Can we get HQ textures yet? It's 2018

[MrKusakabe]

I'd gladly shell $10 on the mog station for this.

What? What's next? Locking sound in mono and if we want stereo sound we gotta pay, too? Stop that!!

EDIT: But I'd like if Squeenix would get me high-resolution hairstyles. I have the Papalymo hairstyle and it is clearly still in 1.x state (a bit washed out) compared to the new(er) ones.

I'd love to see this game have higer quality textures but as an MMO, I wonder how SE's gonna do it when in instances like Eureka there are graphical issues with NMs disappearing mid-battle, animation glitches etc.? what I'm pointing at is despite having a good PC build for most new AAA games, FFXIV might still not run as smoothly/prettily on it due to other factors. I don't mind a possible separate content/DLC for such textures (optional of course) but let's not encourage SE to make us pay for it.

I don't think the amount of character models being rendered would cause trouble with the terrain textures. I come from GW2 a couple of days ago, it looks pretty stale and despite I am playing "only" in FullHD, disabled AntiAlias and reflections, I've got like 30-45 frames unstable over there. I am running a Ryzen 7 1700X and GTX1080. I think I am pretty much set with that, but not if the engine sucks monkey ba.. The performance we have here is awesome and the problems you describe seem more or less easy to fix.

[duvvvv]

I don't think the amount of character models being rendered would cause trouble with the terrain textures. (snipped).. The performance we have here is awesome and the problems you describe seem more or less easy to fix.

like how?
and did I say it's about the number of people in Eureka that's causing NMs to disappear mid-battle? I mean, I've partied with people on PS pro, and on a high-end rig like yours and they'd tell me they can't see the NM or the party, while I play on a 1060 budget build and could see it clear as day. it's definitely not client side. and apparently it's been an issue since 2.0
and further discussion here i.e. I ain't making this up.

also, is it just terrain or isn't this thread asking for holistic upgrade including character models?
tldr; I'm not against improvement, I also believe this game performs way better than many other MMOs out there, but it's also not perfect. so I hope Squeenix fix some of these performance issues first before they do pretty up the game.
substance over style IMO.

[Nerfworthy]

I support this request, I have a monster for a PC so I would love to have HD textures. Definitely should be optional though because I know not everyone has a good PC.

[Rofel]

I'm all for improving the game, but...

SE is still having a hard time prioritizing mobs in a crowded area, so I'm not sure putting better stuff on the screen would help with these kind of stuff that needs to be adressed.

[Makeda]

there's still something called minimum PC requirements.

That was my thinking too...

But if these are something you only end up downloading if you toggle them on... then that concern goes away.

The best known example of what the OP is asking for happening to an MMO would be WoW's update to the character models. They started doing that in... I think, 2013 or so... (Seriously fuzzy on this though). As of today you can still access the old models for any older race... and it appears the races coming in their next expansion will only have higher detail models...

So... if that is true, if the next expansion ALSo disables the old models... then we can still say that in late 2018, they will be finally shutting off support for models that were made for 2004 computers... and allowing only models that would have needed some hardware that came out after 2013 or maybe even a little earlier... (after all, when the new models came out, they didn't need the newest system, but anything still 'current' at that time...)

So... if we got high rez-textures as an option now... and then they disabled the low-rez ones in say... 5+ years... that would be entirely reasonable.

[XenoCranel]

The "server limitations" joke only applies when it's bandwidth related or server-sided. Anything the client sees is not.

Hence the "disappearing players/mobs" in Eureka is a client-sided priority thing, it draws everything it can until it hits the frame limiter, and then stops. Otherwise we'd see flickering and seizure-inducing effects as the combat effects end up on every second or third frame. There is a reason for what it does, and it's generally an issue more for the DX9 client since DX9 doesn't have threaded draw calls.

"server limitations" are things like inventory or map sizes. Someone with a potato laptop can still play in the large maps, but the draw distance would be reduced. But from the server side, it can only track X many players and entities combined. Beyond a certain point the server itself would slow down, and that would show up as command lag, rubber banding, and "dying" before the monster attacks.

People still buy laptops with only iGPU's, for $500. Those machines are technically inferior to play ANYTHING, but people will still try, thus the game client has to be able to play with everything turned off. You can play FFXIV on a 4400 iGPU (Haswell), but it won't be fun.

but server limitations tho...

[Alucard135]

but server limitations tho...

Please look forward to it

[Jijifli]

there's still something called minimum PC requirements.

Then they don't have to run the HD version?

Like, it's not a hard concept. Minimum requirements are listed at what you need to run the game at the lowest settings, not the highest. If that's the excuse to no HD, then you might as well already remove maximum.

[Alucard135]

They need to put more details into the diffuse maps for the gears also. Because it'd be pointless to just put them in high res. If you were to us a higher res diffuse map for the cape in the image below, it would just be a bland yellow mark without the jagged edges. For now, anything post 1.0 is just a bland mixture of colors. All the details are in the normal maps.

Cape is 3.0 model and shoulder pad is 1.0

[ChocoFeru]

HD textures are easy to implement because these textures already exist (designers create HD textures, then downscale them to our current low-quality textures).

Also, textures are all about VRAM, it doesn't even need much extra power to load.
Anyways, lots of games have the option to change texture quality, so people concerned about the "minimum requirements" shouldn't worry.


As I said in the other thread, the only real problem is server traffic, since the game would weight 2 or 3 more times. That means that patches would take longer to download, expansions as well etc etc...

Still, we NEED this. People is jumping to 2K and 4K screens and our eyes bleed.