Lackluster Graphics in FFXIV

[Ilean]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G9anRoYGko

Tessellation based water

[OJtheLIONKing]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G9anRoYGko

Tessellation based water

I thought this was a troll post for sure, since this is still the best looking MMO I've seen by a large margin, but I didn't notice how distractingly bad the water looked in Limsa or that the LoD was distracting even on high settings until I recently got a new computer. To say that the graphics are lackluster is a bit much, but certainly the water has room for improvement, and it seems the engine in general could potentially run better. The water in WoW is actually a fairly good example of the scalability that could be used--I run it on ultra now and it looks noticeably better than FFXIV water even though the rest of the game doesn't even touch FFXIV as far as graphic fidelity. Just some proper DX10/11 support would probably improve the water noticeably without demanding too much more in resources.

Although I'm sure there's be a lot of work involved in optimizing the engine (and we know that they're aware of the issues and are working on them), it would pay off if it properly supported DX11 while being a bit more forgiving in the lower range to allow more players. Most FFXI players I knew wanted to try this game out at launch but simply didn't have PCs that could run it. Really, I didn't either--until last week I could only run it on my laptop with all the settings turned down as low as possible, and had lots of loading lag as a result. The game runs tons better now that I upgraded, but not everyone has that option, and when the game is in better shape it'd be great if more could play it.

Still, aside from the water, some pop-in issues with LoD, weird normal mapping in Limsa, and the somewhat unrelated issue that they're working on of kinda boring spell graphics, the game looks pretty awesome. I hope in the future the zone design philosophy allows for a little more variety inside zones, though. The actual regions are pretty diverse graphically, but inside them everything looks pretty similar and there aren't many distinguishing landmarks to make the world feel unique or real.