Can we get HQ textures yet? It's 2018
The PS3 is no longer supported I think so there's no need to worry about performance on that system. This game is beautiful even without the HQ textures but I could imagine how much better it would be with it. I'd gladly shell $10 on the mog station for this. At the very least please let us toggle distant textures to the highest quality textures currently available because the distant textures look like they are from 2002.
I know this thread will get nowhere but maybe the echo will be heard somewhere.
Edit:
Turns out there were several interviews about the subject. Here's some points taken from this thread.
1. Yoshi P stated that he knows about dated graphics being a problem but for the time being, there's nothing they can do about it but because the PS5 is coming and they dropped PS3, 32bit and DX9 support, they will eventually look into the possibility of upgrading graphics.
2. The game engine is old and hard to work with. It's not terrible but certain things can't be done like adding hair to the new male cat race.
3. When they remade the game in 2.0, they did so using low-resolution textures, not high-resolution like they did with 1.0 and other games. It's regrettable but they would have to redo all the textures from ground-up and there's a lot of assets to consider. There's software that has Machine learning A.I. that could upscale to HD and even 4k, but again, Engine limitations might be a good reason to not do it.
I understand the limitations that the FF14 team has to deal with and the amount of difficulty upgrading textures might cause. While it's still a great dream to have, I don't think we will ever see these changes.