So are consoles holding back this game?

[Bishop81]

HDDs can transfer around 40MB/s+ (theoretically it could go higher, but other things play into it), that's much more than enough to move the texture to the VRAM (I don't know much about this, but I figure that's how it works). If a HDD can handle the likes of Metro Last Light at 4k (the textures in that game are amazing) why can't it take FFXIV? You might throw in the "it's a multiplayer game, it has to load every individual player" which is true, but to my knowledge it caps out and only loads more after you move away from the people you're close to. I'm not asking for mind blowing textures, just something that doesn't look like someone smeared **** and threw it into the game, or pixel art. I specifically remember a Roe in the Crystal Tower quest line that had a chest piece that looks like it's textures could have come out of Minecraft, or at least a part of it. There's also problems like this, which ruins the aesthetic of the area imho.

40MiB/s is very slow if you are trying to fill 2GiB of VRAM - 51.2 secs, that is nearly a minute. Heck, even if you kept textures to 1 GiB, it would be 25.6 secs. Imagine a 25 sec+ load screen.

I don't know about Metro Last Light but if you look at games like Bloodborne ... the load times are atrocious.

Adding mip-maps to every texture would increase the memory load by 33.3%, if they can't even afford that ...

[Colorful]

40MiB/s is very slow if you are trying to fill 2GiB of VRAM - 51.2 secs, that is nearly a minute. Heck, even if you kept textures to 1 GiB, it would be 25.6 secs. Imagine a 25 sec+ load screen.

I don't know about Metro Last Light but if you look at games like Bloodborne ... the load times are atrocious.

Adding mip-maps to every texture would increase the memory load by 33.3%, if they can't even afford that ...

I'm going to have to assume Bloodborne's insane load times are tied to either the game being made horribly, or a limitation elsewhere on the PS4. You can easily use an SSD with a PS4, and yet the load times are still atrocious as you put it, barely beating out the HDD. Long longing has been an issue with consoles for ages now, on a HDD I can load up a heavily modded Skyrim with 2k textures within 10-20 seconds, can't say the same for a lot of console games.