I don't see why people are treating a possible DX10/11 upgrade as being completely exclusive of DX9. Many games I've recently played, including DA2, Shogun 2 and WoW, have options for both. For the first two, this support was added after the game launched, with no pressing reason to, but as a service to fans who bought the game who have higher specs. Now I realize that there are higher priorities than the engine right now. The game has to be fun to play first, and I personally have high hopes for 1.18 with dungeons and auto-attack to solve a lot of that problem, but the fact is the actual process of getting leveled up is almost as dull in this game as it was in FFXI, and that will require a lot of time to fix with content.

However, the battle/quest/art designers and the tech folks aren't (or at least shouldn't) overlap. Further, optimizing Crystal Tools for PC should be a priority for SE, since that means they can port console games over with more ease. Personally I'm dying to play FFXIII on PC, but I suppose part of the reason for that is that PC ports of single player games always have mods whether they're officially supported or not, and who wouldn't want to see Snow modded so see how big a tool he'd look like if he was balding under that condom hat? <cough> Anyway, this would be an investment in the future of both FFXIV and other SE games. FFXIV's already on PC, so it's the perfect testing ground for the Crystal Tools engine before using it for ports for other games. I bet a PC release of FFXIII would offset the losses caused by all this development time, for instance.

I can't find the interview, but I recall them mentioning that, like FFXI, they made this game intentionally high spec to future-proof it. Part of future proofing is using the most current technology at the time, which they're not at the moment. My hope is that, after the PS3 launch, they have the technology group work on optimizing the engine for the next generation of systems, and have a FFXI-360 style relaunch when that's done to extend the life of the game. While they're at that, they can implement their new technology into the PC version of Crystal Tools. I think what many here are worried about is that they will never upgrade the engine (as was the case with FFXI) when most successful MMOs have upgraded their engines for newer technology after a while (see Asheron's Call, City of Heroes, Guild Wars, WoW, etc) WoW and CoH in particular have managed to keep their fairly ugly base graphics up to pace with newer games just with graphical upgrades, and I hope SE does the same in the future rather than hiding behind "PS3/DX9" limitations like they did with XI's PS2 limitations. It won't affect game balance if you add proper water tesselation effects or better optimized ambient occlusion or (gasp) the ability to alt+tab from fullscreen.

That and I want a cape. I'm dying to have a cape. Guild Wars has capes and that game's 6 years old, surely you can manage something SE.

Well, I know I tend to write essays when I post, so as I often do I'll summarize.

tl:dr I know it's not a priority now, but SE should keep the engine as upgraded as feasible as a testing bed for console>PC ports, and FFXIV will benefit from that as well. Also capes. Please add capes.