If FFXVII is a new online game... would you move inmediately?

[Lauront]

It might be worth a go, who knows, perhaps the continuation of FF14 post Endwalker will be another end of the world event where the Star is remade again and we all just get accounts on FF17. New world with upgraded game engine etc, leaving current FF14 for people who play on PS5 only and FF17 for the master race...

14's handicaps stem from their engine design choices dating back to the PS3; certainly not the PS5. You can glean as much from their comments here...

Since FFXIV had PS3 support, its graphics technology is 2 generations behind. If we had high poly models/hi-res textures ((unclear)) then we could just swap them out, but we don't. A lot of things were created low poly/low-res from the start for cost-saving, so we would have to recreate all of them in order for the improved graphics to look good.

...and here (which IMO somewhat walks back his point on not mixing pipelines in the earlier interview, maybe due to a shift in mindset about it)...

In what ways does FF14 compensate for its tech aging over time?

Naoki Yoshida: So by hearing your question, probably our basic understanding is different. Your understanding is a different perspective to what we have. There's a big difference. When we're looking back about the time when PS2 was out and PS3 was out in the market, they have specific unique characteristics to those consoles back then. But after any console released after Xbox 360 - so Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and Scarlett in the future - you can see them more as a PC. There might be a difference in memory size or GPU or CPU but we can safely assume that they are kind of PC. We are working on the PC version of Final Fantasy 14 as well. They have different names of course - some say Xbox One, PS4, PS5 - but they are all the same with different names. It's more like a reiterating thing. But also we have to make sure there's a minimum requirement for FF14 for the game to run on console or any machine. As long as we can keep that threshold, it's easy to scale up and down within that limit. It's easy to make it dynamic in an upgrade.

I'd be surprised if they didn't release any future MMOs on a console, just with a more flexible engine and mindset to avoid being plagued by legacy issues. Even if they didn't put it out on a console, it will always have to be broadly playable enough so as to exclude more powerful PCs being a baseline - the more important thing IMO is the ability to be flexible and allow more features for those with the machines to make use of them.