My Three Main Wishes for 7.0 Graphical Update

Lighting

Lighting is a huge part in gaming graphics, and good lighting can often make up for low triangle counts and average textures. When lighting mocks up, it can bring down an otherwise good looking game, and XIV needs to improve its lighting. We spend a lot of time in The Ocular in Shadowbringers, and the lighting and shadows there look really weird. Faces looks like clay, with very unnatural looking shadows:

https://imgur.com/NEewu9I.png

Emet in particular looks... really weird (really bad imho) in this place, and we spend a lot of ShB chatting with everyone in this location.

https://imgur.com/e1w1fMN.png

There's also places where light behaves very weirdly. Here we have a bright red source high in the sky, and the area looks properly lit, actually:

https://imgur.com/qT1CAfm.png

Until you flip the camera and suddenly the character is completely in the dark and very poorly lit. What happened with the big red source of light in the sky?

https://imgur.com/4R1oOO9.png

XIV's light model was fine, for 2014. They've said a lighting revamp is on the table, so I hope they can stick to landing!

Anti Aliasing

XIV uses an implementation of FXAA for its AA, and it's... really bad. I'm running the game at 1080p so millage may vary on higher resolutions, but the bad AA tends to pop out like a sore thumb, and some details end up looking just terrible:

https://imgur.com/bdaFkEV.png

https://imgur.com/Q2QZyeA.png

https://imgur.com/KA6n0uf.png

It's also why stairs have this weird wobbly effect thing I'm sure everyone has noticed:

https://imgur.com/PxEnimK.png

It's easier to notice in motion.

AA tends to be some of the less expensive graphical tweaks on modern engines, so I'm hoping this improves with 7.0

Textures

Just by improving lighting and AA, lower quality textures are gonna look way better than they do right now, but once you have some newer textures on, the game has the potential to truly look amazing. Not much to share here. We've all seen the low quality leaves, or Hien's clothes. This is the last thing I feel will help the game look super nice without destroying performance.

What wishes do you guys have in particular for the Graphical Update?

+1 to everything you said. :)

Personally I’d just like hair that doesn’t look like yarn close up, but that might just fall under the textures category. lol

Agree on all counts. For now, if you have an NVIDIA GPU you can clean up the shimmering a bit by setting Texture filtering-Negative LOD bias to Clamp in Manage 3D settings>Program settings>Final Fantasy VIX A Realm Reborn in NCP. Not perfect but it does clean things up a bit. Looking forward to 7.0

My biggest wish for the update even though it was never in the initial conversation but to allow more customization options. Or at least free up certain clan specific option looks to be available for both clans of their respective race.

The lighting in this game is absolute dogshit. I can't wait for them to fix it. Hopefully.

Can we have more than 4 faces to pick from plz. That's my other thing. I feel like a lot of stuff will go a long long way if there were more customization options in general.

LIGHTING upgrade would be a game-changer. I hope they also redesign the Gold Saucer with more colorful textures instead of brown everywhere, and many more light sources placed there so it's much brighter.

I'm not expecting anything thats better than you can do yourself with reshade.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I'm not expecting anything thats better than you can do yourself with reshade.

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ReShade is post. A new light model should change how lighting works at an engine render level, and ReShade can't go that deep.

Didnt they show off a Demo of how the Graphical Update will be?
They used the Dancing Plague as an example and showed a Before (current) and After (When Graphics update hits)

I think it 'mostly' covers all of your points

I believe your desires are going to be addressed but certainly explaining what concerns you have might help them focus on something if it was missed, so the pictures and text is nice still :)

They also mentioned potentially weather, and that is definitely one of the ones I think could have a 'major' subtle impact. Water would be another. Some high quality snow and sand shaders could make the snow and sand zones next level without much else than just a shader giving them better sense of traction and dynamic shape. For example sand skirting across the surface, appearance of movement, sinking. Snow is more obvious.. make it crunch lol. Semi-related but a surprisingly a decent amount of mounts don't have 'footprints' or at least logical ones.

Further improving parallax would be nice.

Game is far from ugly but I could imagine quite a few 'systems' under graphics that could have large impacts to the game without many small individual changes. By that I don't mean 'easy' just for example if you said update the textures (and we're not using some AI lol), that could be billions of textures XD. Meanwhile if you upgraded the shader for sand, water, or what have you- it would be a lot of code / work but you'd re-use it over and over and over. So my personally the 'I don't feel guilty to desires' / votes are to some of the environmental shaders and systems like weather, water, snow, sand, etc. Grass is another one they mentioned where improving the system can have wide reaching impact once developed, and the example they showed was very nice- if they're going hog wild and while not really necessary light filtering through (translucent) and flora responding to physics (like spells and physical body mass) would be neat (though just looking better is already great).

