Request: DX11 to have the return of character physics and weight to movement?

I know and have accepted that much of the physics, weight to characters and armor, etc were removed in order to allow a wider variety of hardware to play this game. I do understand it was necessary to widen the potential audience.

However as we start into consideration of DX11 and possibly new client that would go with it. Would it be possible to bring back these features and a DX11 supported card would be higher performance?

These of course could be things that can be turned on an off to keep some variety.

So the requests are
1. Bring back character physics and weight of movement.
2. Bring back some of the appearance and texture quality to characters.
3. Give the female butt back and give the male cat some shape.
Note: My thought is similar the physics and textures used in 1.0

I am not looking to have the game completely changed but basically a return of some of the character aspects that were well done?

Thoughts and feedback from the community on this?

While I'd like to have a nicer ass and momentum in walking, this isn't really related to DX11. The texture quality is okay, they said that they would use tessellation to make things look better instead of raising texture resolution, I'm fine with that personally.

1.0 movement physics were removed to allow for the more responsive movements needed to dodge enemy AE attacks, reverting them would just cause more rage (because SE sever <> client implementation isn't enough already) amongst most players running any content with insta-gib mechanics.

I think we are still kinda far from DX11

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Originally Posted by Skull_Angel

1.0 movement physics were removed to allow for the more responsive movements needed to dodge enemy AE attacks, reverting them would just cause more rage (because SE sever <> client implementation isn't enough already) amongst most players running any content with insta-gib mechanics.

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...and the problem 1.0 had is that they went overboard with the graphics quality so the game caused issues with people that didn't have the latest gaming rig. If you want an MMO to be successful you need to open it up to as many players as possible. I didn't play in 1.x and maybe it did look better but the game as it is now looks great and most importantly it uses little system resources even up fairly high; the devs did a great job with the client. The bottoms were reshaped to allow for better gear. Bigger bums cause problems with the gear.

We are still far from DX11 client. All I read around the web is Devs stated they gonna work on it after the PS4 release which already happened. My personal opinion is that we wont see DX11 with patch 2.3. Seems we have a good chance to get it along with the 1st expansion which gonna be around this Autumn. FFXIV ARR gonna have 1 year anniversary and usually you get such big changes alogn with big patches/expansions. Devs didn't say anything more expect from some hints in various interviews. While the taxtures are fine in enviroment and they don't really need a change in resolution characters models and armours need it. The character's skins are highly pixelated along with the armours even when you don't zoom in. The character is always centered and close the the camera so that needs a graphic revamp. Enviroment is fine. FFXIV will look miles better with DX11 and it deserves that. Especially after the succefull launch on 3 platforms and the milions of subscribers who supported the game.

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Originally Posted by Saccharin

...and the problem 1.0 had is that they went overboard with the graphics quality so the game caused issues with people that didn't have the latest gaming rig. If you want an MMO to be successful you need to open it up to as many players as possible. I didn't play in 1.x and maybe it did look better but the game as it is now looks great and most importantly it uses little system resources even up fairly high; the devs did a great job with the client. The bottoms were reshaped to allow for better gear. Bigger bums cause problems with the gear.

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1.0 had an engine that allowed for gear deformation so they wouldn't have to resize each set manually. And allowing for different graphic options for higher tier computers shouldn't be detrimental to lower end machines.

But as much as I would seriously love to have the physics back, there's the issue of animation cancel/merging. That sort of thing really would require all machines be on the same level of capability, and as it is, those features where removed specifically to allow for the new battle system and lower end machines. Not to mention weakened server-client relations that would result in characters seeming to walk over/through walls, which was a real problem in 1.0.

I do hate the stiff mechanical animations we have now in comparison, but unfortunately it comes at a price that would demand the whole game be reworked yet again, or some really intense engineering at a cost I doubt Square would find comparable to the reward.

Can you show me the comparison of "character physics and weight of movement." I play v 1.0 but I not notice weight different?

