Quote Originally Posted by Hycinthus View Post
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Purely on a technical standpoint? Depends on how the workflow is handled. My personal guess based on my own history of game development is from initial conception to finished product, a quest in 14 will likely take about 2-3 weeks of dev time. That being said, this isn't 2-3 weeks for everything, certain aspects will take much longer than others.

Script - This is likely where the most development time as far as the actual quest goes. Scripts for quests not only have to be written, but then thoroughly reviewed by the writing lead &/or game director, mistakes corrected, potential lore contradictions/issues addressed, checking if the dialogue fits the character's personality & experiences, etc. Scripts aren't a simple 'write it out and you're done'. They get passed around many people and most scripts have to go through many re-writes. Then once an absolute finalized script is finished, it gets passed onto translations teams, each of which then has to spend time not only translating the script, but also changing the wording/dialogue to better fit the region (Like how certain references in JP dialogue wouldn't translate well to EN, so they get altered) through localization. After every language team approves their final script, that's when it gets truly finalized.

Actual gameplay loop of a given quest - Even assuming the quest is absolute bare-bones 'go to point A, talk to someone, repeat 4-6 times', You would have to create, design and program the following:
-A list of event flags associated with the quest, making sure that the flags unlock in order to prevent the quest from breaking and going out of order
-Cutscene crafting, where not only would you have to plan which cutscenes occur where in the quest, but then also plan all the camera movements, jumps, pans, etc for each interaction, syncing up emotes/animations to key moments in each cutscene, and with FF14 in specific, program in the target all the characters in the scene should be looking at on any given text box.
-If the NPCs associated with the event are brand new, there will be a not-zero amount of time spent crafting the NPC in the character creator, giving them a lore-appropriate name, crafting their personality, backstory, etc. If they're wearing a unique set of armor, then you also have to wait for the 3D modeling team to finish their work first. (see next)
-Plan the placement of NPCs associated with the quest at key locations they need to be in the questline, while also having to factor the positions of any other NPC in that zone(whether their sidequest was active or not) to make sure that no 2 NPCs ever overlap from being placed in the same spot.

To put it in perspective, I worked on a sidequest in Assasin's Creed 2 that was a glorified short fetch quest, and that quest took us about 3 weeks of development till it was fully completed & thoroughly tested. Keep in mind though, the team I worked with was like, 20 people large purely between the programmers, quest designers and QA. I can't make any comments regarding the team sizes that Square uses for their quest designers.

Rewards - This is where there's a lot of ? as I am unaware of the given workload their 3D modeling team is under at any given point. Yoshi-P has mentioned that from first inception to its implementation, a gearset takes roughly 6months to develop, but I think this is an exaggeration. However, 3D modeling a full set with all the variations for various races like the unique body types of Roegadyn & lalafell, along with male & female variants and all the texture work involved in under a week is a massive stretch. I would likely put any set developed at around 1-2 months, given the 3D modeling team likely has to make an insane amount of environmental 3D assets for the given dungeon & trial every patch, along with any additional assets for extra content like exploratory stuff/deep dungeons/raids/etc that might be coming that patch. That is all without factoring that any work they make would have to go through approvals from higher ups, and not everything will be done on the first go around and will require multiple revisions.

This would likely be the choke point for trying to do any sort of monthly mini quest thing. The 3D modeling team has to make hundreds of assets from gear to environmental stuff for each major patch in just 4 months, their workload is likely crammed enough as it is. it's likely the reason that when multiple events are in close proximity, some of them tend to suffer in terms of rewards, since they may not have time to give every event a 'big' reward. Or why you see them implementing some stuff into the game files nearly half a year in advance (the Heavensturn items were in the game since 6.2, as an example) since that's when they have the spare time to work on something.

TL DR: That one quest is likely about 2-3 weeks of professional work, being done by one of the quest teams once they finished their work for 6.3.

But this is all my $0.02 based on my own experiences in the industry. I have no detailed idea of how Square's internal dev environment works.