Major decrease in graphics quality in new Heavensward areas- unacceptable

[Pancakesandsyrup]

I've compiled a short list of various graphical glitches, errors, and just plain *laziness* of the dev team in the production of the new Heavensward areas. Needless to say, if these are the result of PS3 limitations, then official support for that system needs to go. Now. These are all unacceptable, and are taken on a PC with all the settings tuned to maximum. If you can't bin the PS3 support, at the very least allow an option to download higher-vertex models and high res textures, because some of these are just pathetically bad. Either fix the PC version or I'll just have to let my subscription lapse.

FFXIV has an amazingly high standard for its models, textures and maps in every other area of the game. The bump maps are fantastic, and the lighting just works. What the heck happened in HW production??

• Pillars at Anyx Trine aetheryte are levitating off the ground and poorly modelled.

• Laughably low resolution textures in the "nests" in Sea of Clouds where captured soldiers are kept. Am I playing a PS1 game??

• This is perhaps the most offensively bad model in the game. What am I looking at here? It's ostensibly a tarp for a camp, but all I see is a mess of blue polygons. And using the "out of sight, out of mind" excuse doesn't count for much, given that I happened to find another player literally standing on top of this pile of 12 polygons.

• The number of polygons used in the stage for Singularity Reactor is astoundingly low. The textures are so janky that no amount of anisotropic filtering is fixing their pixellation. I can't even tell what I'm looking at on the wall. Is it flesh? Rock? Veins? I just see "mashy pinkish blob on dirty purple blob". The entire area needs to be completely remodelled and retextured.

• Minion flavour text crops outside of speech bubble. Needs to be revamped with proper padding on all dialogue boxes.

• I stood next to this "hilltop" outside Idyllshire (near Alexander) to demonstrate the sheer SCALE of these low-polygon problems. There are three triangles here. Three. To make a human-sized hill. The entire hillside has fewer polygons than a fence at the edge of Limsa Lominsa. This clearly bespeaks major problems with the priorities of the development staff. I'm not even going to mention the glossy, plastic "grass". What happened to the amazing texture qualities of this game going into Heavensward?

• More bad texture work. Far too low resolution for such a large object, and the rims of the leaves are covered with a sickly yellow. It's very disconcerting to see a weird, giant, flat blob of poorly drawn green and yellow splotches floating in the air where a tree should be. There aren't even individual leaves here; just a tesellated texture patern. Yuck.

• This is less of a clear graphical error and more an example of sheer laziness- the entire wall is a single rectangle. Nothing to break it up. No attempt was even cursorily made at decorating it. A clear decrease in quality from the buildings in ARR.

• Even at maximum settings, mid-range distances lose all shadows and virtually all textures, water becomes a filthy green-blue colour, and the entire area looks at though it were composed within MS Paint.

• Another example of lazy mapmaking- grass hovers over the streets of Idyllshire and surrounds. Also note the ridiculous, uninterrupted, lazy triangular white barriers on all the roads and pathways. Talk about immersion breaking. :|

• Textures so murky you can see the individual pixels (smoothed out though they may be) at the Great Gubal Library.

• Another example of lazy modelling- the turret is an ultra-low-poly cylinder that's just had a grass texture sprayed on.

• Low poly, low res, low detail branches completely ruin the illusion of it actually being a tree fort.

• Gargantuan, extruded hexagons. What are they? I honestly have no clue. Again, amazingly low-poly for such a large landscape feature. Not as bad as the 3-triangle hill, but still shamefully bad to ship in a finished product. Let's ignore the textures, because nothing good can be said of them, either.

• A "bush"??? Again, sheer laziness and extreme conservatism with regard to system resources- an obvious nod to PS3 limitations.

• Another graphical glitch with the rendering engine- under direct sunlight or at particular angles, the gigantic (sloppy) rock walls that surround most heavensward areas become reflective and shiny, like they've been coated in nail polish. Why??

As I said, these issues *need* to be fixed. Either release a higher-quality model and texture pack for PC, or remove PS3 support ASAP and release a patch fixing these for everyone.

