Final Fantasy XIV is a game where the accountant is in the room.

[Catwho]

The first rule in software development is There Will Always Be Bugs.

All that the best QA on the planet can ever hope to do is catch 99.9996% of them (the six sigma level) - but that's an unrealistic goal for software development in comparison to manufacturing because of variables outside of their control. So most of the time software teams aim for 4th or 5th Sigma, or eliminating 99.3% to 99.97% of the bugs. That means that out of a list of 1000 features that QA tests, 3 bugs are still gonna slip through. Stuff like the localization from Japanese getting missed in one lone instance last patch is an example - out of the hundreds of lines of dialogue in the patch, one got overlooked. It happens.

For the record, the software team I'm embedded in as a business analyst has over 13,000 JIRA tickets over 10 years, of which about 7800 are bug reports. 700 bugs a year! However, only 3200 of those were client reported, and over a thousand of them were marked as duplicates. 200 bugs a year over 4 releases a year, so about 50 reported bugs per patch. For software with about 300 different components and thousands of features and variables. The QA department is about 4 people. We don't have automation functional testing yet because our code is janky AF and we're too broke to be able to outsource it. So we aim for 4th sigma.... 99.7 bug free. And we kind of get there.

CBU3 is probably still aiming for that 5th sigma level as their goal, but it's a goal and not a realistic demand every patch release. There will always be bugs.

And the bigger and more complex the system, the greater the technical debt, and the greater the likelihood of accidental stuff getting overlooked or unexpected interactions, especially when the servers are stressed beyond their original specifications. (Thinking about the timeout bugs during EW.)

I think CBU3 actually did hit it with FF16. The game on launch had some technical issues from people never having dusted out their PS5s in 2 years and others hating the motion blur, but very few straight up bugs.

[Ath192]

I mean I agree with the general sentiment. It's almost impossible to play this game and not see the cost cutting and min maxing of dev time. This is a bad thing.

I will give you an IRL example of why this is exactly what you avoid:

You can hire two contractors to replace your floor:

Both licensed. They both charge 5,000 dollars for the job.

One contractor works exactly 40 hours a week, has an exact time slot available to do your floors, an exact amount of nails, materials, glue and will only tear the existing floor out and put the new one in in a rush and move on the next job. That is a contractor where the accountant is in the room. - In reality the things that were promised were delivered. It's whatever.

The other contractor sometimes works 30 hours a week, sometimes 50, depends on the job. Starts tearing your floor out and notices some imperfections that COULD be overlooked but would be better to repair, he has the materials for it from other jobs and it will cut into his profits a bit but the important thing is to do the job well because he enjoys doing this kind of stuff and takes pride in it. It's not about extracting the max amount of profit at the minimum loss. He then realizes he will need another bucket of glue and calls you and asks you to buy it because while he COULD spread it so thin it will technically work it will start lifting in a couple of years. You end up paying $5,500 dollars for the job maybe. Once he is done the floors feel rock solid and will last for 30 years NP.

Both got the job done as promised. I know exactly who I'm avoiding and who I'm hiring. One didn't have the accountant in the room and the job was so much better for it.

This game is contractor #1. Things are methodical, uninspired, homogenized with barely any novelty or flair.

The people making this game are just collecting a paycheck and going home at this point.

[Voryn]

Much of it just seems like minimizing risk for budget and workflow reasons.

If the next MSQ involves making our way through six zones over the course of 100 quests, with many of the objectives just being to go talk to npcs, then the quest designers already know what they’re in for. The budget and timeline are a lot less likely to accidentally get bigger than they need to be.

And I think we see this really conservative mentality in terms of how the game works, too. New features are slow to be implemented, and existing features are slow to be changed, as it can be hard to predict how long those things would take (especially the latter).

On the other hand, it’s hard to know what really goes on behind the scenes. Are they experimenting a lot but not having everything actually get shipped? How bad is the “spaghetti code” that they have to work with? We don’t know for ourselves, but the end result is that a very large part of the content we get is just the same formula, for better or for worse.

[Red-thunder]

I generally agree, but I don't really know what you want anyone to do with this information aside from either keep complaining or unsub.

