Quote Originally Posted by Abriael View Post
When the cryengine will be able to render a MMORPG game that looks even remotely overally better than FFXIV, then you'd have any ground about it's superiority. So far there's none, and even between future games, there's none that looks even nearly as good.

There are always tradeoffs when chosing different engines, but for now (and for the foreseeable future), FFXIV is by quite a large amount the best looking MMORPG on the market. That wasn't achieved with your beloved cryengine, but with the crystal tools.
In some ways Crystal Tools seems better given the fact that FFXIV is a very beautiful MMO in 90% of cases, but I would like to have seen what SE was capable of doing with another engine just for comparison. It's hard to tell how much of FFXIV's beauty is due to SE's artistic flare and what is courtesy of the tools used to make the game.

As I said earlier, SE isn't able to render water or fire properly with the Crystal Tools engine, nor are they able to create a seamless world. Some of these factors have contributed to the copy-and-paste situation everyone is so fond of. For example, in order to create such a large world, SE had to employ the cheat of using repeated blocks of land which are loaded in as you zone into the area. If they had used an engine capable of loading in the geography around a player as he moves, then they wouldn't have needed to make this compromise.

Also, there is no blurring between low-res and high-res textures in the distance. So as you move, you see a definite line between the two qualities of textures. Up close, everything looks good, but far away, you realise something is wrong.

The most attractive thing about FFXIV is the fluid character animations and artistic style. I am not so satisfied with the quality of the construction of the rest of the world though.