How much is the game held back by technical constraints?

[Larirawiel]

I mean WoW also still supports the option of DirectX 11. In fact it can be almost necessary to do so because of driver issues: in particular, e.g. WoW has been known to have graphics driver glitches with AMD on DirectX 12, and the general mood from the corporate space has been "afford nvidia or deal with it, we don't get enough business from AMD users" lol ...

The DirectX 11 mode in WoW is a fallback for older Intel IGPUs because the DirectX 12 and Vulkan part of these drivers is very bad. And WoW had some issues with the DirectX 12 mode. But these issues also existed on Nvidia GPUs and now they are fixed.



Cheers

[FeyFavilla]

[*]Tutorialisation and discovery of content: There has been 0 innovation in this category. The vast majority of features of this game are obtuse to get into and not explained well to players. Everything is gated behind "+" quests that give no indication of what they unlock. Someone who doesn't have friends explaining them things can very easily miss entire chunks of the game without realising they exist.[*]Information QOL: Finding what any item does is a chore. Item tooltips are not very useful. A ton of information is locked behind hard to navigate UIs, and some of the information is just not there. This extends to so many details that it's hard to point at a specific thing but just the entire experience of interacting this game feels like a lot of it was made in pre-wow times, despite this game being much more recent than wow. Even navigating the map is a weirdly clunky mess.[/LIST]

Would like to add to this. So this is a personal gripe but I know for a fact that there is a massive community online for completionist collections. There is just something that tickles the brain just right to see a list all filled out.
FFXIV truly is handles like a SP game with hidden, super hard to get achievements. Let me (sorry for bringing it up so much but it just is the best point of reference) compare to WoW:

- Mounts, pets and glam pieces have each their own library IN THE GAME with exact location of drop/vendor.
- complete library that shows you not only the items you own but also all other available ones.
- literal inbuilt glam planning menu. even if you do not own pieces you can play dress-up and plan farming gear around that. you even get to save the preset for later. This was originally a fan driven project as an add-on that blizz incorporated into the game due to its insane popularity.

This is on top of the way they handle glamour. You can only glam at the specific NPCs for it like at the dresser here in FFXIV, but the planning and access to your library of stuff is always accessible via a menu. Not only that, you no longer even need to keep the items. Once obtained and bound to your character it is available to all characters you have on your entire account. No trying to manage dresser space. Found it once, have it forever. Across all armor types, similar to how we will have in 7.4.

I do admittedly really like the glam plate system but WoW has kind of copied that as well now, so that really leaves to question what exactly is holding SE back from taking the positives from their competition.


Other than that yeah, there are probably a ton of technical issues, but I would wager they have also been lying about a lot in the past to shut people up. Who is going to stop them? If they go back on their word and give us something we have been asking regardless of it being 'impossible' people will not look a gift horse in the mouth and just cheer.

[RedLolly]

From my understanding, FFXIV is one of the few remaining projects running on Crystal Tools, the inhouse game engine SE built in the late 2010s. FFXIII runs on it and 1.0 ran on it, and it was heavily slanted for graphical fidelity than literally anything else. It's really good at working with high polygon models and particle effects! And that's about it. FFXIV uses a heavily modified version of the engine that was built during the 2.0 development period.

SE was determined to invest into it's own engine in that era, but was such a failure that SE gave up on it. Apparently this is a factor in why the XIII trilogy is so comparatively buggy on it's PC ports than any other FF port. Crystal Tools!



I always assumed this was also a massive factor in why getting talented devs on FFXIV is so damn difficult. They have to learn to work on a very weird, bespoke game engine and can't take that experience elsewhere, even within SE.

[Bubline]

I always assumed this was also a massive factor in why getting talented devs on FFXIV is so damn difficult. They have to learn to work on a very weird, bespoke game engine and can't take that experience elsewhere, even within SE.

It definitely won't help, although any long running MMO will have weird archaic and often bespoke tools. Back then MMOs were bespoke codebases and it's only a relatively recent thing that could consider using Unreal for an MMO or whatever.

