Did squenix make a mistake by investing too much in graphics and not enough in

[Winterclaw]

I don't think it's a mistake

Good graphic is not a mistake

They need to create a game with good graphic and good gameplay

That's not my argument.

Consider you are building a new PC. You sink all your money into SLIing 4 top end GPUs and don't have any money left over for any MB. Those GPUs aren't going to do you any good. IMO SE should have diverted about 25% of their efforts from graphics and put that into content. Let's say that's 5 million (random number). If it were, that's 500 designer months of content creation SE could have afforded. In one year, ten extra people adding content (or dynamic content) might have had a larger result on the end product at the original release. And as someone mentioned, SE could have updated or added to the graphics later.

[Rydin]

That's not my argument.
Consider you are building a new PC. You sink all your money into SLIing 4 top end GPUs and don't have any money left over for any MB. Those GPUs aren't going to do you any good. IMO SE should have diverted about 25% of their efforts from graphics and put that into content. Let's say that's 5 million (random number). If it were, that's 500 designer months of content creation SE could have afforded. In one year, ten extra people adding content (or dynamic content) might have had a larger result on the end product at the original release. And as someone mentioned, SE could have updated or added to the graphics later.

or the could have just taken the extra time needed.... so no part of the game would have to suffer... but all is well that ends well... and all aspects of the game are clearly being dissected and reevaluated...

This game doesn't have great graphics. It simply has high polygon count player character models.

Everything else, the world, the visual effects are standard, at best.

That's more of an aesthetic choice though... games that offer far less in terms of graphic quality have been called beautiful... personal I think the visual effects suffer from a lack of dynamics in the world.... Eorzea is very static at the moment but all of that is changing soon...
The lighting is way too bright everywhere no matter what time it is.... you need the dark to really compliment the light

[Bigcatman]

I think people are judging the current team too harshly. Think about it: the old dev team made an ENTIRE GAME. The new dev team needs to fix the ENTIRE GAME the old dev team made. Although it seems as though they should be "getting on the ball", we've got to cut them slack, they're basically remaking the game at this point.

If YoshiP was there at the start, we'd probably be much better off since he knows how to communicate with his player base and implement their ideas, instead of playing the "boss" card the old dev team played. What's the point of even having beta testing if you are set in your ways?

[Ilean]

I think people are judging the current team too harshly. Think about it: the old dev team made an ENTIRE GAME. The new dev team needs to fix the ENTIRE GAME the old dev team made. Although it seems as though they should be "getting on the ball", we've got to cut them slack, they're basically remaking the game at this point.

If YoshiP was there at the start, we'd probably be much better off since he knows how to communicate with his player base and implement their ideas, instead of playing the "boss" card the old dev team played. What's the point of even having beta testing if you are set in your ways?

Agree. I don't blame the current team that much, I barely blame the old one for the technical issues. Obviously crystal engine was not production ready when they started working with it, 5+ years later it's already outdated and pointless by today's standards. I've been forced to work with immature frameworks before, the results are always the same.

Whoever decided that the game should be built upon untested and unfinished technology, and whoever approved it are to blame.

[Coldfire]

At least they didn't use UDK like everyone else... man that would have been bad :P

[Fensfield]

Nah.

Crystal tools turns out a certain level of graphical fidelity and needs a certain level of artistic investment to work. Given the issues surrounding the engine's optimisation, and a number of graphical cut corners such as with environmental shadows and entity shading, I'd sooner imagine they actually diverted resources away from graphics insofar as was possible given what CT requires to work acceptably, to use in other areas.

If you ask me, the graphics suffered just as much as any other element of the game from being rushed out/limited development time, we just don't notice as much because, well, it's the graphics. They still look pretty nice, and people just don't get as worked up over graphical problems as they do gameplay, since 90% of the time, graphics either work for your machine and you're okay with them, or you don't play the game at all.


Also, on the EVE Online point...

You might remember CCP were turned away by a number of publishers before Atari picked them up because their investment in graphics lead to assumptions they were pulling a scam; it was assumed PC's of the time just weren't able to render the things v1.0 EVE did in realtime at the time of its creation. Further, they replaced the entire game engine only a year or two back; Trinity 2.0/Carbon is not an old engine (in some ways it's more modern and technologically advanced than the implementation of Crystal Tools used by FF XIV) and given the way EVE is being developed and iterated on, it certainly oughtn't be ranked alongside other games that endured since a while ago by developing content for effectively the same technology they started with.

No, what EVE has over Final Fantasy XIV and similar games isn't that it diverted resources away from graphics and onto gameplay and such (indeed, a major complaint about the early versions of EVE was that it had nothing in it, even less than FF XIV had at launch and not even enough to be called player-driven). EVE's advantage is it's a persistent sandbox. I don't like to say it, but until they switch to a gameplay model based on a persistently dynamic, player driven world rather than a world that can only change meaningfully when the developers burn resources to add or alter things, mainstream MMORPG's like Final Fantasy XIV will continue to struggle to produce enough content for their playerbases and operate within predictably limited lifespans. EVE Online may be in difficulty at the moment, but the potential remains for it to last decades. The same cannot be said of World of Warcraft, the biggest and most successfully implemented game of the MMO-subgenre to which Final Fantasy XIV technically belongs.

[PrettyPrincess]

I'm no expert, but I believe the design of systems comes first before they are actually developed, as in the graphics are one of the last things to be added.

[Roaran]

Thinking long-term, investing in graphics is a good idea.

Thinking long-term, releasing the game early and allowing player feed back is a good idea.

They did the same thing in FFXI, they're just looking at the big picture.

[unnameduser]

Considering that the environment is made up of rehashed textures and we are playing a 2010 release w/o dx10 or dx11 I'd say that they did not even spend enough time on the graphics.

[Coldfire]

They only spent time on the graphical design but not on the graphical engine. The bad lighting and weird tree behaviour with DoF enabled are just two examples for that. For an MMO the stability of the engine is the most important thing imo.
DX11 brings more stability than DX9 if used properly. Especially if the game uses complex rendering. If anyone plays this game on XP speak now! xD