The Graphics update was unnecessary

[DiaDeem]

It wasn't needed

Sorry, complete disagree.

FF14 was not an ugly game

I understand that people are attached to their characters.
I don't understand wanting to keep PS3 grade models, textures, lighting and physics for the sake of arbitrary personal standards.

Going from 1.0 to 2.0 the game suffered actual downgrades to the graphics, but everyone was fine in the end.

I hope improvements can be made based on feedback, but overall, this is gonna hugely benefit the game in the long run.

[CidHeiral]

Are people actually trying to argue that this looks good?

[Tengi]

Are people actually trying to argue that this looks good?

That lasagna looks crisp.

[OgruMogru]

That reminds me... wasn't 1.0's lighting some weird fake trick?
I heard they had no way to do night correctly so night time is just reduced gamma (or was it brightness??) with a dark blue tint filter above everything.

I used to do this on my TV when I was a kid playing The Lion King on Mega Drive so I could pretend like it was night time on Pride Rock

[Rudje]

I don't know if you just skip cutscenes or what, but the game spends a lot of time getting up close and personal with the WoL. Zooming in across character creators is perfectly reasonable, especially since we can't properly compare in the benchmark itself because most of the environments don't exist in the live game and thus would make for poor comparisons.

[Arkdra]

I don't know if you just skip cutscenes or what, but the game spends a lot of time getting up close and personal with the WoL. Zooming in across character creators is perfectly reasonable, especially since we can't properly compare in the benchmark itself because most of the environments don't exist in the live game and thus would make for poor comparisons.

The game does not spend a lot of time zooming in on your face, it spends a lot of cutscenes doing that and maybe you spend a lot of time doing that if you're a gpose junky. But me, I spend 100's of hours questing, rouletting, crafting, and gathering and the time spent zoomed in on my face in those capacities is 0%. But I will appreciate the better lighting and the better textures across the board during these activities.

[SigmaOZ]

@OP


The game definitely needs a REAL graphical upgrade, what they have done so far is just change lightning, the eyes of the characters and add a few better textures but the whole game still looks old after ten years of service, not counting 1.0.


Has any player seen the character models?. They look so blocky from the neck down. I had the silly idea they'd remodel them but in reality they might have cut some polygons instead because they look really poor, just set them to smallclothes in the benchmark and move the camera above their heads and you'll see how bad they look, the elbows, the hips, the buttocks, the thighs and the knees all look like PS2/PS3 characters, that's unforgivable in 2024.



I agree with some of your points in that the game needs fixing on certain things like movement physics however the visuals of the game cannot be underestimated because they are the first thing new players see when deciding if the game is worth playing or not, I surely wouldn't want to play an old looking game with trash graphics.

[Rueby]

Dated doesn't always mean ugly. I just personally never been bothered by it. The majority of the game looks alright for a game that is 10 years old. The pixelated issue could have always been fixed with a high res texture update. It's nice they went an extra mile to provide us with this overhaul- I think it's positive, but I wish they paid more mind to details.

I voiced my thoughts before and I will again, I think we should've been provided with a beta of the CC way before th Benchmark and a section of the forums should've been dedicated to player feedback. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt with how unpolished the CC is, that maybe they're tight on time.

Regardless of how me and you feel, the graphical update is happening, from a business standpoint it doesn't make much sense to not do it, however you might see some damage control PR stuff coming up in forms of really 'sincere' apologies for inconveniences and people will buy it.

I personally found the game charming, in my eyes I didn't see it necessary- what I thought necessary was texture upscales, I never thought they'd overhaul the lighting engine or go so far as to resculpt player characters etc. We're in a very rough transition period I think and I hope they listen to player feedback and try their best to preserve the old SHAPES of some of the features.

My girl's Miqo 4 nose bump was given to Miqo 1 nose...that didn't even have that bump in the first place! And it wasn't a situation of 'hey man it's them polygons'. Alot of things seem to have lost alot of sharpness/angular look and deviates towards chubby soft. If they don't address the issues before EW, will they it ever change? Will they give us another fantasia? Or will they tell us to buy fantasia?

Then again beauty is in the eye of the beholder, to you the game might look ugly, to me the game looks dated but fine for its age. Neither of us are wrong or right.

[Gyson]

Are your settings in the launcher the same as your in-game settings, especially the gamma? It looks like the gamma is way off in the second screenshot (look at the background for obvious differences).

The settings are the same. However, the character illumination setting for Dawntrail's Benchmark can't be altered and (I believe) it has the character lighting maxed at 100. In the real game I leave this at 0 because my character is not radioactive, so why would he need to self-illuminate.

But I raised the character lighting to 100 temporarily to take another photo for a more accurate comparison, and to me the new Dawntrail version (right) does not look the same/better than the old version (left).

Edit: You were correct about the gamma, it was set to 50 in the Dawntrail Benchmark. I lowered it down to the same value I use in Endwalker and updated the image.

Are people actually trying to argue that this looks good?

The image you posted clearly looks bad, but I think the more important question is "how does it look after the update?", because if the answer is "different, but still bad", then I can understand people questioning whether the update was worth it or not.

[Malthir]

That's extremely subjective. For example, in the case of FFXIV I'd put Story at the top, because if the story wasn't good I'd have zero reason to bother with this game in the first place.

It's not subjective, my statement was for MMO's as a whole and not ff14. The reason being is, you already know the FF14 story was good. However a new player doesn't, they've heard things but their experience is coming in blind which is why you can look at the generic MMO's features list.
The first thing a consumer is going to notice is the art style and theme, what I mean by this is some people cannot stomach anime style games so they would be uninterested in the art of some games, those that like that style or don't mind it will give it ago, from there the first thing they will notice is picking classes and the core gameplay loop.
The next thing they will encounter is UI, movement and combat if these are bad they will stop playing.

So what I'm talking about is not about personal preference, some people put more weight on one thing or another, however FF14 has serious issues in the core gameplay, movement, combat and UI all of which could have been done instead of the graphical update. Generally speaking graphics is the least important thing to most players, hence Runescape's popularity.

I wont talk about the discussion of job roles on the Dev team because honestly we don't know their setup. I'll go out on a limb both of us have either tech or games experience so we're disagreeing based on what we've seen in industry, and I think we can agree that few people end up wearing many hats. Ultimately the budget of an expansion is the budget, they chose to spend that budget on dev hours for a graphic update instead of using the budget for technical enhancements that would improve gameplay. I personally believe this is a mistake which is why I said in the beginning, I actually like the changes. However I don't think they offer value to the game as a whole. Generally, we all play pretty zoomed out, which makes a large portion of the changes unnoticeable. There are many more issues with the game that put potential players off and generally most of them are about movement and responsiveness, also the early player experience being bad.