A guilty example would be a particle system like they have in their more recent FF games (flashy SFX with dynamic particles) lol. Fire particles blasting out into the environment and scattering with physics into the walls XD... So unnecessary but I'd turn it on if it was an option. Melt computers if you left the setting on for all entities in a large battlefield.

Square should take a page out of WoW's playbook for this and look at the "against ToS" mods out there that accomplish what you want graphically and just buy the code and implement it, saving time and resources for other game related things.

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Originally Posted by OogaShaka

Square should take a page out of WoW's playbook for this and look at the "against ToS" mods out there that accomplish what you want graphically and just buy the code and implement it, saving time and resources for other game related things.

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Sadly this will never happen.

The most obvious issues to me are the pixels visible on the moon's rocky areas, the pixels on some of the newest gear, the overly smooth faces lacking any sort of detail and how grainy grass and trees look from a distance. They are definitely looking at the last two.

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Originally Posted by OogaShaka

Square should take a page out of WoW's playbook for this and look at the "against ToS" mods out there that accomplish what you want graphically and just buy the code and implement it, saving time and resources for other game related things.

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I've already said this to someone, but I can say it again:

ReShade is a post processing tool. The changes I'm hoping for are at an engine level, and ReShade can't go that deep. One of the reasons why FXAA sucks is that it's a Post AA solution. We need something at the render level. Lighting sources and how it behaves is also an engine-render level change. There's no real third party fix for either of these right now. Texture (and body) upscales on the third party side are actually rather nice. Can't believe we still have sausage fingers and N64 feet, so I guess I should have added that one to the OG post.

The reason I'm not too concerned with post processing changes to the visuals is because ReShade can always take care of that, though a better vanilla post pipeline would be very nice for console users.

My main wish for the graphical update is to update the textures of old models properly, especially Titan who I can see his pixels. In fact, I think there are still a lot of things in this game dating back from the PS3 era, and I'd wish to see them dropped and moved on.

Was so happy to see lighting at the top of the list; I agree. It's bad bad bad in this game. I wanna say 90% of the game's aesthetic issues come from just really awful lighting. And the whole game has this like... faint greenish tint over it that looks awful until you use a shader.

like a twitter user said....you people are putting extremely high hopes for this graphical update


keep expectations low

i will...

I concur with most if not all of what has been espoused here so far. It's no Everquest, but improvements are always welcomed. Emet-Selch (and a lot of gear when zoomed way in) looks atrocious to be quite frank. I also agree with what you said about FXAA, that's an egregiously outdated format when it comes to antialiasing. I reckon FFXIV needs TAA at the very least. Textures being improved would be nice (bringing all old gear textures up to Shadowbringers and beyond territory, as pipe dream as this hope is), but I have reservations on just how far Square's pushing it.

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Originally Posted by keichirou

i will...

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Will you now.... (͠≖ ͜ʖ͠≖)

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Originally Posted by TowaIsBestGirl

I concur with most if not all of what has been espoused here so far. It's no Everquest, but improvements are always welcomed. Emet-Selch (and a lot of gear when zoomed way in) looks atrocious to be quite frank. I also agree with what you said about FXAA, that's an egregiously outdated format when it comes to antialiasing. I reckon FFXIV needs TAA at the very least. Textures being improved would be nice (bringing all old gear textures up to Shadowbringers and beyond territory, as pipe dream as this hope is), but I have reservations on just how far Square's pushing it.



Will you now.... (͠≖ ͜ʖ͠≖)

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dont get me wrong, i wiiiiiish we had some good graphics update, new engine...i would totally love that but reality is....quality has been decreasing

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I'm not expecting anything thats better than you can do yourself with reshade.

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Reshade is post processing. It cannot fix the damage, which is already done by the engine.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Reshade is post processing. It cannot fix the damage, which is already done by the engine.


Cheers

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I really wish some users got off their high horse about community mods and reshade, they are great at patching some holes but the graphics update has the chance to at a fundamental level rework key systems that no mount of reshade can fix. So when I saw people being like oh my reshade settings do this… they do not… trust me. You could have artists or graphics teams tell you it can’t but they’ll be in their denial brain. Also it would be a good thing if it goes further beyond because then modders can then take their work even further… sounds like a win win to me.

I'm personally hoping for some kind of texture update on older gear. I use the second tier Alexander raid gear for my tank, and I really like it, but looking at it close up it's easy to see how bad the texturing has held up. You can almost count the individual pixels on some parts.

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

+1 to everything you said. :)

Personally I’d just like hair that doesn’t look like yarn close up, but that might just fall under the textures category. lol

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Hair defined is your friend, HD hair textures.

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Originally Posted by Iyrnthota

I'm personally hoping for some kind of texture update on older gear. I use the second tier Alexander raid gear for my tank, and I really like it, but looking at it close up it's easy to see how bad the texturing has held up. You can almost count the individual pixels on some parts.

