A Respectful Request For Improved Cloth & Hair Physics

[Kacho_Nacho]

The "GLAM" aspect of FF14 is truly enormous, if not even more substantial than PvP and PvE combined. It's been long overdue for FF14 to receive a graphical update, as the 2014 standards are far behind us, and today's computers and consoles are significantly more powerful than they were back then. Consoles, in particular, repeatedly demonstrate their capability to deliver stunning graphics.

Physics-influenced elements like hair and clothing have become standard in games, and they have been around since 2011, if not earlier, on a large scale. Whether it's vegetation or clothing, these features have been available for quite some time.

I always advocate for great graphical updates, especially since my computer is getting bored with FF14, and most of its components, except for the RTX3080, are now five years old. Even today, I can play current games at high FPS, even with ray tracing enabled (using Cyberpunk 2077 as an example).

Yoshi himself stated that FF14 is far from ending, and players growing up in today's era, spoiled with abundant computing and console power, will look back at past games with a tired eye. Graphics aside, this aspect of a game should truly not be neglected.
In short: Physics-influenced elements like hair and clothing? Yes, please, I absolutely want them. They make the whole game environment more vibrant and authentic.

Good points! I absolutely agree if FFXIV wants to keep bringing in new players its graphics have to be comparable to the current games on the market. With the advent of so many new games using the Unreal 5 engine, FFXIV is in serious danger of looking like it was made in the Nintendo Age of gaming.

Making hair and cloth move naturally isn't necessarily easy but can probably be done by making the model work with a popular physics engine. But let's assume they already did this because of the movement we already see. The issue is then collision, where clothes and hair collide with other clothes or the rest of the character model itself. To avoid this, some of the time spent making gear and hair goes into making sure it doesn't collide much on all the difference races, so if they could somehow solve the collision issue then it could save them time or thought about this issue when making the models.

If you think about hair though, in order to twist and turn to the extent needed for this, it could require a lot of polygons, rather than being very simple and blocky like it currently looks. Which returns us to the question of what if hundreds of players are next to each other with all these polygons that they didn't anticipate and players complain about performance and crashes?

Yes, it will be challenging and there is a real danger of a big hit to performance. But, I feel there is some wiggle room between what we have now and totally realistic hair, cloth, tassels, etc... Honestly, would it be that hard to have soft things bend to cut down on all the clipping?

Today's computers and consoles are far more robust. We don't need to have stiff as a board tassels, ignoring gravity to accommodate 24+ people grouped in an area. We don't need hair and manes held in place by super glue, either. If the Creative Business Unit III doesn't address things like these, they are going to really stick out in the finished product. Players will complain they put little effort into the update because people naturally see the flaws in a piece of work rather than the expert care the developers put into the other 95% of the work.