The fact of the matter is

[Aistaraina]

The engine can easily render massive areas beautifully with high resolution textures a feat that I have yet to see another engine pull off as well thus far.

Source.
Unreal 3.
CryEngine 3.
Avalanche 2.0.
Frostbite 2.0.

There are enough engines out there that make Crystal Tools look like a kids toy.

And your above statement is seriously flawed. Take a look at this screenshot.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink
Notice the difference in the rocks just in front of me, and the sidewalk on the right. It's pretty clear to me it cannot render large sections with high resolution textures. It has a serious pop in effect due to an apparent lack of mipmap support.

[Chocobits]

Source.
Unreal 3.
CryEngine 3.
Avalanche 2.0.
Frostbite 2.0.

There are enough engines out there that make Crystal Tools look like a kids toy.

And your above statement is seriously flawed. Take a look at this screenshot.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink
Notice the difference in the rocks just in front of me, and the sidewalk on the right. It's pretty clear to me it cannot render large sections with high resolution textures. It has a serious pop in effect due to an apparent lack of mipmap support.

link is busted

[Aistaraina]

link is busted

Haha. My bad. Accidentally put it in a new album, not my public XIV album.

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink

Instead we have a ugly border between near and far and models just pop out of nowhere :P

Above pic as proof! This should not happen when running the game at max settings...

[Tsukino]

Unreal 3.

Sure is awesome having everything in a game look like a pile of feces for several seconds before the game decides to load a good texture.

More seriously though, while Crystal Tools might not be the most advanced engine out there in terms of technical specifications, the results SE has produced both times they've used it feature artistry miles ahead of anything that uses Source or Cry3 or whatever. FFXIII may not be a good game, but the graphics blow almost every other console game out of the water, all without the noticeable texture popping or severe clipping issues most games made with third-party engines do. FFXIV may be behind PC games in general, but no other MMO out or soon to be out looks as good, and that's an important distinction.

Just because it doesn't have as many modern features does not mean it isn't the tool best suited to the people who are using it. So far they've shown that it works for them, and it's not a commercial engine so that's all it needs to do.

This all has very little to do with what the OP is saying though. The server dependency is unrelated to the graphics or the engine they were designed with.

[Coldfire]

FFXIII may not be a good game, but the graphics blow almost every other console game out of the water, all without the noticeable texture popping or severe clipping issues most games made with third-party engines do.

Instead we have a ugly border between near and far and models just pop out of nowhere :P

The engine was just not made for MMOs or PC. The lighting is a bad joke as well as the LoD. The high detail of the characters has nothing to do with the engine(which is the only nice graphical feature this game has). The models were obviously done by designers and they did a very nice job. The coders however... oh well <.<

[Kyant]

Source.
Unreal 3.
CryEngine 3.
Avalanche 2.0.
Frostbite 2.0.

There are enough engines out there that make Crystal Tools look like a kids toy.

And your above statement is seriously flawed. Take a look at this screenshot.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink
Notice the difference in the rocks just in front of me, and the sidewalk on the right. It's pretty clear to me it cannot render large sections with high resolution textures. It has a serious pop in effect due to an apparent lack of mipmap support.

In a later post the link was changed to this... which works: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink


Let me get out my magnifying glass... wait... is that it? hmm... no. I still don't see anything. I seriously have know idea what you are talking about. The picture looks fine to me. When were graphics the deciding factor for a game? If you think that they are then get out. Also, if you were standing (in real life, mind you) on top of a bridge, and you looked down at something 300 or 400 feet away, then of course you wouldn't see it as clear as something right in front of you. You people seem to think that no matter where something is, you should be able to see every detail there is, and you can't. Not in life and not in FFXIV.

Graphics are second to gameplay and story. The only reason you people are upset is because you hyped up the game to be something that it wasn't. You let your imagination get away from you.

A lot of you are citing other games that have better graphics and things, but to the best of my knowledge those were not MMOs. Graphics are easier on games that are single player or multiplayer with max of what? 32 people? In an MMO with hundreds of people, it is more difficult to do graphics and I think SE did a great job. No one complained about FFXI or WoW's lack in graphics before...

As for the delay problem, btw, I have noticable delay while on my laptop, but not while on my desktop. My desktop is much more powerful than my laptop, so I want to say that the hardware on your computer might be causing lag in addition to the normal lag. Probably because there is a lot of information going through the CPU and slower computers can't handle it as well... or something... but if you are maxing out your graphics and have lag, I suggest putting them down a notch and I think it will help reduce the lag, it did for me.

[Davorok]

FFXI 0n PS2 = Gimped PC graphics & gameplay experience.

FFXIV on PS3 = Gimped PC graphics & gameplay experience.

PC's will always outpace Consoles and so any Cross-Platform games will always be gimped for PC.

[Zion_Cross]

Source.
Unreal 3.
CryEngine 3.
Avalanche 2.0.
Frostbite 2.0.

There are enough engines out there that make Crystal Tools look like a kids toy.

And your above statement is seriously flawed. Take a look at this screenshot.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink
Notice the difference in the rocks just in front of me, and the sidewalk on the right. It's pretty clear to me it cannot render large sections with high resolution textures. It has a serious pop in effect due to an apparent lack of mipmap support.

Source isn't that amazing.
Unreal handles static meshes well and can be heavily modded
CryEngine 3 is being used for controlled areas and small playing fields
Avalanche... really?
Frostbite - Low poly models to compensate for the large maps it's used on.

Crystal engine takes advantage of the normal maps to no end to create an illusion that wins over every engine you mentioned concerning over MMO elements, not to mention the game already looks amazing when it comes to the details of every single individual model( Aka every single piece of armor or weapon). You can't put the cryengine 3 running on an MMO because it's already been designed into small scale play. You don't have 1k players in there noting the server every action they make. You have yourself and a programmed AI, let alone the amount of landscape put out into the world. UE3 isn't that much different either as it works under sections and devs have to use the same normal maps illusion to get by on the terrain and landscape. I won't get too much into detail, but, I will say this much - I feel that the world in ffxiv needs a bit of a jump start on moving npc's like in sandoria, more beastmen outside of towns working as scouts. If you kill on of the beastmen the other would run away into a dark corner of an uldahn mountain and spawn two others to give him some back up. If you kill him before then you might get an item or something. Something that speaks up a little bit of dynamic movement between the player and the atmosphere of the game.

To be frank it's the devs behind the engine that can make the most out of it and they do just that in their own controlled environment ( being the reason why the title games under their respective engines were built in such ways as either single player, small scale multi player, or massive online shooter ( which were low poly as hell on console ).

P.S. links busted.