This is unacceptable. If I don't get some kind of response (please, at least a "We're aware this is a problem"), then I have no choice but to cancel my subscription.

[LeeraSorlan]

The hovering objects are quite an eyesore, but uhh, there was loads of horribly rendered low res objects in 2.0 as well.Just go look around the world.
Nothing youve shown here is exclusive to HW.
Of course that doesnt make it acceptable, just a note.

[Enkidoh]

A lot of the issues those screenshots you posted clearly show problems associated with your graphics card/video drivers and are not the fault of the game itself (especially the ones showing scenery tearing and deformation - graphical artifacts often are a sign your video card is dying a slow and painful death). You say you've turned all the settings up to maximum, then I think that's a sign your system simply isn't capable of running the game at that level. Turn down the settings and things should improve - don't be so quick to point fingers and accuse the development team for 'a decrease in quality' in HW (which there isn't). Maybe a hardware upgrade is in order?

Hells, my crappy Athlon X2 dual core with 2gb of RAM and Windows XP is running HW areas fine and with none of those issues you're showing, but then, I don't have the graphical settings turned up to maximum so there you are.

[Pancakesandsyrup]

I hate to say it, but you're plainly wrong. Graphics cards don't magically exclude content, lower polygons or decrease texture sizes if they're "dying". This is the quality of the game. It might look somewhat more exaggerated in terms of its pixellation because the screenshots are small and taken from only one portion of the screen, but I can guarantee you my graphics card is working just fine and none of the issues are with it- they are specifically relevant to this game only.

I was incredibly careful to include things that could not possibly be the result of the individual configuration of one's system. Polygon counts are fixed- unless you magically have a system that's tweaking the LoDs on everything- a polygon is a polygon is a polygon. My issues are 100% valid and they still stand.

[AriaEnia]

I dunno, in PS4, I've never found any issue such as those, everything's beautifully rendered, except those 2D tree leaves, which is I think to accomodate PS3 and low spec VGA cards.

[Pancakesandsyrup]

The hovering objects are quite an eyesore, but uhh, there was loads of horribly rendered low res objects in 2.0 as well.Just go look around the world.
Nothing youve shown here is exclusive to HW.
Of course that doesnt make it acceptable, just a note.

I agree- there were some poorly rendered objects. But it's taken a very noticeable turn for the worse in HW, in my opinion. Especially in the flying zones. And while the objects themselves were sometimes poor, the textures were usually stellar. Now even those have taken a hit

But yes, it's inexcusable.

[Pancakesandsyrup]

I dunno, in PS4, I've never found any issue such as those, everything's beautifully rendered, except those 2D tree leaves, which is I think to accomodate PS3 and low spec VGA cards.

You've never noticed them, or they aren't there? Things like low polygon hills, clipping furniture and pixelated textures aren't the result of your system- they're a result of the amount of effort that goes into constructing the game.

[AriaEnia]

You've never noticed them, or they aren't there? Things like low polygon hills, clipping furniture and pixelated textures aren't the result of your system- they're a result of the amount of effort that goes into constructing the game.

Nope, I don't think they are there (on PS4) and I have high attention to detail, and I can say the graphics (on PS4) are beautifully detailed, from lighting, cloud, fog, water, contrast and colour, rendering and everything.

[Pancakesandsyrup]

Nope, I don't think they are there (on PS4) and I have high attention to detail, and I can say the graphics (on PS4) are beautifully detailed, from lighting, cloud, fog, water, contrast and colour, rendering and everything.

That was a rhetorical question; I can guarantee they are there. It is impossible for them to have made 3 separate versions of every map, and to have inexplicably removed polygons from the PC version and added new ones to the PS4 version.

[AriaEnia]

Isn't that what they do when rendering? Making circle things to become octagonal to preserve memory for lower settings? Removing anti-aliasing for performance is also the cause of this.
Hovering grass probably because there's many grasses there in higher settings so the hovering grass is actually on the middle of the grasses around it to give them some height, and when they reduce for them for lower settings, it becomes visible.

Edit: but then again, I'm not an expert on this so, it's based from what I observe when I used to play PC games, changing many GFX settings lowering them to make the games run smoother.