Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
You do realize that this is because SE themselves decided to 'tone back' a perceived obsession SE had with graphic quality at the expense of everything else? (To paraphrase Yoshi's own phrasing, he wanted to escape from "the graphics disease" that doomed FFXIV 1.0 due to Crystal Tools requiring (for the time) ridiculously high system requirements to run the PC version of the game). So he toned back the graphics slightly for ARR so as to allow the development team to focus instead on gameplay and content which 1.0's development had been sacrificed for.
1.0 had more wrong with it then just graphics, which ultimately was SE upper management fault for pushing out the game too early, the 1.0 director was just the fall guy for it.