Breaking down some of the screenshots

[bobbygunz]

.....ROFL

ok please stop, you have to be trolling.

*Steps outside Uldah*
*Looks at the Landscape*

I have no successfully seen ALL of Thanalan as its no different from the moment you step outside the door of Uldah.

Please show me these "Interesting" places, unless you think HIGH RES ROCK TEXTURE is uber..

Here is how badly XIV is copy-pasted

Well obviously everyone's familiar with those images, and also the copy-pastedness of large segments of land in FFXIV, but it's certainly not a problem which is ever visible in screenshots. However, those badly normal-mapped ground textures and lack of aliasing is a problem which is visible even in screenshots.

And anyway, within each large segment in FFXIV you have to admit there is still variety. Thanalan is not a homogenous area, even though people like to say it is. It's pretty popular to say such things, but it's not actually correct. Thanalan is copy-pasted, but not ostensibly within an individual area. There is diversity in Thanalan, it's perhaps just spread out too far and also repeated on a large scale.

Someone mentioned that they counted 5 individual trees or something in a screenshot for 2.0. So it's not as if everything is unique in 2.0 either. There will always be repeated assets, things used over and over. Same thing is true for version 1.0, it's just that the landscapes are bigger, and their size makes them feel repetitive and boring. If for example, Thanalan was smaller and had no copy pasted chunks, what would the problem be?

All the maps in FFXIV at the moment are lcopy pasted, and it's a problem, but it's not as bad as everyone says. It's not a problem to the extent that everything about FFXIV's maps at the moment are bad. It's a large scale problem, but on a small scale (e.g., in your immediate surroundings) it's not, and the game still looks good.

From the screenshots for FFXIV 2.0, the reverse seems to be the the case. The issue is no longer copy paste, but lower quality graphics.

I guess I was just expected best of both worlds.

And nobody has to keep mentioning that those are probably on standard settings, they probably are, or atleast I'd like to believe so.

Edit: And I don't mind the new crystals, I think they look nice and refreshing.

Hopefully. If high settings fixes the bad textures and suchlike, I definitely wouldn't complain anymore.