New things from German interview with yoshida

[Theodric]

I really hope we see some serious competition where rival MMO's are concerned. I hope at least one between Blue Protocol, Ashes of Creation and Pantheon manages to step up in that regard. With a proper rival, I think FFXIV would quite quickly come to resolve many of the issues that are arguably holding it back.

If Viera and Hrothgar were going to cause so much trouble, I really don't understand why they bothered adding either - especially when enhanced customisation for the existing playable races has been a common request for quite some time. Now we have two playable races who can't use most of the hairstyles present in the game and of the new hairstyles we do get, most are quite clearly designed with female characters in mind first and foremost even if they're technically 'unisex' - with little regard for those of us who play male characters and who wish for masculine hairstyle options.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Could someone explain to me their whole clipping argument? Literally almost every single piece of gear in this game clips in some way or form. At first they added holes for miqote tails in glams but then at some point just said screw it. 99% of hairstyles clip through headpieces or the ears just completely disappear. So...why is clipping for Viera an argument when it’s no different than the huge clipping issues we already have? As far as the whole development cost things goes...i genuinely don’t see how much more they can cut development costs seeing how much content we lost this expansion. Are we going to lose more in 6.0 as well?

[Iscah]

Could someone explain to me their whole clipping argument?

He does say "clipping or other errors" which suggests there more to it. Maybe things interact in some strange way behind the scenes.

I also suspect the clipping could be a lot more glaring than it is for Au Ra horns. At least those emerge where ears would be on other races.

[Eldevern]

The real reason is probably both the engine and the standard meshes are still the ones from the 1.0 with better shades. They probably think the extra work that compatibility needs doesn't worth it unless they update both the meshes and the engine. If they plan to make the game runs ten years more (at least) as some other editors, they will do an update, but most likely not before the 7.0 or 8.0... Unless they plan a new generation MMO to replace both FFXI and FFXIV and to make it cross platform.

...

The short reply is : in order to avoid too much clipping and make the game runs faster, you delete as many subsurfaces as you can. The more your bones and meshes are standardized, the less works it requires to update hairs, weapons and other gears.

If a new character is not compatible with the standard, you need to make specific mesh. They added new races only because many players asked them.

That's why you have many MMOs with job lock, gender lock, race lock.