How much is the game held back by technical constraints?

[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.

[Enkidoh]

Except that is blatantly incorrect, as proven by statements Yoshi himself made years ago where he stated that ARR's engine is a new custom engine that used elements of, (or at least has similarities to) the Luminous Engine (such as here), and thus has nothing to do with Crystal Tools.

There is also no technical or remnants of 1.0 code used in the engine, technical limitations are entirelly the new engine's limitations itself. Crystal Tools was dumped out on the kerb for rubbish collection long ago. It's just a stupid meme now, and is as mistaken as 'spaghetti code'.

[Hyperia]

Before the near catastrophic drop in subscriptions due to the very poor reception of the Dawntrail MSQ, it was an all but certainty that PS4 support along with lower end PCs were going to be dropped. While they can still do this, it is in serious doubt as they want to keep as many subs as possible in the hope that 8.0 turns things around.

[RedLolly]

They've made no indication that PS4 was going to be dropped yet, anyway. I've not seen any official channel make that push, it's just player speculation on player speculation here.

[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") ...

[Hyperia]

I will not play a mobile game, while I have the tech to do so. I do not like the interfaces and I pay for XIV so I do not have to do a gatcha game.

They are too often setup that if you fall behind, it’s time to quit or spend way too much money to catch up. That’s why I gave up on Genshin, I got too far behind, didn’t have the meta characters and it got too hard to play.

[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