Quote Originally Posted by Drimn View Post
I'd go one step further and say the game is just getting stale at this point. What big changes have we really seen to it since Shadowbringers? The game itself has become so formulaic. I just got done playing Endwalker, and after suffering through Dawntrail's story, the game is just Endwalker with a packet of taco seasoning dumped on it. Great. I get not wanting to take risks, but after a while not changing things becomes risky in and of itself.
I'm kinda wondering if it's a severe misallocation of funding/talent. We're pretty confident that talent is being taken away from XIV and put on other projects. But I'm wondering how much of it is funding being put into the wrong projects. Looking at DT (minus graphics update, but I'll get to that) from a purely technical/cost view, at least from an outsider's perspective who has done PM work for games, that corners were cut in a lot of places. Sure, Living Memory was pretty...for about 45 minutes and so was the lower half of Yak'tel, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who like Solution 9, but there wasn't a whole lot that really stood out. Compare that to ShB and EW where the majority of zones were interesting and creative. Even the amount of voiced cutscenes seemed to be reduced (which isn't a bad thing since it was all Wuk anyways), or the amount of cutscenes which used novel camera angles or emotes. Everything felt stock, plain, safe, and boring.

This makes me wonder if a lot of the budget for the story, cutscenes, zone design, job design, etc.... was siphoned away so it could be put into the graphics update, temporary server capacity for launch, hiring unionized American VAs, etc... and the XIV team expected to just be able to get by using the same formula they have been for years?