So what exactly is driving the developers to keep going?

[Tint]

This is Yoshi P's dream come true of living the rockstar life he never was able to because he is a video game nerd instead of a cool kid with an electric guitar.

Have you seen his outfits? The jewelry? Jetting around the world, staying on big stages with thousands of fans.

This man will keep the show running.

[Jeeqbit]

Been curious about this since I would think after 10 years of this game that the devs would get burned out eventually, and Endwalker being like the peak of what they wanted which is the end of a story arc.

It's been discussed in the backstage interviews series and Yoshi-P has talked about this a lot of times and this is how he solves it.

1. Not overworking themselves (see the increased breaks between patches of 2 extra weeks plus holidays).
2. They are not allowed to overwork themselves (Yoshi-P stamps his foot and forces them to take a break sometimes when they don't want to, so they don't burnout or feel overwhelmed).
3. Switching roles around (different people working on different types of content each patch such as different raid designers or story writers).
4. Opportunity for any of them to switch units or games that they are working on if they get burned out of this game.
5. The passion, excitement and support of the community helps drive them.

assuming their team members have been mostly the same unless they shifted devs around at times.

It's changed a lot. They slowly trained new staff over the years and slowly some of them went to work for other companies, other Square Enix departments, or FF16. The most well known to have moved to FF16 is Koji Fox!

It made me curious about something else as well, let say during Stormblood that Endwalker was actually being made aside from Shadowbringers at the time. Does his team actually plan a lot of things out way ahead of time and thus why they can meet Patch Deadlines so easily like that?

They have a rough idea of the plot 2 expansions ahead. In fact let me prove it to you.

1. In ARR patches, Doman Refugees arrive to setup Stormblood.
2. In Heavensward patches, the Warriors of Darkness arrive to setup Shadowbringers.
3. In Stormblood patches, we have a lot of Garlean activity and Alphinaud travels to Garlemald. We were told plans changed, but it seems 6.0 was originally going to be a Garlean expansion and Endwalker was going to be 7.0. We did still visit Garlemald too.
4. Arguably, we see Elidibus on the Moon many times prior to Endwalker.

But there is more. Watch this Heavensward cutscene and see how it predicts the plot of the expansions up through Endwalker, including how Zodiark is bound on the moon.

They start thinking about the next expansion after the last one. They start working on a new expansion after the .3 patch. This is obvious for many reasons, but they also casually mention it sometimes that they are about to get very busy. Shortly after the .4 patch, we then see an initial trailer. We have been shown their development system in presentations a lot of times. They start working on models something like 8 months before, where they present the idea to concept artists and then the artists give it to the people who make models and it goes from there. So just think for a moment how many months in advance every item, object or character could have been going through development for.

They usually have a patch ready months in advance. For example, when 5.0 released we were told that 5.1 was already ready! But they waited months to release it. They spend those months having Quality Assurance test it for bugs and reduce the bugs from thousands to under one hundred and we are told some of the remaining ones in the "Known Issues" section.

Because if so they know how to keep secrets.

They investigate and sue anyone that doesn't (and have done in the past). They don't put information in the patch files that gives away future patches usually, although you can usually predict a lot of story events anyway if you think about them and see what references from real life and other FF games they are using. Obviously all the trial bosses this expansion were predicted for example.

[Fawkes]

It made me curious about something else as well, let say during Stormblood that Endwalker was actually being made aside from Shadowbringers at the time. Does his team actually plan a lot of things out way ahead of time and thus why they can meet Patch Deadlines so easily like that?

Because if so they know how to keep secrets.

I'm pretty sure the plan for after Stormblood was always to go straight to Garlemald next, but then Yoshi-P decided on a whim to make Shadowbringers instead.

Also I think in some pre-expansion talks they mentioned what percent of the new maps were done at that time. I'm pretty sure they're always just working on the next thing and not anything further down the line.

[TheDecay]

I'm pretty sure the plan for after Stormblood was always to go straight to Garlemald next, but then Yoshi-P decided on a whim to make Shadowbringers instead.

A huge travesty. While ShB was decent as a story in isolation, the effect it had on the rest of the story was palpable.

[Zaniel]

This might not be obvious to younger people to whom 3 years is an eternity but people work 30+ years in extremely demanding jobs without quitting. Sometimes it's because you love your job, sometimes it's necessity. Plus in spite of what the internet thinks being a game dev might be long hours but it ain't a "mission critical" job like being a doctor working in a major hospital or an engineer building aircraft that stay in the air or criminal defense lawyers keeping people in/out of prison. People also just work grueling physical jobs for 30 years until they simply collapse.

[Carin-Eri]

This might not be obvious to younger people to whom 3 years is an eternity but people work 30+ years in extremely demanding jobs without quitting. Sometimes it's because you love your job, sometimes it's necessity. Plus in spite of what the internet thinks being a game dev might be long hours but it ain't a "mission critical" job like being a doctor working in a major hospital or an engineer building aircraft that stay in the air or criminal defense lawyers keeping people in/out of prison. People also just work grueling physical jobs for 30 years until they simply collapse.

Sad fact is, though, that the customer/patient etc won't care about that. The majority of customers/patients don't give any consideration whatsoever to the fact that the employees of whatever company/service it is have a life outside of their work.
Though I guess it might be slightly worse in the gaming world due to high expectations and low patience from the sort of gamers whose life revolves around the game(s) they play.