Bring the world to life...
Charred trees, frozen lakes, traveling merchants, remnants of a past war...PLEASE add something to make this lifeless world become more interesting. Every little cave in Uldah and Limsa are exactly the same...I don't want to hear excuses on why everything looks the same, I want something to be done about it.
I'm not going in to details about Gridania...but you should understand, walking through the exact same patch of land over and over again completely ruins immersion and makes you feel detached from the world. It makes it feel small and insignificant.
Add more colors, add some more diverse wild life, that would make me more interested in the game.
Beauty is relative - and hardware hungry
The strange thing looking at ffxiv, there are so many things, especially characters, animations done with so much detail and <3.
the light of a fire reflecting on the character etc. looks amazing.
Then... you are in the forest, or in the desert, wherever and the sun is shining. But...
The only thing with a shadow is you and your companions and npcs and mobs.
there is no shadow on the ground, no tree, no rock really has a shadow. (they have some sort or shadow on themselves where the sun isnt atm but the ground is still without).
looking at other (sometimes much older) games you can see that its really is making the world more realistic and gives atmosphere a lot. when im in Uldah and the sun is almost gone, i still have a massive shadow, but the huge walls of uldah dont cover the city in more or less darkness, which they should. you have static light sources that sometimes dont even match a lantern ...
The other thing that kills the atmosphere is the, i might say, most ugly way of putting textures with the look or 1985 in the - not that far - distance. then being replaced by HD textures when you are closer (depth of field doesnt help here either).
I prefer a bit of a "fog" or 3-4 steps to make it look smooth. Thats a way of killing the HD feeling a lot for me.
the water looks like pudding as well btw.
Cosidering that this game is the most hardware hungry game it offers not much in return. And the engine is still not optimized a single bit. Even in areas without 1 single mob my rig sometimes cries for help - which it doesnt in crysis, aoc, rift, or any other game i played so far. The fact they dindt get the ambient occlusion to work properly -
even lotro has a pretty decent looking AO with 5% performance hit max- is a slap in the face. Its SE, not 1 man company. the options in the menue for graphic should as well be in the game, not before... and there have to be many more tweaking options.
Atm the only thing you can do to increase the performance is.. make the game look like ffxi... that isnt even the standard it was 5 years ago.
and well the other things are said in the former posts :D