All that to say: Yes, those are issues, but those are very common issues to have in the industry, and other companies have managed to keep improving their own tools, engines and pipelines as their games grew.

I really hope some of what Yoshi P has been hinting at for 8.0 involves having actually invested in seriously working in that area to help their team make more interesting stuff and get rid of whatever issues are hindering them

[Catwho]

Sometimes it's easier to build your new stuff from scratch and figure out how to migrate all the old data to the new system than it is to gradually update the system piecemeal.

The technical debt - the engine, the net code, the table structure, etc. is enormous, and its rapidly becoming an insurmountable problem. I suspect this is what Yoshi P is referring to with a new ARR.

Blow the whole thing up, start over from scratch, and figure out how to port the old data after you rebuild it properly a third time.

[Bubline]

Sometimes it's easier to build your new stuff from scratch and figure out how to migrate all the old data to the new system than it is to gradually update the system piecemeal.

The technical debt - the engine, the net code, the table structure, etc. is enormous, and its rapidly becoming an insurmountable problem. I suspect this is what Yoshi P is referring to with a new ARR.

Blow the whole thing up, start over from scratch, and figure out how to port the old data after you rebuild it properly a third time.

Definitely possible (and it doesn't have to be a binary thing, there's a whole range of middle grounds between "remake the whole thing" and "keep the old thing"). but remaking things from scratch is a huge investment.

I've recently been involved in discussions and investigations on a live service with similar questions of whether we're better off migrating or rebuilding from scratch, with views of 10+ years in the future of live service... and even then, you are often better off slowly chipping away at it than rebuilding (not only for technical reasons but often because it's hard to convince people to do such monumental work, and it's hard to keep aateam motivated if they have to restart from scratch. It's also really hard to reimplement every single tiny detail etc)

[RedLolly]

I think that's why the mobile remake exists.

It's ARR fully remade from the ground up in UE4. And the great majority of the complaints we have with the main version (especially UI and netcode) and the suggested changes from the recent interviews are accounted for and/or already implemented in the mobile version. I really, genuinely, think they're going to start pushing it more once its localizations completed and let retail fade off as Mobile catches up. The KR and CN retail versions are going to have patch parity with us very soon, too.

[Bubline]

Maybe, but I would expect the mobile version will inevitably turn into a microtransaction infested, dumbed down version of the game that will barely be recognisable.

It's cool that mobile players will get to experience FFXIV, but I hope we'll get to keep our PC/Console traditional MMO isolated from all the predatory things happening in the mobile space

[RedLolly]

Maybe, but I would expect the mobile version will inevitably turn into a microtransaction infested, dumbed down version of the game that will barely be recognisable.

It's cool that mobile players will get to experience FFXIV, but I hope we'll get to keep our PC/Console traditional MMO isolated from all the predatory things happening in the mobile space

https://youtu.be/JZK_2E8uMms?si=tcnzm7ne-0Ae-nWD
https://youtu.be/nqaTzfhl1Hg?si=Jszzcho70_iiTUko

A lot of the glam prices have parity with what we pay in our Mogstation but they have so many exclusives already. It's all the mobile quirks.

[Bubline]

https://youtu.be/JZK_2E8uMms?si=tcnzm7ne-0Ae-nWD
https://youtu.be/nqaTzfhl1Hg?si=Jszzcho70_iiTUko

A lot of the glam prices have parity with what we pay in our Mogstation but they have so many exclusives already. It's all the mobile quirks.

Cosmetics are one thing, but sooner or later, with a mobile game, and if it does pick up, you'll start to see the more sinister parts of F2P games show up. Roadblocks added to your progression to make you pay for some currency or some item that relieves it.

On a traditional MMO they can't do that because the playerbase wouldn't accept it, but on a mobile game it would be completely normal. Pay to uncap your tomestones, pay for the daily roulette battle pass... Who knows, they could even invent a new feature just to add gacha mechanics to the game