How much is the game held back by technical constraints?

[Bubline]

We always hear about spaghetti code but how much of it is true? I'm a game programmer and my impression of FFXIV based on how it feels to play, is that they have been mostly unable to truly add new mechanics to the game or to polish the gameplay and UX. Most of the content that gets made reuses the exact same systems that have existed since ARR. There are improvements to those systems, but very few actual new systems that enable meaningfully new or different gameplay.

Let me give some examples:

• UI/UX: The UI is incredibly clunky. It seems that most actions lock you in certain modes that are rigid and not compatible with each other, so you can only browse one UI at a time and can't easily access a lot of things. This applies to things like glamour dressers being a usability mess due to vague "server constraints"
• Retainers: Same applies to the retainer system, which is needlessly obtuse and an obstacle to selling your items. It feels like 1.0 legacy.
• Inventory: Speaking of items, let's talk about how bad inventory management is. Everything gives all sorts of tokens that have to take inventory space and for some reason can't be stored as currencies. I had an entire retainer of just raid tokens of all sorts. That combined with the convoluted armory chest system means everyone has to inevitably spend an hour doing inventory management every now and then
• Market: Pricing and selling items on the market requires so many steps to see prices, probably because of server constraints that often get mentioned
• World Content: The world content hasn't innovated since FATEs. Everything is just FATEs. Even field exploration zones are just a map with fates.
• New systems are just old systems in disguise: Cosmic exploration is fun conceptually, but in truth it's also nothing meaningfully new. It's just fates where you sit and craft in a loop. Deep dungeons have better bosses now but they're just the same series of corridors behind the scenes. Field explorations already mentioned. Island sanctuary mostly failed due to it relying on interacting with clunky UIs. I can't think of anything else that's "new"
• Endgame progression unchanged: The routine of tomestones, raid tokens etc has been unchanged for probably a decade now. I assume this is more a design issue than a technical issue, as the team is maybe scared of bothering players with change. The thing is, the current system, as was designed back then, is incredibly convoluted for new players. The way players have to obtain various tokens to go to various merchants to get gear is incredibly obtuse and really not communicated well to players. It makes the system feel very old and boring.
• 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.

[Bubline]

• Combat feel and responsiveness: The combat feels floaty and unresponsive to anyone who has played other MMOs. This is partly a design problem but combat just doesn't feel great. Encounters are only interesting based on the dance you have to do with bosses, but your actual character moment to moment gameplay is incredibly basic. The GCD is slow, a lot of spells have long animation lock and feel like their impact happens ages after you press the button. Most jobs are incredibly boring at lower levels, and they're pretty repetitive. Compare this to how impactful attacks feel in wow, and how instant and physical the feedback is when pressing a button, or how varied the toolkits and abilities are.
• Actions delay: How is there so much delay in combat actions? Like how you can't weave multiple OGCD buttons because they seem to take 500ms to execute but in a way that's not clearly communicated to the player. It seems to also be due to animation lock and prioritising spectacle over gameplay... and yet, wow managed to have every button press feel like it gives impact instantly while also having perfectly fine animations. FFXIV just feels like you're barely controlling your character and you're sending server commands that get executed 2 seconds later sometimes.
• PVP Responsiveness: This is why very few people play PVP by the way. It's impossible to play this game reactively because nothing feels responsive, and PVP inherently needs reactivity. The way the combat works on a technical level is only compatible with slow, repetitive, mostly memorised rotations.
• Lack of truly new systems: There has been no piece of content using any new system in any recent time, really. It's just so stagnant. Look at how much other MMOs can innovate with their gameplay over time, and compare it to FFXIV. The game is more polished now, but fundamentally we're having the same experiences that realm reborn had.
• Lack of innovation in quest mechanics: The MSQ, and other quests in general, also have had no innovations mechanically. I understand that FFXIV MSQ is mostly a visual novel, but our characters are fighters and explorers, it would be nice to have more variety of quests and content to do in the world. Again look at any other MMO for this. Meanwhile FFXIV quests can do "go talk to X", "go walk into purple zone where an enemy will spawn", "kill a few marked mobs", and a few other things but there have been very few meaningful additions to make questing feel fun
• Duties for everything: Everything has to be implemented as a duty, and as a result there's almost no content that you can do while queuing in the duty finder. Once you've done the MSQ, there's almost nothing to do in the game that isn't behind the duty menu, or something that's contained in a duty. Duties also strangely lock you out of a bunch of social features for no clear reason, other than what I assume to be more legacy from very outdated server code infrastructure
• The competition: Compared to this I look at games like wow, and how much it's very obvious that they have continuously been investing in making big changes and refactors to their code and infrastructure to keep their game feeling responsive, modern, with good QOL, good UI, fresh ways of interacting with the world, new types of quests/activities to keep you engaged, varieties of content for different players, etc. Meanwhile FFXIV doesn't really feel like it's meaningfully changed since ARR.

