Why do so many textures look like they are from a ps2 game?

[Noodle_Trinidad]

I think you've mistaken why they zoom in on something in scenes.

It's not to impress you, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's because whatever they are focusing on is meant to be exactly that - the visual focus for a narrative reason. They aren't saying "this looks awesome, look closely at all 5 pixels it has" they are saying "this stuff is 'important' to what is going on in this scene right now" (relative levels of importance, obviously - early important stuff won't be all that important, but in the context of the scene in which it appears they are generally the focus of the narrative, at least briefly).

The focus is still meant to "Awe" you in some manner and the pixelization just takes you out of it because what was supposed to look like some grandiose or important item is now some staircase of a mess that has you wondering: "Is that suppose to look like that? Are my settings on Max? Did I accidentally drop it to low and AA off or something?". This game is in need of some serious texture overhaul, though I would love for the models to be updated a bit as well but thats more expensive and aren't in a position where earlier work would make them future proof like the textures should have been.

I agree the pixelation on some of the outfits is a bad problem. But WoW does not look fundamentally different to me now then when I played in back in Burning Crusade. It has the same wacky cartoon art style that was used by games that couldn't offer good graphics and that hasn't changed it seems. I grand you WoW's graphics isn't terribly pixelated, but it still looks low res, a consequence of being a 2004 game. Comparing screenshots from WoW today to screenshots from 2004, the game hasn't evolved that much in the graphics department. I've seen World of Tanks preform HD transformation that was practically night and day compared to WoW. Screenshots from 2010 and now look almost nothing alike.

FFXIV has a most realistic art style to it, but the resolutions are inconsistent. That makes it better in my opinion because they aren't cheating with cartoon art styles, but I agree the excessive pixelization is a problem. Even though the characters in SWTOR was cartoony and looked like they were made of clay, I don't really recall seeing that much pixelization in the outfits.

The issue is while it's technically playing it safe by using a cartoon art style to make graphics and textures that much easier at the very least they have taken advantage of what they have to make sure their textures pop. FFXIV has gone for the realism route to an extent but haven't put in the effort to make it consistent in the long run. The biggest offender is the fact that Yoshida himself admitted to making low res textures when by now its known that the industry standard is to make the source files at a higher resolution and scale them down accordingly for level of system and its limitation. If you're gonna go for a "Realistic" style then you can not make compromises with such things with base textures as that can run your overall aesthetic. Art Style can take you far but if you're not willing to put in the work to make it work and instead go for the fastest possible route you'll eventually pay for it. The textures were fine at launch because it was launch. Now that game is running freely with a decently sized playerbase and one of its original consoles discontinued it would have only made sense for Stormblood to have introduce that texture bump for PC and PS4 players alike.

I'm more than certain that if we had actual high-res source files for the textures PC and even the PS4 would have been able to get a bigger bump in graphical fidelity that would slowly get bogged down by the Low-Poly models a few more expansions which by then would probably mean an overhaul overall given the standard would be significantly higher than it is now.