How much is the game held back by technical constraints?

[Catwho]

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

We already saw it - completing some shiny weapon in the mobile version costs around $250 if you want to pay for all the currency instead of earning it.

[SyferU]

I also think that XIV mobile will replace the retail version at some point. The global release will probably be less aggressive with the micro transaction than the Chinese version.
But I think it's gonna be at least a few more years until that happens.

[DPZ2]

Question: Why didn't SE utilize a Cloud Computing infrastructure?!? [based on this quote: "For example, they decided not to use cloud servers"]

Answer: It was pretty much untested on a global scale when the game came out. Core cloud-native MMOs didn't start coming out until the late 2010s. (One reference mentions Fortnite in 2017, but not for the core game, and New World, running fully on Amazon's cloud, in 2021). A number of current MMOs rely on dedicated servers supplemented by cloud infrastructure. An expanding number of current MMOs appear to be utilizing a hybrid model. NCSoft, for example, still uses the traditional MMO server infrastructure for Blade & Soul, but has integrated cloud computing in the 'rerelease' called Blade & Soul NEO earlier this year.

Fully cloud-native MMOs is a more recent thing. It's been 4 years since New World released on AWS.


NOTE: be aware that if you consult an AI such as CoPilot, it will lie to you. Or, as it "confessed" when called out after presenting a purported quote attributed to Naoki Yoshida during a PAX West Interview as recorded on a specific web site source: "I should not have presented it that way. What I was trying to convey is consistent with what Naoki Yoshida has said in multiple interviews, but the phrasing I gave was my own synthesis rather than a direct citation."

[DPZ2]

I was under the impression that SE used an extremely modified (to the point where it is no longer Crystal Tools) version as the basis for the ARR engine.

The Luminous Engine, as far as I can tell, was used for Final Fantasy XV and ... Forspoken?

No confirmations about Final Fantasy XVI's engine, but it is definitely not the FFXIV engine, nor Luminous. According to the title of an article on cgworld.jp in 2023, 独自エンジンによる、アートとリアルの中間をねらった画づくり〜『FINAL FANTASY XVI』（1） 開発環境・画づくり篇 ... (key words being "proprietary engine" and "development environment).

Autotranslate in Edge provides: In addition, this game is developed with a newly designed in-house engine. Mr. Honda explains, "Considering the man-hours required for support when using a general-purpose game engine or an in-house engine, it was more suitable to develop and manage it ourselves from scratch."

[Source: https://cgworld.jp/article/202309-cgw301-ff16-01.html ]

[Jeeqbit]

I was under the impression that SE used an extremely modified (to the point where it is no longer Crystal Tools) version as the basis for the ARR engine.

The Luminous Engine, as far as I can tell, was used for Final Fantasy XV and ... Forspoken?

The entire point of getting rid of 1.0 and remaking the game was to not use Crystal Tools. It uses a different engine than Luminous, but it's similar in structure. Some of the people working on FFXIV at the time had worked on Luminous.

[MayuAmakura]

It's not just technical limitation but also the way code was implemented into the game. Bad implementation, bad storage management and runtime all caused issues that we see today. Either devs just didn't think about it at that moment and wanted to deliver product as best as they can "brute force" or just didn't care. Now we see these consequences when they cannot save simple info on their servers so you can access them from anywhere. Wow did this way before in 2004. Now even for simple housing changes, they say "servers would crash".

[Absurdity]

It's not just technical limitation but also the way code was implemented into the game. Bad implementation, bad storage management and runtime all caused issues that we see today. Either devs just didn't think about it at that moment and wanted to deliver product as best as they can "brute force" or just didn't care. Now we see these consequences when they cannot save simple info on their servers so you can access them from anywhere. Wow did this way before in 2004. Now even for simple housing changes, they say "servers would crash".

My guess is the former.

1.0 shut down on November 2012 and ARR released in August 2013.
Even if we assume they had the idea to completely rebuild the game very early and were already working on it while 1.0 was still actively being developed, that is an incredibly short time to make an MMO, even less time to cobble a functional MMO version of the Luminous engine together.

I think it's highly likely that they just made sure the engine "somehow" worked and that absolutely came back to bite them as far back as Stormblood.

[Kelg]

The game is not held back much at all from a technical standpoint(as in it actually can't be done). It's more of a manpower, budget and tech debt(aka spaghetti code) standpoint.

[Jeeqbit]

manpower, budget and tech debt(aka spaghetti code) standpoint.

Manpower yes, because they refuse to assign more developers. Budget, I don't think is the issue, but rather the actual assignment of manpower, because you can see how certain teams never grow in the credits.

Tech debt I don't think is particularly the issue either, because that can be fixed, there is just a lack of ability or a lack of task assignment to actually improve it. They've had 12 years to fix various "tech debt" after all.

[Kelg]

Manpower yes, because they refuse to assign more developers. Budget, I don't think is the issue, but rather the actual assignment of manpower, because you can see how certain teams never grow in the credits.

Tech debt I don't think is particularly the issue either, because that can be fixed, there is just a lack of ability or a lack of task assignment to actually improve it. They've had 12 years to fix various "tech debt" after all.

The manpower is an issue because they refuse to hire anyone outside of Japan and potential employees are short because of this. The budget is an issue because square takes the game's profits and doesn't put it back into the game, not because the game doesn't make money (it does). The deadlines they have to meet are super strict, they have to put out x amount of content so they can't just divert their coders to dig through old systems and remake them, that's why you keep seeing them make questionable decisions when it comes to glamour and other things that seem like a bandaid solutions that are just slapped ontop of current systems (the outfit system in the glam chest for example) instead of just remaking the systems in a smarter way.