Would you like to see a texture update?

[JisKing98]

I dream where they put ff16 as a mmo on UE5. Let the graphics destroy my pc.
As for a texture pack, i know pc players wouldnt mind although i can also see ps4 players complaining about it. Im more on the side of might as well update everything engine, character models, textures, etc.

[Morningstar1337]

I dream where they put ff16 as a mmo on UE5. Let the graphics destroy my pc.

Wasn't that part of the issue with 1.0? graphics destroying PCs?

[Shougun]

Wasn't that part of the issue with 1.0? graphics destroying PCs?

Well they had flower pots with the polygon count equal to players. They had beautiful animations but no smooth animation canceling in many situations, physics that ate PCs, etc, etc. Some of it was not, I think, due to quality but both weird decisions and optimization wasn't ready (weird decision being something like a flower pot being equal to a player character lol), as I've seen a lot of this stuff in other games and my PC (at the same time that game was released) was like "..Zzzzz, give me moar" (of course those were single player games, where certain optimizations were far more reliable to make).

With the amount of players FFXIV 2.0+ shows on screen at once the high quality characters with physics would probably still cause a lot of issues even with good optimization given the number of characters on screen lol. Although perhaps selfishly I'd prefer lower view count but higher quality visuals. I also turn off the special effects of players not in my group so I can actually see the monster I'm attacking . I might even consider some sort of shadowy 'shade' figure for players after a certain number, if it meant allowing the game to render everything else at a better quality. I'll hardly be able to see anything at 100 players anyways, just a blob of chaos, might as well simplify some of the visuals and improve the ones I'll still notice (or at least that's my thought).

I always enjoy the funny nature of people prefer FFXIV for it's graphics over WoW, as it's a major point I see people like FFXIV for, and then at the same time seeing people say graphics don't matter. Now to be fair sometimes that isn't the same person, some people don't care and just don't care, period. But I think graphics do matter, they just aren't the only thing that matters. There is a thing of aesthetic outside of just quality, to make sure to note that, so something can be technically detailed but still not that pretty. You'd want amazing graphical aesthetic and design over just pure high quality in most situations, but like many things having it all would be the preference . So one might think of Journey and how things aren't hyper realistic detailed but the game is still very very pretty.

Beautiful game with awful gameplay is just a wallpaper maker that isn't that fun to play. Ugly game with amazing gameplay can be fun but leave a lot of desire and missed a lot of potential hook value. Beautiful game with amazing gameplay is going to steal your soul and hold you hostage. That's the sweet spot.

If you had to sell yourself short on one then yeah I guess you'd do graphics, but actively selling yourself short is like.. 'but y tho?'. Now I'm not accusing SE of that, but I do sometimes feel people will do that for SE and act like graphics have no importance. Like the recent pixels people are talking about with the crystal effect part of 5.3, count-able pixels, not pretty nostalgic pixels either like a pixel game, nah these just be pixels waving madly at the screen lol. Like how FFXIV could benefit greatly from some good AA (which it doesn't have since it's engine is differed rendering). To be clear I'm not calling FFXIV ugly, just clearly has some technical anchors that can pull one out of the experience and the game 'could' be prettier (well could as in visually, in terms of code I've no idea how hard it would be to fix and so I won't pretend that party is easy to fix). Especially 'could' as we move forward and more and more MMOs are looking better and better, or like WoW where they continue to slowly update old systems. If you take a look at recent WoW, and even some old parts of WoW, that pixels can be hard to find, and they do have a few quite stunning sets, and models get fixed up over time. Now WoW is ancient and they've no intention, it seems, of replacing it so that makes sense, and if FFXIV is going to do a WoW then I think it can use some of that thought of reconstructing old parts occasionally (and if it's heading towards a slumber then I guess, new MMO can be shiny and purty).

[Enla]

-snip-

All of this. Back during the 2019 Japanese Fanfest they had an art panel that brought in animators and the concept artists, and they broke down the decrease in fidelity between 1.0 and 2.0, and even between the concept demo for 1.0 and 1.0 itself. As well as why we never saw the original progenitor of the Crystarium that was teased in concept for FF14 before the MMO even launched. It wasn't just the flowerpots, but even models you'd never see due to lighting and particle affects had insane polygon counts like the lightbulbs inside the lanterns. It's the main reason why so many things look blocky in the 2.0 areas because they were desperately trying to scale back from that error in design.

Note: The stream is in Japanese, but there are English restreams out there if you look for them. Reddit also did a live reaction for the entire fanfest that summarized what happened here.