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Originally Posted by Alise

Can you show me the comparison of "character physics and weight of movement." I play v 1.0 but I not notice weight different?

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Same... I played 1.0 and thought the animations were more or less the same, or even in some cases worse(lalafells running animation...). The only thing I can think of was the clunky movement when you tried to turn around and it would force you to run about 5 feet.

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Originally Posted by Alise

Can you show me the comparison of "character physics and weight of movement." I play v 1.0 but I not notice weight different?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMycCa5YHck
Poor quality and small character. But see how she stops or starts? She has momentum. There is a moment of speeding up when she goes. And when she stops, she adjusts her footing . The weight of her arms and body shift to compensate. It helped give the game a very natural atmosphere.

In ARR, you simply switch in and out of your running animation.

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Originally Posted by Almalexia

Not pictured:

- running in one direction, then scrambling to about-face and run in the opposite direction
- the character's gentle tilt to the left or right while turning

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I loved that gentle tilt. Loved it like a brother.
And now...oh gods, I never even got to say goodbye! Yoshi why?!

Everyone is going to be so disappointed when the DX11 version hits and it's just a slight performance boost and maybe a tiny increase in quality for like water or shadows or something. They might want to hold off on it until they can do some sort of larger graphical update along with it just so people don't riot.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

Everyone is going to be so disappointed when the DX11 version hits and it's just a slight performance boost and maybe a tiny increase in quality for like water or shadows or something. They might want to hold off on it until they can do some sort of larger graphical update along with it just so people don't riot.

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Honestly, the best I'm hoping for is an upgrade for the normal maps.

I'm in favor of this as well. Please bring back our physics and weight.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMycCa5YHck
Poor quality and small character. But see how she stops or starts? She has momentum. There is a moment of speeding up when she goes. And when she stops, she adjusts her footing . The weight of her arms and body shift to compensate. It helped give the game a very natural atmosphere.

In ARR, you simply switch in and out of your running animation.

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Not pictured:

- running in one direction, then scrambling to about-face and run in the opposite direction
- the character's gentle tilt to the left or right while turning

I agree I wish there was a bit more movement in your character, the animations were much more appealing in 1.0 and when it comes to general movement, I don't see how this is a problem for avoiding mechanics with a couple of extra frames of animation.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Honestly, the best I'm hoping for is an upgrade for the normal maps.

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This. It's appalling how many flat textures are in the environments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRbf0HCAGqc

Here, this is a good video showing the movement in 1.0.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Honestly, the best I'm hoping for is an upgrade for the normal maps.

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That's probably the only thing that'll be upgraded. I don't know where people get the idea of improved physics from Dx11... and even then they mentioned their only using a small portion of what Dx11 provides.

And tbh it's too late to add that sort of stuff now w/o it looking funny. The movement in this game is constant, you move the moment you hit ASDW now, if we're to add anticipation/reaction (the 'inertia' in animation) to things now you'll just be more pissed that your sliding around during the 'anticipation' frames and thus immersion is further ruined.

No we can't suddenly speed up the animations either, otherwise it's just plain unnoticeable. Look at Capcom's fighting games where jumping has like 3 frames of 'anticipation' but it's barely noticeable.

I'd love to see them return, but we will never see it come back.

You can't make a change like momentum in a DX11 client because that is a feature of the game simulation as opposed to the game's display. Things that could be enhanced in a DX11 version could be things like models, textures, lights/shadows, particle effects, water, animations, ect.

The important thing about the DX11 client is that it won't contain any game-play changes. That means they could possibly change the way they blend animations to look like they have momentum, but they can't actually give the characters momentum.

Also, as far as character momentum goes, I always find it makes it feel like you are running on ice when you have momentum in MMOs.

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Originally Posted by cloverkitty

I know and have accepted that much of the physics, weight to characters and armor, etc were removed in order to allow a wider variety of hardware to play this game.

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It was removed so that the game controls properly instead of like a clunky unresponsive mess.

