FF16 stealing dev time from FF14

[Floortank]

"FFXIV stole from FFXVI" is factually incorrect.

FFXIV's current development involves more work/budget/developers than ever before, but the game has gotten larger from patch to patch, expansion to expansion. When a game expands vertically, like with increasing the level cap, that's one thing. But when it expands horizontally, like adding more races or Jobs that need custom content (headgear for new heads, Job gear for new jobs), the workload expands into new areas of required support and maintenance, meaning support for other things must get dropped.

They have hit a point in the game's development where, for every utterly new feature or innovation they make to the game, somewhere else in the game, something is left undeveloped. Yoshi-P made a post about this at the beginning of Shadowbringers, when he was discussing the reasons why there aren't two genders for the new races. Problems of time and budget cannot be solved by hiring more people and throwing more bodies at the problem, because literally everything they do has a cost in time and QA, and in order for the game to maintain its high standards, they can't exceed a certain amount of development.

So they focus on making high quality content, but know their limits and don't exceed those, either in their budget of time, or money, all of which includes QA testing and management.

So yes, it has led to things which I find to be very objectionable. I don't like that they put new races into the game unfinished. I don't like that Dancer and Gunbreaker are missing ultimate weapons and many equivalent primal glamours other Jobs get. I think the decision to go without these features in order to stick to the work / QA budget is questionable in some places and just flat out wrong in others.

I am not apologizing for them, but nonetheless, I 100% understand the decision.

In essence, Division 3 can't be the reason FFXIV is lacking features, because if they took that entire team and put it to work on FFXIV, it would increase their QA/developmental overhead beyond the limits of FFXIV's update/QA/budget structure.

You can't fix these problems by simply throwing more money or bodies at them. They are problems of horizontal expansion, of adding more lateral rather than vertical content to the game.