they said in the roadmap that there will no longer be a seamless game world, it'll be seperated into many unique zones with their own landmarks and topography.
So rather than eliminating zonelines, there's going to be load lines.
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I'm all for an engine with better scaling. It concerns me what was said in the 1up interview tho. It really does sound liek the PS3 is the base platform for the new engine and the PC will just be an enhanced version of that with the same assets. If that is the case we are probably in for a drop in graphical fidelity for people who are playing at 1920x1080 or greater with everything on.
My machine runs nicely at high everything at 1920x1200 with everything except ambient occlusion on. I know that a 4ghz i7 6gig ram and an ati 5850 would be considered mid to high end now but with the basic gaming system becoming an i5 K series and a new generation of graphics cards comming in 4-6 months that level of performance will be available in a $500 PC.
If anything FFXIV V2.0 engine should be aiming to offer even more than the current one not less. Better scaling for laptops and lower spec machines is a must but making that the baseline witha few enhancements on top is a bad idea to me. Especially if that is done by reducing the complexity of the models or detail of the textures which this sounds like and will certainly be neccesary for PS3. The way to make something look good on PS3 is lots of shader and post processing work. For a PC where you sit close to a high resolution screen the textures and models have to be huge.
Not really what he meant. What he means is they are basing it on the PS3 for it to be able to run the game smoothly, while the High End PC users will be able to play the game with better graphics. This also means that people with lower-end computers will be able to play it too.
Nothing was mentioned that the graphics would be dumbed down, its just that they are optimizing an engine the way it should have been from the start.
Unfortunately that is the technical implication of basing it on the PS3. If you base it on PC you can reduce the lighting detail and texture fidelity when you move to PS3 and use simpler shader effects. If you start at the PS3 you can't magically add more animation frames and higher detail models for the PC version. To go farther than that to make use of high end PC features essentially requires branching your engine and duplicating your base assets and developers even id software with rage don't do that because it is too hard to maintain and keep them in sync.