Waiiiit a second!?

[Darkshade]

For a game as massive as XIV will eventually be? Probably.

At best we might see new rendering features/options/upgraded shaders and zone redesigns/town redesigns in 4-8 years.

With a game like this I can't see SE ever re-drawing the textures at a higher resolution or adding more polygons to the models. (Really that shouldn't be a problem for awhile though, the amount of polygons in XIV models is insane.)

I'm also pessimistic about the future of game design. With the coming console generation, depending on their power and also how the PC market evolved with the digital distribution boom. I have a fear that another video game crash is going to happen soon with the sharp prices involved in developing and selling both the hardware and software. That is too assume that games are all held to the near AAA rule of "push the hardware as far as it goes then develop clever programming to push it further."

I'd imagine any large graphical upgrades will be passed on to the console version for as much as the console will allow. If next-gen consoles are released SE will probably work on getting FFXIV released on that too with the improved graphics (Like they did with FFXI on xbox360).

At least that's my take on it, I heard a similar question in regards to CCP's Dust 514 game which is an FPS MMO linked directly to Eve Online, and people asked "what about when the PS4 comes out?" and CCP replied "well... we'll put it on that too."

The 360 version had little to no improvement over the PC version. Actually it was basically a buggy poorly down port of the PC version set to display at predefined resolutions depending on what your display output was set to in the 360 system configuration. Texture data/polygon counts remained the same and the only thing I can think of that "improved" was they claimed it had surround sound I believe which both the PS2 and PC version never supported.