The story is what carries this game. As a mostly single player story it's great. As an MMO it feels like interacting with an incredibly dated clunky stagnant MMO

To me, this feels like what would happen if your dev team only had a skeleton crew of programmers and everyone else just making content within the existing tools, or a codebase so incredibly old and bad (I'm guessing 1.0 leftovers and maybe even code inherited from FFXI) that programmers simply can't even start getting their teeth into modernising the game.

[Larirawiel]

The technical constraints are propably very noticeable. The game still uses DirectX 11. DirectX 11 was discontinued in January 2013. It means, the game runs on a 12 years old technology. And this is the reason why i do not wonder, that they have difficulties to hire more developers for the game. Because almost nobody learns such an ancient technology.


Cheers

[Bubline]

Well, DirectX isn't the biggest problem as that's only the graphics API, and on that front they did a pretty good job with the graphics update recently. I'm more worried about the legacy codebase inherited from 1.0 and maybe even from FFXI. The amount of things that feel clunky or old and have been basically untouched for years just feels like they must mostly be held back by technical issues. Because surely design-wise, they're aware of what needs to be improved (I dare hope).

[Jeeqbit]

It is constrained far more by specification limits (Playstation, Xbox and Recommend PC spec limits). By this I mean they announced the specifications the game is for, and cannot exceed them, even if some PCs or the game engine itself could do so.

To give an example of this, FF16 was clearly adapted using the FF14 engine. So I suppose make your judgement on what it's capable of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRAcPMTNqsc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdoKnM29qrA

It's also constrained by infrastructure decisions. For example, they decided not to use cloud servers, which means they have to link up lots of completely separated physical machines and can't add hardware on the fly in a virtual way. They often struggle with the fact that data is on another machine elsewhere - which is why when you visit another world or data center, you can't access certain things such as mail, and is why you can't access the chocobo saddlebag on the duty servers.

All of these things overcomplicate things that aren't a problem for companies that don't limit themselves by such specifications, consoles or infrastructure decisions.

they have been mostly unable to truly add new mechanics to the game or to polish the gameplay and UX.

This is purely because they only work on the next patch (7.4, 7.5 and 8.0). This means any old things get ignored unless specifically approved by Yoshi-P, such as side dungeon revamps and the graphics update. Obviously, a UI revamp has not been approved so they are not allowed to work on it.

Why do they only focus development on the "next patch" and ignore old things? The answer is because that's where the money is. People return to the game (hence subscribe) when a new patch releases. Those bursts of returners help retain players and give them subscription revenue. They don't believe they will return due to a revamp of old systems such as the user interface; it's not a particularly enticing offer compared to a new chapter in the MSQ or a new savage raid tier.

The UI is incredibly clunky. It seems that most actions lock you in certain modes that are rigid and not compatible with each other, so you can only browse one UI at a time and can't easily access a lot of things. This applies to things like glamour dressers being a usability mess due to vague "server constraints"

To a certain extent, it's easier to create a brand new system than build on an old one that is difficult to adapt in the way players want. But not merging the different similar, but clunky systems, is likely as I said, because Yoshi-P won't approve them working on old things and quality of life very often, since the money is in new things.

The issue with this, of course, is it has gradually made players believe the developers have run out of passion for the game. I know that this is not true, that they remain very passionate, but we are at a point where most players don't believe the passion is there are at all because a key way to show that passion is to improve old systems.

Everything gives all sorts of tokens that have to take inventory space and for some reason can't be stored as currencies.

Something about network capacity, but it doesn't add up because they keep adding new tribe currencies, new achievements, all of which add to the data you are "carrying with you". They told us they aren't attached to things like old currencies and suggest just deleting them. They don't understand the concept of keeping them as trophies of our accomplishments.

The world content hasn't innovated since FATEs. Everything is just FATEs. Even field exploration zones are just a map with fates.

They see the innovation as in the mechanics of those fights or the roleplay and animated sequences before and after those FATEs. As irrelevant as that may be to us as players, you see a long list of credits for FATE development at the end of each expansion MSQ and it makes me feel bad that they put so much work into them just for players to see them as something that puts them to sleep.

What we learned from Cosmic Exploration is they have an internal problem where they just do things based on precedent. By this I mean they are so comfortable in their formula and so pressured by time that they just repeat what they did the previous time because it worked, with no consideration about whether it is too repetitive or whether it even works well.

I believe they don't want the open world to be that threatening in case of new and returning players doing MSQ only and seem to want most things to be in instances where the amount of players can be guaranteed.

The combat feels floaty and unresponsive to anyone who has played other MMOs.

