Death Vs. Defeat - Disintegration Effect?

[Reinhart]

I feel like I should point out that we had several corpses to carry out of the waking sands - including our sylph friend - so people not disappearing and instead leaving a body when they die is perfectly normal. Plus, there's the cemetery in Eastern Thanalan.

[LystAP]

I feel like I should point out that we had several corpses to carry out of the waking sands - including our sylph friend - so people not disappearing and instead leaving a body when they die is perfectly normal. Plus, there's the cemetery in Eastern Thanalan.

I like how they made each corpse take up a unique cast time depending on how heavy they were. Really stuck it in there.

[heiligeharmonie]

I feel like I should point out that we had several corpses to carry out of the waking sands - including our sylph friend - so people not disappearing and instead leaving a body when they die is perfectly normal. Plus, there's the cemetery in Eastern Thanalan.

Well, as some have already pointed out, the fading thing is mostly to reduce the workload on the graphics engine (and most enemies serve no purpose after being killed, so there's no reason to make the engine work to keep them rendered), and Cilia made a good point in saying that leaving dead bodies lying around can make some players start to feel bad about themselves. So though we see the bodies disappear, the characters themselves probably do not.

So the bodies in the waking sands (or in any of the many other quests that require you to interact with dead bodies) were left unfading because they needed to be on screen for us to see and interact with.