Thread: Final Fantasy XI Version 2.0?

Yes. It's not as much the poly count and texture resolution that bothers me, but the complete lack of hardware antialiasing, glitchy graphics close to the "seams" where different objects meet (feathers, hair, etc.) and at times inconsistent texture filtering. I dunno about everyone else, but to me it seems like when looking at surfaces from a low angle, you go from good texture filtering closest to the camera, then no filtering at all (blocky textures), then texture filtering on the textures further away than that again.

Additionally, shadows seem to eat away a disproportionally huge amount of resources too. I'd love a game where you could run at 60 fps, 8x (or more) antialiasing, really nice texture filtering, better shadows, and shinier water, all without the game ever dropping below 60fps even in events where you have over 30 character models on screen.

Oh yeah, and maybe some updated sky textures here and there too. I know the devs know how to do it, because some of the WotG skies look absolutely fantastic, but at the same time, some other textures in other areas look very bad. An excellent example of this would be one of the nearly cloud-free during daytime in the past, and then look back at the clouds seen when it is thunderous in pashhow in the present, where you can clearly see color patterns in textures to make up for a too small color palette. Additionally, the resolution of the clouds in Riverne is also very low and looks very much out of place compared to other areas.

I also dunno if I'm the only one experiencing this, but I also saw a significant decrease in graphics performance when going from WinXP x64 to Win7 x64. I only managed to get it back to the performance I had on XP x64 when I upgraded my CPU to something about 30% better.

It would also be nice if they fixed the "glow" effects that we have on avatars, maws, and so on. This effect actually looks pretty neat at the resolution the game was originally made for (on PS2), but becomes increasingly blocky and ugly as the game's resolution is increased. At low resolution, the effect actually manages to emulate a HDR bloom-like effect pretty nicely (which is kind of impressive for a PS2 game). It is too bad that it doesn't look nearly as good for most players.

I would also like to see an official setting for greatly increasing draw distance. The game can look very pretty in some areas with the draw distance increased several times more than the game initially allows for. There is however one problem with increasing the draw distance more than the game is made for, and that is that environmental fog and weather effects that are meant to set the mood in an area are also affected by this, making these effects often become much weaker or farther away. Some areas really look a lot cooler when weather effects are allowed to do their thing. I bet it would look even better if we had both increased draw distance and the correct application of these effects.