We have tried to tell them this for years. They just tell us it is our ping. It is crazy that if I don't interrupt the add in Necron ex half way through the cast then sometimes it kills me. Yes, I said halfway. It's a pretty slow cast, and there is a long time for the information to reach the server, so it is just the extremely slow server processing that causes it to fail. I would normally interrupt late in the cast to delay the subsequent attacks as much as possible, but it's too risky due to the game's code.

a lot of spells have long animation lock and feel like their impact happens ages after you press the button

I understand why this is. They want the animation to happen and to be seen. They want the impact of the effect to happen in line with the animation. For example, it makes no sense to animate a leap to a target but to leap to them instantly before the actual leap animation occurs. This is why they revamp Dragoon and Dark Knight leaps to have different animations, so that the faster leap made sense.

They have defended this in an interview before as well, saying how they value the animations. However, they have made changes to the animation delays on certain abilities with long delays over the years, particularly on Dark Knight. They also made changes to invulns to make them act faster. Then they made changes in PvP to adjust when the effect vs animation happens on a case by case basis, but didn't seem to extend this to PvE beyond the invulns.

You can see how this is a thing. On a Bard, Sidewinder's effect is instant, whereas Bloodletter or Refulgent Arrow take ages to produce their respective damage snapshots in order to line up with the slow bow-arrow animations. I use this knowledge for some purposes where I need something to hit a target faster. They could absolutely adjust this, and it's a choice to delay it as much as they do.

I do believe animations should not be tied to effect in most cases, especially for damage. Function is more important than aesthetics. They can change this, they just won't take our feedback usually, despite their recent, bold claims to the contrary.

There has been no piece of content using any new system in any recent time, really. It's just so stagnant. Look at how much other MMOs can innovate with their gameplay over time, and compare it to FFXIV. The game is more polished now, but fundamentally we're having the same experiences that realm reborn had.

I elaborated on this earlier, but it's because they just do things based on precedent without discussing if it's a good idea, due to time pressures. However, I believe a big part of it is that they lack mechanical creativity. They have aesthetic creativity and story creativity and fight creativity, but when it comes any other form of mechanical creativity, there is none. I gave an example recently about how a field operation could introduce boat riding, boat cannon fights, underwater combat, racing, things like that and it could even be achieved with minimal changes to systems they already have in the game, but they never think that deeply about things. They leave the creativity purely to the environment and music teams.

The MSQ, and other quests in general, also have had no innovations mechanically.

Disagree with this on the basis they added "follow NPCs", "follow NPCs without them seeing you", "NPCs follow you", "ride mounts with an ally cutscenes", the Thancred stealth mission, In From the Cold in Garlemald, and the recent find clues mini-game. These are some recent efforts they have been making to quests mechanically, but I do think they could make it less of a visual novel by having cutscenes happen while you control your character - which happens in many single player games including FF16 where there is some dialogue as you fight.

a codebase so incredibly old and bad (I'm guessing 1.0 leftovers and maybe even code inherited from FFXI) that programmers simply can't even start getting their teeth into modernising the game.

They were asked that directly and denied there is any spaghetti code from 1.0 whatsoever because they "rebuilt it from the engine". However, that doesn't mean there isn't spaghetti code from 2.0, since the game is built upon the back of 2.0 and changing the 2.0 pillars of the game could make the stack of cards fall. My understanding is that there are people who coded for 2.0 that no longer work on the game as well, which leads to never touching that person's code.

[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.

[RyoXander]

I've played many modern MMOs that both run and look beautifully on the PS5 Pro. I remember they said they created this game with the PS3 in mind so it is likely that that's a huge part of the reason, at least back then. However there is no way in hell that any current gen console would have an issue running a beefier, updated FFXIV; including even the Switch 2.

[Larirawiel]

Well, DirectX isn't the biggest problem as that's only the graphics API,

It is a problem when you use such an ancient API. FSR3 and FSR4 and XeSS are already ruled out because AMD and Intel do not support DirectX 11. And FSR1 is ugly as hell. DirectX 12 and Vulkan are also way more efficent. So you could have better graphics without raising the minimum requirements. And the second thing is, it is very likely, that the rest of the FF14 infrastructure is also as old as DirectX 11. It can be very difficult to mix old APIs with newer APIs. The development tools and the middleware have to support it etc.




Cheers

[Bubline]

It is constrained far more by specification limits (Playstation, Xbox and Recommend PC spec limits). By this I mean they announced the specifications the game is for, and cannot exceed them, even if some PCs or the game engine itself could do so.

I haven't had time to read the rest yet so I'll edit my post with more replies later maybe, but just at a glance from this, I really don't think it's relevant to the majority of my points.

I think the majority of the issues I've brought up have more to do with the architecture of the client and how it communicates with the server, and more widely how gameplay is implemented in their engine, from a logic point of view.

