Would you trade new ingame content for an engine upgrade?

[Katt_Felista]

I wish that, with the money they made this time around they would actually ditch new content for an overhaul of the engine... But.... There is a very , very old work mindset at Square Enix, it consists, if you will of a "Don't try to fix it if it's not broken" and keep old engines and way of doing it "alive" but it also stiffle innovation very much. You would need to have a complete overhaul of segment of SE to make a new / total re-upgrade of the engine happen.

From this mindset u could say that it also proposes that, newcomers at SE are forced to develop very rigid, in the "box" of what works, work ethic and ultimately it's not the devs that are making the decision. The netcode is very "limited" and wonky in FFXIV, not allowing you to whisper if you are in instances /dungeons / raids...

I would hope to see an upgrade, something that looks closer to Final fantasy 16 in terms of fidelity, buuuuut i really doubt it, what i see them do is more like 4/ 5 more years of "this" then... I hope i'm wrong. I would even sacrifice some of my mounts or some of the features yes, that we had over the years for this whole engine upgrade.

Will it happen... With this very specific type of mindset ? Somebody would need to either Completely change his mindset, or be pushed out the door for it to happen.

[Imoye]

Especially considering that almost every asinine limitation in the game is a result of 1.0 spaghetti code. So many core features hamstrung with "why the hell can't I just..." moments.

To be honest, it blows my mind how an MMO in 2022 can be so limited. Never in my entire life have I seen a game so held back by awful code. It really shows how bad 1.0 really was and I'm amazed that someone could create something so fundamentally outdated even back in mid-2000s. Look at WoW - it's an ancient game, but it's smooth, has great netcode and has continously received updates to its engine. WoW is a more modern game than FFXIV in pretty much all respects. That is sad and it needs to be fixed sooner or later.

[Jeeqbit]

It was said in a recent interview in the media tour that all the 1.0 spaghetti code was fixed over time, including a change to chocobos working as pets, a change to player collision and summoner.

"We don't have any sort of like technical, or like a technological issue that was carried over from 1.0, because ARR was meant to kind of discard what we had from 1.0 and rebuild it from the engine."
https://youtu.be/ge32wNPaJKk?t=560

[technole]

It was said in a recent interview in the media tour that all the 1.0 spaghetti code was fixed over time, including a change to chocobos working as pets, a change to player collision and summoner.

"We don't have any sort of like technical, or like a technological issue that was carried over from 1.0, because ARR was meant to kind of discard what we had from 1.0 and rebuild it from the engine."
https://youtu.be/ge32wNPaJKk?t=560

Yeah, I liked Larryzaur's media tour questions to YoshiP. People like to say 1.0 spaghetti code when they don't have any clue. It's more when they rebuilt the UI, there are just many things they never really built. Then there are new things they tried in a shorter amount of time, like Summoner job branch off of Arcanist class was chaotic, so much that they don't want to do that again.

As a developer as well everything he says makes logical sense. There is always that list of enhancements we tackle and more we want to get to. Much of it we cannot tell the public until we get further along the process. Most of the time we are on the same page as the community. There is so much involved to move the gears from business case, priorities, and man-power cost. Like every expansion gives them likely all those things to tackle several off the list. Graphics engine to me is something that would take several development cycles. Although from past interviews I remember he talked about they kind of already were on a planning path.

[IdowhatIwant]

They can't really make much less in game content, so I would take a engine upgrade as they are already taking in game content away every expansion anyways. At least the game will function.

[Shurrikhan]

@OP

Whether I'd trade content for an engine upgrade would depend on what content would be sacrificed and, more importantly, what eventual content or other affordances the engine upgrade could provide.

Without a vision of how the engine upgrade would be put to use, I'd be mostly uninterested, and would rather the game just died after a one more arc of expansions, having done all it can manage well, and that a new MMO come out thereafter to actually take advantage of whatever engine upgrades it's built around from the ground up.

[Haruka_R]

I wish that, with the money they made this time around they would actually ditch new content for an overhaul of the engine... But.... There is a very , very old work mindset at Square Enix, it consists, if you will of a "Don't try to fix it if it's not broken" and keep old engines and way of doing it "alive" but it also stiffle innovation very much. You would need to have a complete overhaul of segment of SE to make a new / total re-upgrade of the engine happen.

From this mindset u could say that it also proposes that, newcomers at SE are forced to develop very rigid, in the "box" of what works, work ethic and ultimately it's not the devs that are making the decision. The netcode is very "limited" and wonky in FFXIV, not allowing you to whisper if you are in instances /dungeons / raids...

I would hope to see an upgrade, something that looks closer to Final fantasy 16 in terms of fidelity, buuuuut i really doubt it, what i see them do is more like 4/ 5 more years of "this" then... I hope i'm wrong. I would even sacrifice some of my mounts or some of the features yes, that we had over the years for this whole engine upgrade.

Will it happen... With this very specific type of mindset ? Somebody would need to either Completely change his mindset, or be pushed out the door for it to happen.

So some stubborn stuck-in-the-past old fart is the reason why we can't have nice things? I'll believe that.

[Thi]

Currently it seems like we are trading away in-game content for nothing, so if we can trade it for something I'm all good with it.

[AnnRam]

They can't really make much less in game content, so I would take a engine upgrade as they are already taking in game content away every expansion anyways. At least the game will function.

They can. Since HW they have been using " remove to improve and recycle".

For example SE are totally capable of removing every single dot(including nin damage up)effect and give you 20 more potency.

Or remove tank stances and keep only provoke.
Maybe remove 1 ring slot.

[Larirawiel]

The engine does not really need an update. The ingame assets need a rework. The metal shaders are bad, the lighting is often very incorrect, many texures have a very low resolution etc. Fixing those things would bring more quality without risky engine upgrades.


Cheers