Visible Belts?

[Tiggy]

They removed them as I recall for 2 reasons. It lowers the amount of poly's per character helping with performance, and it increases the flexibility in designing gear. I don't think this will ever return.

[Shioban]

I do understand it would take a bit of work to add them into the game, but there aren't that many different belt models which need to be added in, considering most of the belt icons look similar. I Also has there been any news for this in the future? I could not find any.

This will never be added back in. The developers have explained at length as to why.
(I can't find the original post, so I've explained below)

"A bit of work" is an understatement, it would be a metric-ton of work and effort to make these work with the gear we have now.

The icons are the same, simply because we don't see them anymore, there's no need for extravagant or new icons as a result. (They may add more icons in the future simply to break the monotomy).

But you absolutely will NOT see a return of belts (see below)

They removed them as I recall for 2 reasons. It lowers the amount of poly's per character helping with performance,

Nope. The belts added a negligible amount of geometry.

I miss the belts showing in 1.0. I guess we'll see once they finally drop support for the PS3.

That's ridiculous, the belts weren't removed for this reason. They were ugly, they got in the way of designing gear and were a general pain to actually fit on top of most designs.

It was a designers nightmare to start making a new gear design only to have to consider the restrictions that belts imposed. (Almost all of the new gear you've seen in ARR wouldn't have been possible in FFXIV 1.23 without extra effort and a helluvalot of time wasted.

it increases the flexibility in designing gear. I don't think this will ever return.

Yes.



The reason this was done is based on the sheer complexity behind the gear design process in the first-place let alone having to consider how you're going to add a mesh-deformer for belts.
Consider the image below, EVERY piece of gear would have to be adjusted to suit this belt (and all other belts), meaning even the belts would have to be restricting in terms of design to fit, or they'd have to consider the deformation of gear for MULTIPLE types of belts.

See where it's starting to get complex now?



Consider the new gear designs in A Realm Reborn, with the wider variety in styles, shapes and sizes, it becomes an extremely difficult task to add in another consideration such as belts into the mesh-deformer (which collapses the polygons of the model to fit the shape of the belt(or any other piece of gear for that matter) ).



Instead, they decided to focus more on creating interesting designs and axed the belts (which were ridiculous in the first place in terms of design time management/flexibility).

This works miles better, as they can simply work a belt into the gear-design if it suits ( As shown above, the belt suits it, however consider a white-raptorskin-belt ontop of the gear shown below...it would simply ruin the look too)




TL;DR

For a simple and ergonomic design process belts were removed, it also helped improve the overall aesthetics for most gear (as most gear-sets were ruined by belts)

[Jim]

For a simple and ergonomic design process belts were removed, it also helped improve the overall aesthetics for most gear (as most gear-sets were ruined by belts)

Alright thanks for explaining it, ow well, looks like belts went good bye, thanks for helping to solve my question!