How much is the game held back by technical constraints?

[Amarande]

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.

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 ...

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.

Hoping for not another case of mobile-ification, but also kinda nervous in light of present tech politics if that's a hedge bet they can't afford not to make ...

Most particularly, how rapidly everyone is warming up to age verification laws for the Internet, after decades of "that would be a terrible idea due to identity theft and a whole lot of the internet disappearing due to it being uneconomical or impractical to implement support" - when you consider how often the suggested verification procedures kind of forget about desktop PCs altogether it starts to become at least a little worrisome for the future of PC online gaming platforms, especially ones as necessarily social as an MMO. Especially when you add in that we already have security providers that have decided that PC is not a large enough market to bother supporting authentication from e.g. Authy discontinuing its desktop 2FA (and with how often the suggested methodology for age verification is going to be "you have to verify ON THAT DEVICE") ...