1.0 vs ARR Areas - A Visual Comparison

[Etupa]

Textures, animations, weather and... seamless no loading exploration... I will never understand why thoses "PS3 limitations" are still a thing in 2022 where we can have individual settings, resolutions and configuration... moreover, a FFXIV PC licence don't even work on PS3... That was a strange choice.

[Ransu]

Textures, animations, weather and... seamless no loading exploration... I will never understand why thoses "PS3 limitations" are still a thing in 2022 where we can have individual settings, resolutions and configuration... moreover, a FFXIV PC licence don't even work on PS3... That was a strange choice.

Because the system was built with the ps3 in mind. They'd have to redo A LOT to make zones seamless. That's just straight up never going to happen.

[Packetdancer]

while they are good looking keep in mind a slow starting run or stop animation like in 1.0 would cause a lot of grief while dodging aoes.
they had a similar problem in tomb raider angel of darkness. gorgeous, lovingly animated movements.....that you got sick of waiting to play out and would kill you sometimes.

Yeah, I really miss the feeling of "weight" that the animations had to them in 1.x... but:

1. There was basically no concept of animation "cancel" in that game; if you started a movement, by the Twelve it would play the whole animation, regardless of whether or not that carried you into an AoE or whatever. I'm not even convinced it had blending of any form for transitioning between animations as opposed to playing out an entire pre-made transition sequence.
2. It's actually very, very obnoxious to try to do animation that has weight and have good networked movement when you have potentially many, many players presence. I will spare you the technical reasons for this (unless people want to hear it, I guess) because I will otherwise be my usual wordy-as-all-hell self, but suffice to say that the choices ARR made with animations are far more common than not when dealing with, like, potentially 40+ people in one area all wailing away on a single target a'la a hunt train.

But yeah... movement animations -- and oh, god, the cutscenes. I miss the cutscenes.

I just... don't miss watching myself continue walking and skid to a lovingly-animated stop in the AoE I had tried to just avoid walking into.

Textures, animations, weather and... seamless no loading exploration... I will never understand why thoses "PS3 limitations" are still a thing in 2022 where we can have individual settings, resolutions and configuration... moreover, a FFXIV PC licence don't even work on PS3... That was a strange choice.

Technical debt.

No, really. When you make choices early in a project, everything later gets built on top of those choices. And this project has been going for a while.

Think of it like floors of a building: when the building is only one story high, it's easy to completely rebuild that first floor. If the building is three stories high and you want to change the actual footprint of the building, that gets tricky... you can remodel the interior, and build out rooms on the sides and stuff, but it's harder to change the actual building shape without potentially having to rebuild the upper floors. And once you're, like, a 12-story office building, doing anything more than basic interior remodeling is potentially hugely difficult.

Unfortunately, modern FFXIV is a fairly tall office complex in a downtown business district at this point... and the PS3 limitations are baked in at the lowest floors of that building. Renovating the game properly is not just "hey, let's add better textures", but a fairly major rework; it's bringing in a construction crew -- and if you leave the building open for business during construction (which they are), being extremely careful.

(Versus closing off the building to gut and rebuild it -- a'la shutting 1.x down entirely and making ARR separately.)

That doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means it's a lengthy process and a lot of work, where a new game starting right now would not have the same issues.

Hence why we see that they actually have been working on getting away from the PS3 limitations, working on improving the graphics fidelity -- and for all we know, maybe stuff like trying to rejoin the map halves in the early cities -- since some point in Shadowbringers; they're far enough along to show early examples in live letters, but they've said they still aren't going to be at a place close to "done" where the changes make it to players until 7.0.