First I'll say that I'll shout down anyone who calls the dev team lazy. If there's one thing that's always been clear, it's that everyone who plays even a small role in making this game does so with every ounce of passion and pride they have. From top to bottom we've seen the devs go above and beyond for us time and time again.

That said, there are criticisms to make. First, it's likely they suffer from inefficient workflows and production bottlenecks. For example, thinking back to the live letter where they showed us some production timetables, I was blown away by the number of times "approval from Yoshida" or "check-in with Yoshida" or "test with Yoshida" showed up. I know project management and I can't imagine many other situations in which one individual has so much direct oversight on a team this big, especially when that individual has so many other commitments and demands placed on his time. So much time must be lost waiting for Yoshida to get eyes on everything the team does. He admitted himself that they need to review their workflows. I'm a big YoshiP fan; I love that he is so keen to get stuck in and I'm sure his direct involvement is part of what has made the game so great, but he's only one man with limited time and right now his limits are everyone's limits.

Moreover, "small indie company" might be a meme, but it was born from truth. A company with profits of $250m should not have developers working in their free time to add viera hats, male viera, mahjong or anything else we're told was delivered under unhealthy working practices. We need to ask why the team is stretched so thin that this can occur.

Then there's the pandemic. Clearly it affected productivity and rightly so; I'm happy to wait as long as necessary for content if it means the team can keep themselves safe. Unfortunately it has been used rather naively by some people to dismiss discussion of the other issues I've mentioned.

Finally, some content fell victim to a shift in design direction, like the deep dungeon giving way to Bozja as a levelling tool. I think the new focus on large scale content is a big mistake but that's one for another thread.

Ultimately it's very difficult to single out any one piece of missing content and say whether it was cut because of inefficient workflows, because of understaffing, because of disruption from the pandemic or because of a shift in priorities. I suspect in most cases the answer is some combination of all those things.

One thing's for sure, though - Endwalker won't have the pandemic as a scapegoat for all those other issues the way that Shadowbringers has. In particular I think the period from the launch of 6.3 up to the end of 6.5 will be very telling about the future of content, because that's when we'll be expecting an ultimate, a new deep dungeon and the bulk of the new Eureka/Bozja equivalent to drop, and most of the work for that content will have been started post-pandemic.

It's gonna be interesting.