Is most of FFXIV's failings due to their choice of engine?

[Allcars]

Is XI's battle system unbalanced because of technology?
Are XI's environments unimaginative because of technology?
Are XI's multiple zones and variety in battle areas limited because of technology?
Is the storyline un-interesting because of technology?
Are features like level sync and fame limited by technology?

And finally in a game that you play for thousands of hours, are the graphics a really notable boost to gameplay past the first 15 minutes?

I never played XI, but lets take a look at what the Devs envisioned for FFXIV, Look at the lighting, the shading the architecture, the real time water reflections. What happened, sure don't get me wrong FFXIV looks amazing, I max the game out, but should the cost of resources it requires to run at the highest quality be justified for what we have currently? I think not, a game like blade and soul has better shading and lighting, sure it may have lower texture quality, but look at how nice it looks blade and soul looks as is. When you are using Unreal Engine 3 you also get fantastic lighting realtime water effects amazing shading detail rich character detail, no load zones so you can steam content. All at very low resources on your hardware. Crystal tool may have potential, but currently the only potential I have seen is the character detail, and sometimes with the clipping errors, and lack of more realistic cloth physics that is bogged down.

Don't get me wrong I love playing FFXIV, I just think they could have optimized more visually for currently high level hardware than what we currently have. Low detailed water, lighting that reminds me of more unreal 2.x, load zones, shadows that eat up any high end hardware.

[Elexia]

For one thing...a TECH DEMO IS A DEMONSTRATION OF HARDWARE, in this case, that was demonstrating the XBOX 360, note that it was release around 360's release, it is not a promo video nor an early build.

You can also say what happened with the FFVII PS3 Tech Demo that was also released around the PS3's release which we all know won't be made unless they get the people for it and I can guarantee it will be scaled back.

FFXIII, FFXIII-2 and FF Versus XIII are CT games, "clipping" is found in every engine.

[Allcars]

For one thing...a TECH DEMO IS A DEMONSTRATION OF HARDWARE, in this case, that was demonstrating the XBOX 360, note that it was release around 360's release, it is not a promo video nor an early build.

You can also say what happened with the FFVII PS3 Tech Demo that was also released around the PS3's release which we all know won't be made unless they get the people for it and I can guarantee it will be scaled back.

FFXIII, FFXIII-2 and FF Versus XIII are CT games, "clipping" is found in every engine.

The point I was trying to make is if that techdemo was made using hardware from 2005, why are we stuck with the graphics we have right now in this game. I know the scale back graphics for the final product, but really its been how many years since they showed that? This game is by no means the best looking mmorpg out on the market. I feel that in order to make the game equally on both platforms the ps3 and pc they didn't bother putting in as much time as they should have with optimizing this engine. I realize there is clipping in every game engine, the fact of the matter is its the games biggest graphical point and they still didn't give it their all,

The FFVII techdemo just that a techdemo, and it looked nice, but look at the next gen mmo techdemo that they showed off for the 360. the key words here are next gen mmo so even if it wasn't ffxiv it was their next gen mmo at the time.

[Elexia]

Look at the opening of FFXIV, it's the same thing as the tech demo. A tech demo isn't something that's playable unless its showcasing a certain feature. XIV's 360 tech demo was a video, like the opening to FFXIV. I get what you're trying to say, but it's a bit misleading due to the fact a tech demo isn't an indication of anything other than what the hardware can do.

XIV is indeed horribly optimized especially in comparison to FFXIII, but we know they're working on it.

[TessaJalloh]

The engine really isn't at fault here, crystal tools itself is actually a pretty good game engine. When you take an engine made for single player console games however, and supplant it into an MMORPG, which has to load far more assets at once than a single player adventure, then run all of that loading through a server which has to communicate back what everything actually is so that you can load it.

It slows things down, normally this isn't an issue because they'd have far more optimised code, but they rushed things. Crystal tools itself is fine, FFXIV's utilisation of it is at fault here.