That's the whole point. It's an explanation for why you should unsub. It's obvious to anyone who paid attention to Square Enix over the last few years. This company has all its teams turtle up and milk the same formula over and over again so that a few people like Nomura can waste billions on stupid projects.

They made a huge gamble with A Realm Reborn and that will be the last time they ever make a gamble in CBU3. They need to milk CBU3 over and over again to fund more Forspokens.

[BoJumbles]

To some degree, OP, you do have a point -- but I've played enough budget MMOs to know that FFXIV isn't nearly as egregious as you're making it out to be.
I've played some seriously thin and cheap budget MMOs in my time. FFXIV is not nearly as bad as some of the hot garbage I've sat through before.

Not sure why you talk like you know the decision-making process and plans of the company, though. You sound VERY certain of what is at best some educated speculation.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I don't know about the accountant being in the room, but the game is definitely getting shafted on the financial end and I do believe some of the people who made the game great are being made to work on other projects as well as CBU3 is working on games other than FF XIV.

Aside from gacha games, XIV was probably generally their biggest money maker, and instead of investing into it they threw a lot of that money at projects which either completely bombed, fell to complete irrelevance or just generally didn't make any money due to low sales.

[Carin-Eri]

If this is the case, I sincerely hope they don't continue down this path.

I recall a small indy company, Cryptic Studios, using large sums of money from their more profitable F2P games to develop a game called Magic: Legends (based on Magic the Gathering). They abandoned it following it's open beta. An unfortunate byproduct of this was that the Devs that were transferred from their other games to develop this (failed) attempt were laid off.

Then again, their games were all F2P and dependent on gambleboxes - and gambleboxes/expensive bundles were the only things they seemed to want to develop.

[Red-thunder]

To some degree, OP, you do have a point -- but I've played enough budget MMOs to know that FFXIV isn't nearly as egregious as you're making it out to be.
I've played some seriously thin and cheap budget MMOs in my time. FFXIV is not nearly as bad as some of the hot garbage I've sat through before.

Not sure why you talk like you know the decision-making process and plans of the company, though. You sound VERY certain of what is at best some educated speculation.

You can look at the credits of each expansion and compare the staff lol. A lot of the senior staff are not on recent credits.

If your argument is "where is your evidence of Square Enix saying publicly that they're milking their players while funding other projects" then nothing will satisfy you but it's obvious to anyone with a brain.

[Red-thunder]

If this is the case, I sincerely hope they don't continue down this path.

I recall a small indy company, Cryptic Studios, using large sums of money from their more profitable F2P games to develop a game called Magic: Legends (based on Magic the Gathering). They abandoned it following it's open beta. An unfortunate byproduct of this was that the Devs that were transferred from their other games to develop this (failed) attempt were laid off.

Then again, their games were all F2P and dependent on gambleboxes - and gambleboxes/expensive bundles were the only things they seemed to want to develop.

FF14 is just punished by horrible management in SE as a whole. Then again it's not like CBU3 themselves are that much better when they were given full rein to make FF16 but end up making a mediocre style-over-substance game.

[hydralus]

That's the whole point. It's an explanation for why you should unsub. It's obvious to anyone who paid attention to Square Enix over the last few years. This company has all its teams turtle up and milk the same formula over and over again so that a few people like Nomura can waste billions on stupid projects.

They made a huge gamble with A Realm Reborn and that will be the last time they ever make a gamble in CBU3. They need to milk CBU3 over and over again to fund more Forspokens.

Oh okay. Yeah if you dislike the game then you should definitely unsub. I've always said that. In fact I think it's really weird if you don't like the game and are still subbed.

Edit: To go further on that, it's really silly when there are people who expect the devs to make insanely drastic changes to the game like it's a reasonable expectation. No, completely reworking the gameplay to include skill trees or tripling the content output is not a reasonable request and if you're waiting for something like that to happen I'm afraid you're not gonna make it. You've had 5 expansions worth of decision making to figure it out. Something like changing a job icon or asking to convert wondrous tails rewards is an example of something reasonable.