Crystarium. So that town we caught a glimpse of in 2005 officially has a name now.

[MrThinker]

i thought it looked to original for this dev team to make it -_-
should have known it was from another game.....

It technically wasn't, the tech demo was FOR the original ffxiv. They just changed many things before the release.

[RenewalXVII]

I mean I'm trying to imagine them in as best I can, but short of using a ton of them the huge spaces just don't seem very welcoming(?) or practical, I guess? I don't know; kind of an odd feeling. I like the area more than RT and maybe Idllyshire (though that's kind of comparing small settlement apples to city oranges), but less than RR or Kugane. With NPCs, I imagine I'll like it about as much as Ishgard if Ishgard didn't have loading screens.

It's obviously hard to say given it's still under development, but it may be a deliberate thematic choice. The world is ending after all, and it may be the case that people are dying off and leaving the Crystarium emptier and more and more sterile-feeling as you note. It's slowly becoming an ossified monument to what were once the people of Norvrandt. Just a thought anyway; I'm probably reading too much into it.

[Jonnycbad]

Is this not the city from the 1.0 trailer where the WoL is picking out Leves?

[YianKutku]

According to the dev panel, the background artists actually had their own approaches for the Crystarium at first, under the basic idea of "a town built around crystals", and they went through several revisions and feedback before the art director suddenly told them "we've decided to use the concept from the old E3 tech demo from 2005", and they had to start all over again.

The reason for this was because YoshiP kept getting the feeling that no matter what the art team gave him, he felt that it was just slightly off, but couldn't put it in words. He told this to Banri Oda, who went "I think I know what you're talking about", and showed YoshiP the E3 tech demo, which YoshiP had seen before a long time ago, and apparently subconsciously wanted to replicate for Crystarium. So YoshiP gave the art team their orders.

So that's why the current Crystarium looks basically like the Project Rapture tech demo for FFXIV from 2005.

[Enkidoh]

Is this not the city from the 1.0 trailer where the WoL is picking out Leves?

It's not actually - the Adventurer's Guild shown in the 1.0 opening movie is actually a very early design for the Drowning Wench, where there was meant to be more grander stonework and the aetheryte is right in the centre of the Adventurer's Guild. 1.0's original producer Hiromichi Tanaka quickly realized though that was not going to end well though (making the Adventurer's Guild a hub area) and quickly changed it that the city aetherytes were in a different location, and the Drowning Wench got a makeover so as that it ended up resembling little of the opening movie (the only way you can really tell it's even meant to be Limsa Lominsa in the first place is that the Resolve guildleve that Derplander picks from the levemete counter has 'Limsa Lominsa' stencilled on it.).

Either way, Crystarium resembling the old Rapture tech demo and the Adventurer's Guild in the 1.0 opening movie is simply a clever call back to the game's early history and is not representative of something deeper.

[Anonymoose]

He told this to Banri Oda, who went "I think I know what you're talking about", and showed YoshiP the E3 tech demo

The fact that this was Oda-san's fault makes me smile. Of course it would be connected somehow to the lore team.

[YianKutku]

The fact that this was Oda-san's fault makes me smile. Of course it would be connected somehow to the lore team.

Yeah, YoshiP said Oda was also happy with this, because it let the team tie up another loose end from 1.0, so the decision was made not just because YoshiP wanted it to look like the E3 tech demo on a whim.

[Fenral]

Is it fitting that we're getting that tech demo realized 14 years later? I think so.

[Anonymoose]

cLeArLy iT wAs pLaNnEd aLl aLoNg

[StarDrake]

Is it just me or does a lot of the ShB town look more... sterile, so to speak, than the one in the tech demo?

What you're probably feeling is that the lighting is different and there's also no water (especially not water like *that*) and there isn't stuff like the greenery at the bottom of the rock pillars in the demo. And while part of that is the different setting and a bit of deliberate sterility, like Moose points out, there's another aspect to this: today's FFXIV isn't the Rapture demo. Because it can't be.

Yoshida and the art crew touched on this, but the Rapture demo was made to show off what a future Square Enix MMO might look like. Which is to say, it uses all of the then-new rendering processes that came with DirectX 9.0c... but with unlimited processing power. The artists were told to make things as complicated as they liked, because the demo would be shot and demonstrated as showing off a DirectX 9-rendered demo, but processing wouldn't be an issue because it would be simulating what SE expected to be possible in a decade or so. So they did things like fully model the light bulbs or do that completely absurd full-screen, full-model real time lake reflection that makes up the last ten seconds of the demo. The demo would never have actually run on a PS3, and isn't even really possible on a PS4 Pro or a gaming PC today.

So yes, it feels more "alive" because it's doing things that you just likely won't see in the real XIV until at least the middle of next decade, if we ever see them.

(Though hilariously, Yoshi did briefly concede that a number of the textures are actually not all that advanced compared to what's possible today. The demo anticipated full-scene pixel shaded water reflection but didn't anticipate surface mapping. :V )