Interesting Bit of Speculation Regarding Game engine

[R041]

Definitely this, as most single player engines I've seen in modern times aren't really designed with, for instance, large numbers of simultaneous onscreen actors at a time (think Hunts or certain FATEs especially). There's a reason why for instance the original Doom game engine is still heavily preferred for fans of mass slaughter shooter gameplay, it's because the old school 2.5D sprite based design can actually handle the hundreds of monsters and sometimes thousands of projectiles at a time (in fact, just try playing one of the "tons and tons of monsters in a room" experimental pieces like Nuts.WAD on a GL engine like GZDoom ... you'll find that even on a computer 20+ years newer than the thing was made you still can't get a decent framerate to save your life LOL).

Given the graphical level of FFXVI, and for that matter Forspoken, I could expect a disaster if such an engine was brought over verbatim to FF14. (In particular, given the reviews of Forspoken, I could easily imagine long time players suddenly having to scramble to get a PS5 and re-purchase all their XIV licenses for it or else literally have to get a RTX 4080/4090 to get decent speed in crowded areas. Might even make the Dalaran lag from original Wrath of the Lich King look snappy on less. I'd rather not have to replace my RX 6600 this soon ...)

None of that has anything to do with it being an 'MMO'. The main difference is usually architecture and data communication. But a game client is still a game client.

It being an MMO or Single Player game does not change how things are rendered at the core of the engine itself, that has to do with the pipeline and the expectation of graphical limitations for the amount of static or dynamic objects. Has nothing to do with.. Amount of actors in a scene. . ?

An 'MMO' Engine is typically a 2-3 part system with a client, server instance, and sometimes other interpreters for data exchange and storage. If you take the first part, the Client. Then you can write all of the game logic without server interaction and it would be fine. 'MMO' is all about saving as much memory, cpu, and network calls as possible with the server instance and infra all separated from the client.

So yeah, they can make a Single Player game out of the FFXIV client fork of Luminous. Which I'm pretty sure was forked again for XVI.

The Engine does not equal the graphics of a game. A modern engine that is capable of rendering high-quality textures does not have to do so. Everything depends on the graphics team. More over games usually have graphic settings that you can lower and increase to achieve the desired framerate.

Sorta, but the engine still forces a Rendering Pipeline that determines most of that. The team is limited by what pipeline and tools they have at their disposal. Being limited on dynamic lights because of the lighting model, or things like not having PBR, or newer shader systems have a significant impact on the art/tech team's ability to create complex systems and can also impact the client's overall performance.