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All gear is being done eventually, they basically said 7.0 gear is done obviously but select gear or most popular glams are being looked at. NPCs and gear will be updated each patch likely as they get converted over. It seems annoying they haven’t kept their higher quality assets because you could easily have kept the higher quality and downscaled it at the time.

DLSS/FSR implementation if possible.

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Originally Posted by Ayche

DLSS/FSR implementation if possible.

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Definitely a possibility and would add longevity to multiple specs of hardware. They added dynamic resolution scaling already but if they can implement this that would be interesting. Forspoken added FSR to luminous so with 14s engine being a custom offshoot maybe it’s a possibility down the line then again it might not happen because even FF16 only has 2 flat out performance or graphics modes.

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Originally Posted by Ayche

DLSS/FSR implementation if possible.

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I highly doubt, that DLSS/FSR will make the game better. DLSS/FSR are upscalers. Upscalers are nice if the game is limited by the GPU. But in MMOs this is almost never the case. MMOs are usually CPU bound. In this case, DLSS/FSR will not improve the framerate. :)


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

I highly doubt, that DLSS/FSR will make the game better. DLSS/FSR are upscalers. Upscalers are nice if the game is limited by the GPU. But in MMOs this is almost never the case. MMOs are usually CPU bound. In this case, DLSS/FSR will not improve the framerate. :)


Cheers

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Both are temporal image reconstruction tools, so they will also act as temporal anti-aliasers. They would produce superior image quality compared to FXAA.

My only hope for the graphics update is that my seven year old PC can handle it! I'm saving for a new PC, but with other financial priorities in life it's slow progress and I may not have saved enough by the time the update appears.

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Originally Posted by Carin-Eri

My only hope for the graphics update is that my seven year old PC can handle it! I'm saving for a new PC, but with other financial priorities in life it's slow progress and I may not have saved enough by the time the update appears.

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I'm thinking of getting anew PC this year mine is at the 4 year mark and I too think this may impact my game performance.

We need subsurface scattering for skin, and some form of global illumination (something cheap, precomputed, using proven and well known approaches, like global illumination probes). Those two things would go a long way to improve things.

Perhaps also some color grading improvements would not go amiss to make things look a little less drab in some places.

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Originally Posted by Ayche

Both are temporal image reconstruction tools, so they will also act as temporal anti-aliasers. They would produce superior image quality compared to FXAA.

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OK, almost everything is better than FXAA. xD But DLSS/FSR/XeSS can also produce bad artifacts if the game has many particle- or transparency effects etc. It could be very hard to do it right in an existing engine.




Cheers

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

We need subsurface scattering for skin, and some form of global illumination (something cheap, precomputed, using proven and well known approaches, like global illumination probes). Those two things would go a long way to improve things.

Perhaps also some color grading improvements would not go amiss to make things look a little less drab in some places.

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Well you can tell from the 1 month testing samples there is some form of subsurface scattering the skin looks way better with how it handles light and self cast shadows. I do agree they need to put a lot of work into those aspects as they are the predominately shown thing in cutscenes (close ups of faces I mean)

I do know they're fixing and improving many features!
The one I'm honestly concerned about are Female Elezen faces and some of the Miqo'te faces. Will the improvements go as far as to completely add more textures that they desperately need?

I made comparisons- the 1st miqo face is how it currently looks if you were to choose it
The 2nd face is my edit that I did in CorelPaint- I added mild improvements but something that face desperately needs. It looks unfinished, stale and needs a texture overhaul.
I gave the face shaded in nostrils, and darkened the inner eyelids.
Miqo Face before my edit
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...qoface1111.png


Miqo face after my Edit
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...ce111edit1.png

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Originally Posted by HeyMcFly

I do know they're fixing and improving many features!

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It takes way too long, the fact is simple, the game running on console is holding back its potential.

https://i.imgur.com/6fl1o6Y.jpg

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Originally Posted by Arohk

It takes way too long, the fact is simple, the game running on console is holding back its potential.

https://i.imgur.com/6fl1o6Y.jpg

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Funnily enough it’s not console it’s low spec pcs. Look at the current minimum specs…. They are worse than a ps4 let alone ps4 pro. Plus consoles you get more performance due to one set of specs comparing to pc equivalent. Yoshi P even stated it’s not console holding it back. PS4 isn’t even getting a lot of the graphics upgrades either. 6.4 live letter he made a comment that he doubts it will run so it’s disabled unless this changes. I’m hoping hair gets more then just texture upgrades, I want more layers to it as well, give it some definition :)

I just bought a PS5 to be ready for FF XVI. It's given XIV a shot in the arm for me at the moment; looks so much better at max graphics and 4K compared to what my old PC could do. I didn't buy the complete game yet but I claimed the free Stormblood offer.

Eyebrows.
For.
Highlanders.

More varied height options would also be nice.