Quote Originally Posted by Cheapshot View Post
Yes? Is this a trick question? I think most of the gaming community thinks things are better off released finished if Cyberpunk or No Mans Sky were any indication. I would rather they had not done the graphics update alongside developing a whole expansion. Rather, I think it would have been better to focus on the graphical update and set the target of doing Dawntrail another year out at least. At the end of a long story arc and before a new one is kind of the perfect time to pause and do that.
This is not a trick question, it is simply a fact that whether they release the full graphical update or not, it makes absolutely no difference because it is simply an HD texture pack.

I have said it before and I repeat it, the developers have told us this for already 2 years and we knew what to expect with concrete examples on various PLLs.

They repeated it to us constantly, and yet no one complained about the graphical update and its phased implementation.

People were generally happy, and yet everything was as clear as crystal in the explanations.

Whether it is complete or not at release, why is it a problem since it is just a texture pack and some reworked weather/shadow/light effects?
If you are disappointed with the quality of the graphical update, there is no problem with that, but there are people who are happy or totally indifferent to the graphical update.

Yes, it is minimal, yes there are bugs, yes there are various lighting issues that players report to the developers so they can be patched in the next major updates.
If the developers decided to do it procedurally, it was simply because it was easier for them to do and to get concrete feedback from the players for the future.

Let's also compare comparable things.

FF14 is not No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk, it is a game from 2013 with significant technological limitations and hundreds of thousands of assets to redo.

Each graphical update is a technological challenge for the developers, especially when it’s on an aging MMORPG engine and not a single-player game.

Don't forget all the interviews dating back even to Stormblood about the game's source code, the various issues in implementing a graphical update, and I think that "if the devs made the choice to do it this way,
it's precisely because they know better than us, the players, how their engine works, the planning of the work to be done, and the desire to get feedback from players."

If they made this choice, it’s for a good reason, and you just need to listen to the developer panel dedicated to the graphical update in a precedent fanfest video.