If we're talking graphics, or having bigger maps or an open world, then yes platforms can be an issue. But none of what I've been talking about is limited by platforms. Remember, wow ran with much better QOL and snappy gameplay a long time ago on old computers with much worse specs than current FFXIV specs.

The vast majority of what I've talked about could be implemented regardless of client-side hardware

Why do they only focus development on the "next patch" and ignore old things? The answer is because that's where the money is. People return to the game (hence subscribe) when a new patch releases. Those bursts of returners help retain players and give them subscription revenue.

In the short term yes. In the longer term this is killing the game. I'm sure Yoshi P is aware of it. In fact a lot of his recent interviews sound like he's particularly worried about it. I don't think he's stupid, I think he's pushed for improvements for a while. This leaves me with the only explanation being that it's unreasonably difficult to do, which would mean they haven't done a good job of maintaining a good codebase that could stay modern, or, that Squenix has been refusing to give them the budget.

And that's kind of what my thread is about really. I want to know, like, why is the game in this state? There are lots of glaring quality issues (for like of a better word) that are just not addressed at all.

It's going to be really hard for this game to acquire new players with how dated it is, and existing players will eventually run out.

The issue with this, of course, is it has gradually made players believe the developers have run out of passion for the game. I know that this is not true, that they remain very passionate, but we are at a point where most players don't believe the passion is there are at all because a key way to show that passion is to improve old systems.

Yeah I agree. I mean, I know enough about game development to know that the people working on it care. It's a priority and ressourcing problem. But there may also be a technical leadership problem where on a technical level, the bad decisions and lack of planning for the future compound into a game that somehow despite being live for more than a decade, feels like it's had barely any development from a features/mechanics/quality point of view.

The content team makes great content with what they're given (mostly), but they're not given much to work with.

We have tried to tell them this for years. They just tell us it is our ping. It is crazy that if I don't interrupt the add in Necron ex half way through the cast then sometimes it kills me.

Actually glad you said that because I sometimes feel like I'm being gaslighted by this game and its combat system. A lot of people on XIV haven't played other MMOs for comparison and so they don't realise the huge gap in combat feel between FFXIV and other MMOs.

Even LOTRO which is an older and almost abandoned MMO maintained by a small team with no budget has recently migrated their servers to new 64 bit servers and improved lag to the point that they have super snappy spell activation times.

I do believe animations should not be tied to effect in most cases, especially for damage. Function is more important than aesthetics. They can change this, they just won't take our feedback usually, despite their recent, bold claims to the contrary.

Yep. It's pretty bad. The gameplay in this game feels so floaty to me because of it. I never know exactly when my attacks will hit. For example when tanking, I'm never quite sure when to trigger my AOEs to grab all the mobs, as I don't know exactly when it will get resolved (if you get what I mean).

I don't think I know any other MMO that has such a delay for actions to take effect. It feels completely wrong. Other games manage to have nice animations without adding delays. And really, the delay is often just immersion breaking. I'm sure there's a middle ground here, and it's definitely gotten better (helped by the fact that we have less server delay than we used to), but right now I don't think it's right.

However, I believe a big part of it is that they lack mechanical creativity. They have aesthetic creativity and story creativity and fight creativity, but when it comes any other form of mechanical creativity, there is none.

Yeah... The cosmic exploration mech-ops being just a vacuuming minigame was kind of embarassing. They have the tech to at least do some rudimentary "vehicle gameplay" like wow does (if a bit clunky). Maybe not great, but they can do something. What they end up doing is always just so little.

It is a problem when you use such an ancient API. FSR3 and FSR4 and XeSS are already ruled out because AMD and Intel do not support DirectX 11. And FSR1 is ugly as hell. DirectX 12 and Vulkan are also way more efficent. So you could have better graphics without raising the minimum requirements. And the second thing is, it is very likely, that the rest of the FF14 infrastructure is also as old as DirectX 11. It can be very difficult to mix old APIs with newer APIs. The development tools and the middleware have to support it etc.




Cheers

Sure, it liimts the graphics, but I'm fine with the graphics as they are.
Middleware wise, I see your point and that can definitely affect some things, but an MMO is going to have a lot of custom tooling (which they control), and a lot of what I'm talking about I would suspect is more related to how their engine implemented server-client communication, character actions, things like that.

And sure to some extent you're always locked into past technical choices but also, the company can make a choice to invest into modernising that. Wow used to run on even older tech, and the cloud was not even an idea yet. They have kept their infrastructure modern, enabling new things as they did it over time.

I get that FFXIV isn't as big as wow, but we players do spend a lot of money on this game. I have heard rumors that a lot of FFXIV revenue gets funnelled into other Squenix projects and thus doesn't get reinvested into the game. If that is true, it makes me sad, because having a bunch of extra programmer time and a team dedicated to improving game feel, improving QOL, etc, could have a massive impact on this game.

[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.