point so I do have SOME insight into how these things go.

I grew up inside the industry, too, so I know people.

My point is don't assume everyone is an "armchair developer". Games don't magically fall out of the sky, people make them. People like the ones we're talking about in this thread.

There's dozens of us! Dozens!

It was a snarky comment fishing for likes. Ignore the excess sewage.