FFXIV: Do you think Square Enix will put more money and resources into it?

[Ath192]

The graphics are totally fine. If you want more fancy effects, use reshade. But no need to change the engine. Better graphics are not making a better game.

I would give the Creative Business Unit III the time, money and other resources to rework old systems like the glamour, housing, items and PvP. Maybe continue older content like the grand companies, squadrons, monster log, veteran rewards and novice hall.

And remove mentors xD

We shouldn't depend on filters and third party tools to get a better look but that's not the only issue, reworking the game at that level would fix all the fundamental issues this game has like allow a trans mog instead of a limited glamour system, and I know you want to virtue signal and seem considerate of the creators and company but every problem this game has is tied to its horrible engine. Even Yoshi P doesn't like it and has expressed a desire to upgrade it.

So then why are you defending and even encouraging that the company doesn't do anything about it? Everyone knows its bad and even the people who work on it don't like it. This also doesn't have to come at the expense of working devs to death. While they could certainly go that route they could also simply expand their departments so that they can get more done and still give their employees good work life balance and weeks vacation.

People making excuses for the game are actively holding it back.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

The graphics are totally fine. Better graphics are not making a better game.

But they do.

Graphics of XIV are not totally fine: Lowres textures actually hurt some of the amazings designs this game has to offer and take many players out of immersion by blocky pixalated textures, or even devious ones (trailer metallic DRG armor of heavensward vs leather, wet cardboard in game one).
The shadows on this game, i have to stand for a good while for the shadows of trees to become somewhat sharp, while interior shadows are blocky messes.
I play at 1080p so maybe i've got it all wrong because in 4k might not be much of an issue, but not having a proper anti-aliasing solution also is a bad thing.

Let's stop thinking graphics don't matter in videogames, they are in the name videogames.

Well, this thing ran on PS3 somehow too... But there is a reason why most players use some form of third party filter.

[Theodric]

Many of the older character models and animations are looking very stiff and dated at this point. So texture improvements and character customisation enhancements are high on my priority list of features to push for.

[Lauront]

We need a game engine upgrade, with better graphics and way less technical limitations. New mmos coming out like pso2 new genesis and new world, ashes of creation are looking a lot more updated. We gotta keep up.

Agreed, and they do seem to be giving it serious thought (here and here.)

[DPZ2]

We will get more and more players, and much less content as the expansion comes

If, by "content", you mean instances (dungeons, raids, etc), perhaps. If, by "content", you mean new and possibly innovative features to please the home audience, not so much.

Well, this thing ran on PS3 somehow too... But there is a reason why most players use some form of third party filter.

Most players of this game do not use any form of third-party filter. Your anecdotal evidence is performed using a self-selected set of responders on these and other forums.

How can I possibly know? The popular third-party filter doesn't run on any of the consoles, and "most" implies that population has been ignored completely.

Prolly not, considering that the most popular expac to this game ever, just uh... Brought less and less content

Less and less combat content in your eyes, possibly. It brought two new areas to concentrate upon for the Relic weapons chase. It brought new (and old) areas for crafters and gatherers to play.

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People should not ignore all of the non-combat changes made to the game, each of which can be considered "content" for purposes of this discussion. People also need to stop using ARR as the prime example of what constitutes "content". Yeah, there were more dungeons and other sorts of things to do than what followed after (even waaaaay more quests in the MSQ). But. ARR was written at a time when the viability of the new revamp was not guaranteed ... and players needed to know that new things were scheduled to crop up in-game to encourage them to continue subscribing.

The current team no longer considers continuous subscription to be the primary goal of this form of entertainment.

[KizuyaKatogami]

If, by "content", you mean instances (dungeons, raids, etc), perhaps. If, by "content", you mean new and possibly innovative features to please the home audience, not so much.



Most players of this game do not use any form of third-party filter. Your anecdotal evidence is performed using a self-selected set of responders on these and other forums.

How can I possibly know? The popular third-party filter doesn't run on any of the consoles, and "most" implies that population has been ignored completely.



Less and less combat content in your eyes, possibly. It brought two new areas to concentrate upon for the Relic weapons chase. It brought new (and old) areas for crafters and gatherers to play.

-----

People should not ignore all of the non-combat changes made to the game, each of which can be considered "content" for purposes of this discussion. People also need to stop using ARR as the prime example of what constitutes "content". Yeah, there were more dungeons and other sorts of things to do than what followed after (even waaaaay more quests in the MSQ). But. ARR was written at a time when the viability of the new revamp was not guaranteed ... and players needed to know that new things were scheduled to crop up in-game to encourage them to continue subscribing.

The current team no longer considers continuous subscription to be the primary goal of this form of entertainment.

Diadem was literally copy and pasted from an old area. Firmament was new yes but SB was able to give us Shirogane without sacrificing combat content. Let’s not forget that we also missed out on primal weapons for Gnb and Dnc, Voice acting for the 3 weapons trials, voice acting for the nier raids, Dungeons per patch, deep dungeon, 2 relic zones seeing that SB brought us 4. An extra trial(SB gave us Rathalis and Yojimbo,) Allied beast tribe quests, Hildibrand quests, end of expansion glamours, and i’m sure much more i can’t think of atm.