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Originally Posted by Skull_Angel

1.0 movement physics were removed to allow for the more responsive movements needed to dodge enemy AE attacks, reverting them would just cause more rage (because SE sever <> client implementation isn't enough already) amongst most players running any content with insta-gib mechanics.

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This. Its already been stated officially why it was removed. Search more.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Honestly, the best I'm hoping for is an upgrade for the normal maps.

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I'm hoping for a prettier UI. The UI is functional but I feel it's a 'PS3 limitation' UI so they could keep the version the same.

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Originally Posted by Saccharin

I'm hoping for a prettier UI. The UI is functional but I feel it's a 'PS3 limitation' UI so they could keep the version the same.

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I still prefer the original menu we had at launch, not this oversimplified version.

The difference between DX9 and DX11 will not be all that much. The main improvement in DX11 vs DX9 is increased sunshafting, water-effects, tesselation. While adding a new client to enable DX11 call use will help these things it has two things going against it for an MMO. First is over all most people will barely see any performance boost and actually many who will enable it just because they hear it's better will have a performance drop. There is also the thing of if square even bothers optimizing the game around the newer API.

While in the end options are always nice due to the difference in systems out there, you have to stop and ask if this one is of most importance over other things about the game that could be worked on.

Yes please bring back weight, I miss not being able to jump. Can we please let FFXIV 1.0 everything just burn in hell?

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Originally Posted by bonedeaf

Yes please bring back weight, I miss not being able to jump. Can we please let FFXIV 1.0 everything just burn in hell?

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Mmm... the mature way to go about it I see.

the inertia and heavy deliberate movements aren't related to physics or DX11.

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Originally Posted by Dano

the inertia and heavy deliberate movements aren't related to physics or DX11.

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I don't think anyone said they were.

Hence why the thread title grammatically split the three.

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Originally Posted by Eunys

The difference between DX9 and DX11 will not be all that much. The main improvement in DX11 vs DX9 is increased sunshafting, water-effects, tesselation. While adding a new client to enable DX11 call use will help these things it has two things going against it for an MMO. First is over all most people will barely see any performance boost and actually many who will enable it just because they hear it's better will have a performance drop. There is also the thing of if square even bothers optimizing the game around the newer API.

While in the end options are always nice due to the difference in systems out there, you have to stop and ask if this one is of most importance over other things about the game that could be worked on.

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Small steps are better than none I'd say.


They've actually listened to our feedback on what we want to see in the new client which.

Hardware Anti-Aliasing isn't confirmed yet, but it'll most likely be an option, and if not at least with DX11 you can force hardware AA externally in Deferred Rendering (unlike DX9). This is something I really miss from 1.23 when the lighting system was swapped out in favour for Deferred Rendering, which wasn't a bad thing as Deferred Rendering is a much better option, even at the expense of hardware AA under DX9.


Originally when uncompressed textures or at the very least a higher base resolution we were told "No, it's not needed we think it's fine".

Now it appears they've re-evaluated that after a volume of angry feedback into to quote "Testing uncompressed textures memory impact on performance".



So, even with the smaller steps, additions like Hardware AA and Hi-Res Texture Maps would make a huge difference.

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Originally Posted by Pandastirfry

Personally I felt 1.0's "inertia" movement made the games horrendous lag feel even worse.

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With visibly more movement, this is obvious.

Whenever you have animations recorded between 30-60fps, with a vast amount of detail, it relies heavily on a draw-speed and a decent frame-rate.

As for 1.23's lag, it varied from machine to machine, I ran the game on a £40 Quad-Core AMD processor, £80 GPU (GTX560) and the rest of the parts were very very cheap, and the game ran between 30-60fps, what shocked me when I played the game was the amount of the people who had the "Drawing Quality" set above 'Standard', alongside the people who had Ambient Occlusion turned on.

With minor adjustment the "horrendous" lag was actually quite manageable, it never ran perfectly but unless you were running on a particularly old machine the game was adjustable.

