Keep your expectations low and you'll never be disappointed

[EliaStormblade]

With the way this game generates composite characters coupled with the sheer quantity of items out there, I'll be borderline shocked if we get any geometry changes to characters beyond maybe the face since that appears to be entirely independent of any equipment. Bumping the vert count on player models overall would be a monumental undertaking this far down the road.

If the silhouette doesn't meaningfully change, it doesn't present much of an issue. Only if parts of the mesh start exceeding the original bounds. There's not much of an issue with subdividing what is already there and interpolating between the extremities. Then again, I'm fine with admitting it's going to be a wait and see for now, since the only example we've had so far is the face, which is proven to be higher density in the preview.

Upscaling textures is going to be the meat of this upgrade IMO, it's a relatively simple job and won't hugely impact performance. My best guess is that skin and hair materials will be the big gains here. Higher quality skin normals should make shading cleaner in strong lighting (Precisely why that was chosen in the preview IMO) and even as a Lala on a 1440p screen, the lack of resolution on the hair textures is immediately obvious.

You mention the texture and kind of interchange the term materials but I feel like the materials altogether will be the biggest gain. Having more of a distinction between types of materials, to me, is going to effect far more change than higher-res textures (which are still good, of course)

Where's the PBR thing from? Are you assuming that XVI's advancements are going to get back ported to XIV? Again, that's no small undertaking with significantly more materials being thrown around than I suspect XIV's PS3 friendly roots would allow for without serious work.

Metallics. A big hubhub was made about making metallics truly metallic, and that's exactly the domain of PBR rendering. Well, one part of it, at least. The alternative is a specular workflow, which is basically what we seem to have right now. Golds such as have been previewed are basically the PBR trademark. Sidenote: PBR doesn't mean single-player AAA PC-meltdowns. It's fairly common nowadays.

Opacity map resolution improvements? That's another way of saying texture uprezzing sir. No 2 for 1s allowed.

It is, but it also has different consequences for the game than higher albedo and normal texture fidelity. Leaves, foliage, small elements like chains and tassels and what have you that are too minor to be worth representing with an actual mesh. You're free to not count it, but I'm also not playing a goal scoring game; I'm trying to explain the breadth of its influence.

Lighting improvements is going to be the other big one IMO. FFXIV's lighting has always had a bit of a miserable dull brown wash over everything if you don't jump straight into reshade to correct it. My suspicion is that we'll see colour correction coupled with some basic reshade style functionality to inject a bit of vibrancy into things when needed. FFXIV genuinely can look pretty stunning when it's not doing it's best to look as brown as Quake 1.

It's not just colors, it's everything about presentation. Of course, more vivid colors are good, but lighting alterations can change literally every bit of how the ingame world is presented. The ground, the characters, the buildings, the standalone assets. It's so much more far-reaching than something reshade could ever hope to do. Assuming here that they do a good job of it, of course.

Fog updates, meh, more reshade.

Hardly. It's a very important ambience thing. It works well to sell atmosphere, the distance of objects and more. Reshade, again, cannot achieve the same thing. It can fake it, sure. But reshade just cannot accomplish anything on the same level for the mere fact that it injects at the tail-end of the process. If you've ever used distance fog in reshade, you probably know that its "artificial" (as in, it attempts to calculate and put a filter over things) nature leaves it rather flawed in the sense that it cannot meaningfully distinguish depth other than by a rough approximation, nor can it cut it off where it isn't wanted. That said, you're free to not be impressed by it, but I think it can have a great impact on the feel of a world.

Increased world clutter is interesting. I could be wrong on this one but I don't think FFXIV's clutter is dynamically generated? I'm somewhat confident that it's baked in at creation with the only variable being LOD distances. You can verify this with the Grass Quality option in System Config. It doesn't increase the amount of foliage, it just controls the distance at which it draws independently of the main world geometry LOD toggle. The way FFXIV handles world scatter is very primitive even for it's time and adding more would quite literally require their world builders to go in and add it themselves. Outside of an LOD distance bump this isn't something that's going to change with a graphics update.

You're right. I'm not sure exactly how they've gone about it, but I'm tempted to believe you. Again, not sure how far they'll go with the graphical update, but even if it's all manual, having more clutter does give the world a more lived in feel. I quite liked the Thavnair preview picture.

As for shadow resolution upgrades, that's another meh. A nice to have for sure, but it's not going to really change that much outside of very specific scenes that use world geometry cast shadows as a visual focus. Remember that your character's primary shadow is already rendered at full resolution, compare that to a secondary shadow from a dynamic light source such as a lamp which is rendered at a much lower quality and that'll show you exactly how far they can go. It'll be a cleaner image for sure, but it's not going to be a significant change outside of the aforementioned niches.

I do think you're underestimating how much of an influence this has, but yeah, "better shadow resolution" does tend to be a rather more dry thing to announce compared to "THE GOLDS ARE ACTUALLY GOLD, EYES WILL ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE THEY SHOULD, TEXTURES WILL BE FAR HIGHER RESOLUTION." All bits help, though.

TLDR: IMHO we're going to get higher res textures on common shared key assets like hair and skin, Built in reshade style functionality (Hopefully not just for gpose!) and likely some uncorking of settings such as shadows and LOD. Expecting much beyond that is a recipe for disappointment given how dated this games renderer is. Go equip a Pantheon Fending top and stand in water to soak in those glorious PS3 limitations

Eh, their changes alone indicate that they're having to dig deeper than just tack onto existing stuff, so I have fair hopes. I don't think they'll rip anything straight from XVI, of course, being that it's a wholly different game, but I find it hard to believe that they will refrain from taking some of the things they've learned to XIV. On the technical side, of course.

Honestly, perhaps the boat has been missed on this one, but the engine improvement I'd love to see the most is making character composition multi threaded and able to scale beyond a single core. The game's servers have gradually gotten better at coping with large world fates etc but character composition is a significant bottleneck on the client end if you've not got a fast CPU. Those huge fate dogpiles have always been great fun, but characters and animations getting culled to keep things smooth feels like an unnecessary cop out IMO.

It's hard to say. A lot of foundational things are hard to alter, but I don't think hard = impossible. Then again, it's a risk-reward type of situation, I'm sure. Back on the topic of the graphical update, and I know it's ironic of me to say this right after making separate arguments for every little thing, but I think the real deal is seeing everything working in tandem. It's easy to dismiss better textures, or better materials, or better lighting in a vacuum, but seeing everything together is probably a lot more impressive. As an aside: they have neglected to mention it thus far, but I really, really hope they're also adding better AA options. The ones we have and have had for so long were actually terrible even for when they were introduced.

(Sorry if breaking your post up in such a fashion is jarring. I felt it was more lucrative to do it in a piecemeal fashion to avoid anything getting lost.)