I know ARR was cut down but it really needs more done with it.

[Deo14]

Actually, that is one of the points the developers have stressed to us. The game can't be as good graphically because it's a multiplayer game. The other reason is that it's limited by the consoles it's on. ARR had to work on PS3.

I fully understand that, it was just remark towards people who keep parroting that the FFXIV is FF first, MMORPG second.

GTA was one of the games I was thinking of where they had actually put some effort into natural body movement, but I still don't think even that was very good then. I don't agree that it was much better than ARR, and there were many games that just couldn't pull off a natural-looking breathing system on a character like FFXIV does. Facial expressions is one of FFXIV's strengths in cutscenes.

Now it is 2023, should they go back and change it to be something as modern as Unreal 5? Maybe, but they don't usually spend a lot of time on old things. It took them 8-10 years to get round to overhauling ARR as much as they have recently and it takes development time away from the next patch. The next patch is the most important thing for them to focus on, because that makes people resubscribe and login to the game which makes them money. If they stop doing that to change ARR people will think the game isn't making content anymore.

But they are doing a graphics upgrade gradually in the background where they find the time and resources and some of it may not be complete by 7.0, because they said they would gradually upgrade some character faces over time after that. We don't have any evidence this will include animation changes, but maybe they will think about that someday.

If you think that FFXIV has better facial animations than GTA 5 and a better cutscenes overall, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

But I'm really not saying that we should get some A Realm Reborn: Reborn, just trim some more filler MSQ, which will also result in better ratio of gameplay to MSQ, which will be better for players that are not used to sit through so much cutscenes and they will slowly get used to them, that's all.