Personally I felt 1.0's "inertia" movement made the games horrendous lag feel even worse. The general unresponsivness of the controls was compounded by the aesthetic choice of inertia and made it feel like I could never properly control my character.

I won't say it didn't look nice, but I felt it was one of 1.0's many "Good ideas on paper, bad ideas in practice"

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Originally Posted by Shioban

With visibly more movement, this is obvious.

Whenever you have animations recorded between 30-60fps, with a vast amount of detail, it relies heavily on a draw-speed and a decent frame-rate.

As for 1.23's lag, it varied from machine to machine, I ran the game on a £40 Quad-Core AMD processor, £80 GPU (GTX560) and the rest of the parts were very very cheap, and the game ran between 30-60fps, what shocked me when I played the game was the amount of the people who had the "Drawing Quality" set above 'Standard', alongside the people who had Ambient Occlusion turned on.

With minor adjustment the "horrendous" lag was actually quite manageable, it never ran perfectly but unless you were running on a particularly old machine the game was adjustable.

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that's the thing though.

Once I had finally beaten the graphics settings into submission, I got the game running at what I thought was merely tolerable, About 3 months later I decided to run Fraps and finally kill this last vestige of lag I was getting in character movement. it was then that I realized, as my FPS were actually pretty good, that it was a feature, not a bug. By that time the damage was done. I didn't like it because for the longest time I thought it was lag. turns out it was designed that way.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

Mmm... the mature way to go about it I see.

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It was quite possibly the worst game I have ever played. The insane idea that anyone wants the bumbling feeling of inertia slip and slide play style back hurts my head.

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Originally Posted by bonedeaf

It was quite possibly the worst game I have ever played. The insane idea that anyone wants the bumbling feeling of inertia slip and slide play style back hurts my head.

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As opposed to the totally non-jarring feeling of seeing your character go from a full sprint to dead still instantly and visa versa. Or watching your chatter do the electric slide over rocks while his upper body does the Chaos Thrust.

True Strike! So we can't win either way it seems. However, our points in the long run, are silly. DX11 will only change visuals, not gameplay.

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Originally Posted by bonedeaf

It was quite possibly the worst game I have ever played. The insane idea that anyone wants the bumbling feeling of inertia slip and slide play style back hurts my head.

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It suited the gameplay for 1.23.

Sadly won't work easily in 2.0.

It's a very aesthetically pleasing animation idea, just not suitable for an MMO of this style.

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Originally Posted by Aegis

As opposed to the totally non-jarring feeling of seeing your character go from a full sprint to dead still instantly and visa versa. Or watching your chatter do the electric slide over rocks while his upper body does the Chaos Thrust.

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^This.

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Originally Posted by bonedeaf

True Strike! So we can't win either way it seems. However, our points in the long run, are silly. DX11 will only change visuals, not gameplay.

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That's why the thread-title has split the three, instead of putting it all under "DX11"

This has absolutely nothing to do with DirectX 11. It was an art choice.

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Originally Posted by ForteXX

I still prefer the original menu we had at launch, not this oversimplified version.

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I've seen the 1.x UI in videos and it does look nice. I'd prefer one maybe in between. The current UI reminds me of my Amiga 1200.

I don't really see what this has to do with DX11. However, I could imagine it being brought back into the game (abliet with probably half the frames to it doesn't mess up dodge mechanics), once the support for the PS3 version ends.

When I stop pressing forward it's because I want my character to stop, not to take a few more steps to slow down (especially if I'm trying to dodge an AOE or cast). The problem with inertia and weighted animations is they sacrifice responsive gameplay for something that looks nice. Even Yoshi-P agreed 1.0 was too focused on looking nice and not enough on being fun to play; this is one perfect example of that. Coming to an instant stop can be immersion breaking, but it's far worse if you don't have full control of your character simply because it looked pretty.

This has literally nothing to do with DirectX 11. It was a game design decision, not a graphical compromise.