That being said, for a game with such poor optimisation, it's still REALLY pretty, even on standard settings and without AA turned on. SE told us before when they were making the game that it would be built with the future in mind, that would mean hardware upgrades would be needed to play it. we all knew this, they released a benchmark for us to find out where we stood, many of us did upgrade.

But think on it this way, the game will still be beautiful in five years time, when other titles will begin to look stale. By then we may even had have code tightened up, and a few features added to the rendering, like that 1-1 reflections on water everyone keeps banging on about, or volumetric shadows and lighting.

[Abriael]

Lol. Funny how the same people have to open the same threads every time a movie of a new game comes out, showing zero ability to assess a game's graphics critically in the process (excluding FFXIV of course, lol).

Blade and Soul has nice graphics, but it's nothing so special. The ground is made up of completely flat, blurry textures, with no mapping at all, ground-level vegetstion (grass and similar) is extremely flat as well (literally, a low-rez texture slapped on a flat polygon), and very sparse, creating the extremely annoying "glued on the ground" effect. Water is nothing special and actually inferior to FFXIV, shadows are a nice have, but they don't even cast on characters, creating an ugly effect where your *fully lighted* char walks under a shadow and gets no shading in it.

Finally, characters are so undetailed, in comparison to FFXIV, that it isn't even funny. And characters make the biggest impact on the hardware (not to mention the focal point on any scene, so I agree wholeheartedly with SE's choice of focusing a large percentage of the hardware resources on the rendering of characters).

It's funny, how biased people only pull out a *part* of a game's graphics to create a biased comparison with FFXIV.
"oh! Look! the environments are so good! (ignoring all their flaws of course)", but of course they don't make any mention of the much less detailed characters and their blurry textures, like environments and characters don't have to be rendered on ths same screen sharing the same resources.

So, to respond the silly question, no. The engine is fine. When another engine will produce actually better overall results we'll talk.

[Seif]

In the end of the day who cares about what the cake looks like if it tastes good? Then again I wouldn't call the taste of this cake especially tempting so maybe that's why everybody is just poking at it with spoons and with looks of disgust on their faces.

[Nuru]

and the ability to jump!

Jumping is an Environmental Visual? >_> Either im getting smarter or people aren't making any sense.

Anyways, what Gramul said on page 1. Its not so much the engine, but its the copy and pasting of objects due to the cut in production time. I sure with some rendering and intensified shadows, this game could look better than that. However, i think graphics are just something they are not even beginning to think about working on right now, since most of what a game is about is its Gameplay, not how decorated the turd is.

[Jinko]

Crystal tools was designed with the intention to produce seamless cinematic cut-scenes using the in game engine.

That's fine for a single player experience but doesn't lend itself very well to a massive open world like an MMO, as previously mentioned Crystal tools doesn't utilise streaming very well and thats why we have huge copy and paste zones. (lets not forget that the PS3 is limiting this due to memory restraints, something the PC doesn't have an issue with so much)


Final Fantasy XIV = Crystal Tools + PS3 = pretty bad limitations.
Blade and Soul = UE3 + PS3 = much better streaming capabilities and doesn't have such an impact on limiting the PC version.

[Abriael]

Crystal tools was designed with the intention to produce seamless cinematic cut-scenes using the in game engine.

That's fine for a single player experience but doesn't lend itself very well to a massive open world like an MMO, as previously mentioned Crystal tools doesn't utilise streaming very well and thats why we have huge copy and paste zones. (lets not forget that the PS3 is limiting this due to memory restraints, something the PC doesn't have an issue with so much)


Final Fantasy XIV = Crystal Tools + PS3 = pretty bad limitations.
Blade and Soul = UE3 + PS3 = much better streaming capabilities and doesn't have such an impact on limiting the PC version.

The unreal engine 3 is a multiplatform engine as well, and is just as limited. Put on blade and soul the same character details, the same polygon count and texture resolution and effects and then we'll talk