Sage and Reaper Crafted Weapons.

[Deveryn]

I think they'll be able to catch up eventually. For Shadowbringers, the 3 weapons remain (though I feel like they don't need more than they already have) as well as WoL, then it's on to what we have going on right now. The design contest which is likely to help out relic surely gave them a little more room as well.

[Packetdancer]

i also recognize that the amount of work may seem trivial if you look at each trial individually, but it adds up big time.

Ironically, it's sometimes also actually more work at a big developer than an indie one. Indie developers tend to be light on process, which... there are benefits and downsides of that.

But sometimes it's a huge boon not having to have a whole process by which you design a thing, get the design approved, assign it to a modeler, approve the draft model, finalize and texture it, approve that, add the particle system, approve that -- potentially send to the publisher to approve as well -- and when everything's signed off on, you bundle it into the next scheduled content update. An indie developer can just have some artist go "I think this would be neat" and make a change, show it around the office, and check it into source control. Done, good, on to the next thing.

Working at a big game studio was sometimes an exercise in "yeah, we'd like to do this, but we'd need another week to do this and the publisher says 'nope' on slipping the milestone by a week" or getting otherwise mired in process. And while I no longer do game dev for my day job, I do lead a small spare-time indie game company, and when the company consists of like... a graphic designer/UX person, an artist/gameplay designer, and a systems designer/writer/programmer/musician (me), there's not a lot of process involved if I want to make a change. I have no publisher I'm beholden to, and no formal org chart that all need to sign off on something. (Also I am in charge so what I say goes. *pause for maniacal laughter*)

And moreover, it's worth remembering that while we consider SQEX to be both the developer and the publisher, that's not actually strictly true; SQEX is the publisher, and CBU3 is the developer. They are a part of SQEX, yes... but Bioware is a part of EA, and Naughty Dog or Guerrilla Games are parts of Sony; it's just that with them labeling the studio more prominently, we don't tend to think of them in quite that same sense. And while Yoshi-P reportedly has earned a fair amount of influence with SQEX proper and does have a place on their board (although he almost certainly spent a lot of that 'currency' buying the delay for Endwalker's launch) the two organizations are in fact separate... and it's quite possible that some decisions cannot be made by CBU3 alone without parent/publisher signing off on them.

For instance, it has been suggested before that SQEX may be responsible for the cash shop, not CBU3. That's not actually uncommon, as publisher/studio divides go... and honestly, I feel like that would explain a lot of the "why is this in the cash shop" decisions that I find more puzzling.