Content delivery in an MMO is very difficult and generally speaking, players will consume content faster than a developer can make it. Single player games might spend 3-5 years in development but you’ll then complete it, or at least the parts you’re interested in, with a month of the game releasing. Horizon Forbidden West, the recently released PlayStation exclusive, spent years in development and I got the platinum trophy in 40 hours of gameplay.

Back on the topic of MMORPGs though, I think Final Fantasy has better content pacing than other games and especially to World of Warcraft in particular. WoW expansions are typically frontloaded with the full content cycle in the initial 12 or so months and then you spend a year playing the last patch. I’d rather okay an even spread of content every four months instead of the game consuming my time for a year and then leaving me hanging for another.

The longest gap between a patch and an expansion releasing was the end of Mists of Pandaria into Warlords of Draenor at 14 months. The big expansion releases are important in these games so you can’t do those faster (Blizzard tried and it failed before they even released anything) so the question then becomes how do you pace content between expansion drops.

I’d happily play FFXIV with patches every four months so I get good hoses of content but then periods of “raid logging” to clear and gear before going offline to play a story game. Today is reset day so I’ll do my reset activities and then not play until Saturday to collect weekly cactpot. Rather than being given a reason to log in that’s fairly arbitrary, I’m free to do other things such as play Gran Turismo 7 when it releases on Friday.