[Caitlyn]

So then why are you defending and even encouraging that the company doesn't do anything about it? Everyone knows its bad and even the people who work on it don't like it. This also doesn't have to come at the expense of working devs to death. While they could certainly go that route they could also simply expand their departments so that they can get more done and still give their employees good work life balance and weeks vacation.

People making excuses for the game are actively holding it back.

I m not defending anybody, where did I say that? There are tons of things SE should fix or implement.
I just dont think, that graphics should be top priority. Not before older/broken systems are fixed before.

All I want to say is, that it doesnt need to rework the entire engine just for better graphics.
Just a few tweaks on the directX interface may be enough. Or maybe a downloadable texture pack for PC/PS5.

There are tons of other MMORPGs with fancy graphics. Yes, they look gorgous. But on the same side they lack even the simplest, basic features of FFXIV. And dont forget: FFXIV is almost 8 years old now... .
If you re just looking for good graphics, Black Desert Online may be your game.

Speaking of PSO2 NG. I played it. I played PSO2 JP. NG is way better than the original PSO2. But that didnt stop me to quit after 2 days of playing.
Elite Dangerous promised better graphics but delivered one of the biggest downgrade in history. It looks now even worse and is lagging like hell. Thats not how to make an expansion.



PS: Reshade is not a third party tool or filter. Just saying.

[Kleeya]

There was an already old interview in which Yoshida talked about how throwing more money and people at a game will not magically make it better, and that there is other limits involved. I am too lazy to find it again though, since with the game becoming more and more popular, Google is showing me an awful lot of different interviews.

[Ayuhra]

Diadem was literally copy and pasted from an old area. Firmament was new yes but SB was able to give us Shirogane without sacrificing combat content. Let’s not forget that we also missed out on primal weapons for Gnb and Dnc, Voice acting for the 3 weapons trials, voice acting for the nier raids, Dungeons per patch, deep dungeon, 2 relic zones seeing that SB brought us 4. An extra trial(SB gave us Rathalis and Yojimbo,) Allied beast tribe quests, Hildibrand quests, end of expansion glamours, and i’m sure much more i can’t think of atm.

I don’t disagree with your general point (as a DNC main my lack of primal weapons makes me sad) bu NieR raids are Alliance, do those ever have voice acting? I know there was a little voice acting for bosses in Return to Ivalice, am I forgetting something?

[Shougun]

Better graphics are not making a better game.

I assume people are sometimes slightly talking past each other when they say things like this, or rebuttals to this. Some are like hyper great graphics do not make a great game on their own. Or some are talking like great graphics, as in the fidelity (4K TEXTURES WOOO), is not important but the art can be (like some pixel games, obviously pixel... not 4k lol, but are still very very pretty).

So going off that, graphics, the sum of art and fidelity and just generally meaning "visual presentation".. that absolutely matters, right? Many people here, especially before WoW had so much negative press, first listed "cartoon graphics" on why they don't like or will not try WoW. Matters so much it 'was' first response many gave on why they play FFXIV. Or alternatively why some people didn't try FFXIV, "weeb graphics". Powerful enough to be a frequent, very frequent, no before even giving something a chance, and then even after giving a chance enough to turn people off from the rest of the game (even though there are a lot of mechanical similarities).

If the gameplay is terrible then great graphics just makes a good wallpaper simulator, and I think most people start agreeing here- and where a lot of people might mean "graphics do not make the game better" as they imagine playing a decent gameplay terrible graphic game vs a beautiful, hard to run on your machine perhaps, awful gameplay game. But I think the major mistake here, at least for the people going.. "uh.. yeah it matters" is you've got the field of "how about great graphics great gameplay?". Certainly you can have both in some games, even with great toggle sliders to allow some lower in machines (although certain quality games just wont run below a certain level, which introduces certain problems). Easier said for single player games of course, but if graphics didn't matter, like it was some huge conspiracy, then companies wouldn't spend millions on it. Huge waste of resources if it was irrelevant, but obviously it's not.

There is a hierarchy, and I think that's what people might be referencing when they say stuff like this, but it does just ring.. .. off? When thinking about graphics to mean the presentation of the game. Presentation is very important. FFXIV is generally pretty good, but there were, at least, imo, moments where the presentation faltered enough to be like "oh wow, that's bad man" (like the Crystal Arm, and such famous examples of MSQ). Or areas where I could imagine better engines would make a space shine. Personally something I see unfortunate is occasionally the distance from concept art to reality, which I don't really blame on the team doing terrain- it seems they have to follow some strict budgets (which there are reasons for)... but oh man if it was closer, I want to live in some of those concept arts (and I feel the terrain team does a good job, but occasionally the colors are off, which are helped with reshade, or the object count is highly reduced and so the busy fantastic nature is not quite fully represented in the final product). Certainly it's not uncommon to have concept art have some distance from reality, sometimes because they did some better adjustments, but in recent days the concept art and reality differences have gotten smaller and smaller (some games like some of FromSoft's games sometimes at a distance you might mistake concept art for in game lol). Which again isn't to say I think the game looks bad, just that it would be cool if it more room to look better. I'm sure some of it is a giant pain to plan around lower end machines (you can see some REALLY pretty games scale down for the lower end, but I can't imagine what it takes to plan for that... it's probably even more annoying for an MMO where you want to have 200 characters on screen at once, though personally I wouldn't mind lower numbers like 50 tops lol.. it just gets so noisy visually past that, and it's not a machine problem, just visually I'm like "what.. am.. I .. looking at..?".