Quote Originally Posted by Starlord View Post
Pick Picky Picky! Downgrade or not Graphics still look amazing, and the Diversity in each area is out of this world from what I see From Forest to Desert, and all of the Rocks, Grass, Cacti etc are not all in the same place every 5 secs you walk ahead! So in the end this so called " Downgrade" of graphics is def. a better trade off to get Better looking zones in general. ( And for all you know this is just the graphics of the standard user, and higher ups can experience it X10 better than what were seeing now.)
They don't look "amazing". They look average now. They're still good enough for today's MMO landscape, but they're definitely not the best anymore. FFXIV used to have the best graphics, now it looks just like Blade and Soul and TERA. That desert landscape looks like something copy-pasted out of Red Dead Redemption. Current Thanalan is much more original and interesting. It's not just a generic desert landscape ripped straight from Red Dead Redemption or someplace. So hopefully there is still a place in 2.0 for an area that looks like present-day Thanalan.

And I think you're over-estimating the degree of copy-paste in FFXIV if you think copy-paste is visible in Screenshots. I've never seen a screenshot of current FFXIV and thought "copy paste!".

Obviously a compromise was needed to allow us to have dynamic shadows, and also to avoid copy-paste during zones. However, I had been expecting that the smaller zone size would be that compromise, and in 2.0 we'd still maintain everything else we have in 1.0 (i.e., high res textures, superior normal mapping, polygon count). Obviously not!

I thought more people would notice all this.