Thread: Question about 1.0 FFXIV

Hello everyone!

Thanks to another thread, I discovered a collection of all the cutscenes from the original FFXIV MMO. The look of the cutscenes are quite striking.

Sort of dreamy, with these wonderful, rich shadows, and good, sharp detail. I was wondering if we could have an optional setting or a texture pack which would capture this look?

Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

Hello everyone!

Thanks to another thread, I discovered a collection of all the cutscenes from the original FFXIV MMO. The look of the cutscenes are quite striking.

Sort of dreamy, with these wonderful, rich shadows, and good, sharp detail. I was wondering if we could have an optional setting or a texture pack which would capture this look?

Originally Posted by Kallera

id rather have the missing animations. there were different voices too.

In 1.x the intention was to take the graphical styling on XI and push it even further beyond that graphical fidelity as far as they could. To that end, the graphics contained an ASTOUNDINGLY high polygon count to the point where even simple objects were achieving counts that character objects reach today (aka: OP flower pots). However, in chasing down this ideal they went a goodly bit too far and ended up with a graphical system that nearly no computer of the day could handle. Even by today's standards the graphics were overkill when it came to processing power.

Due to this, the cutscenes needed to be just as graphically stunning and all had to be prerendered cinematics whereas the cutscenes we have today are mostly rendered with the in-game engine. The result (since the game had to be rebuilt graphically from the ground up to a sensible standard) is that the cutscenes are much lower graphical fidelity but they can also do a lot of things that the pre-renders can't, such as account for differences in the player character's appearance, class and gear.

Would it be nice too have that level of graphical detail back? Yes, but the amount of computing resources that would make it feasible to do that in the game system is significant and would likely erode playability at its expense.

Edit-
For the voices... Voice actors move on to other things, some stop doing VA and some (as we unfortunately know all too well) pass away while their voiced characters live on. Without being able to produce the content quickly and consistently you're probably going to see voice changes here and there, which is why so many MMOs have little to no voice acting in consistent characters.

Originally Posted by Kallera

I don't really see how movements and voice are so prohibitive in this game, considering animations are being sold...

Animations take a while to create and there's production time involved in that. Selling them on the Mog Station offsets that cost. We still do get new free emotes from time to time, but generally within the patch cycle as part of other content where they needed to create that animation anyway. The same thing kind of goes for voices where they need to pay someone to create the voices and incorporate them into the game. They likely don't see the return on voices the way they do on emotes since it's unlikely they will ever cash shop voice packs... But you could always ask about it in a Q&A Live Letter and Yoshi might consider it as he's done with other things.

Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

Hello everyone!

Thanks to another thread, I discovered a collection of all the cutscenes from the original FFXIV MMO. The look of the cutscenes are quite striking.

Sort of dreamy, with these wonderful, rich shadows, and good, sharp detail. I was wondering if we could have an optional setting or a texture pack which would capture this look?

I wish we could have one, but SE has made no moves in this direction. Ironically, aside from the insistence on PS3 support, the average computer (or PS4) was more than powerful enough to run FFXIV 1.0's graphics by the time 2.0 was released with the detail levels blown to smithereens.

That said, as others have pointed out, there's a lot more to it than the shadows and such. The animations in the 1.0 cutscenes were entirely original, not repackaged emotes like what we have now. As a result, they were more difficult to make, though I'd argue some of the more major cutscenes in 2.0+ would benefit from the extra attention.

We might get an improved engine one day when PS4 Pro becomes more widespread, but I'm not holding my breath.

Edit / Additional Reply:

Originally Posted by Malzian

Would it be nice too have that level of graphical detail back? Yes, but the amount of computing resources that would make it feasible to do that in the game system is significant and would likely erode playability at its expense.

I beg to differ, here. Virtually any high-end PC title made over the last several years looks vastly better than FFXIV. Hell, Skyrim, which was released in 2011, blows FFXIV out of the water when you layer on high-resolution texture packs and some extra lighting bells and whistles.

It wouldn't have worked on the PS3, and weaker computers or the PS4 would struggle with improvements right now, but allowing for higher-resolution textures and some improved lighting effects really wouldn't take that much effort right now. Let people who have the hardware use it.

Originally Posted by Malzian

In 1.x the intention was to take the graphical styling on XI and push it even further beyond that graphical fidelity as far as they could. To that end, the graphics contained an ASTOUNDINGLY high polygon count to the point where even simple objects were achieving counts that character objects reach today (aka: OP flower pots). However, in chasing down this ideal they went a goodly bit too far and ended up with a graphical system that nearly no computer of the day could handle. Even by today's standards the graphics were overkill when it came to processing power.

I take this inflated factoid and raise you anecodatal experience.

In 1.23 at Desktop (Standard) settings I ran around 30 fps (when running in Windowed Borderless; there was a strange fps loss in true Fullscreen with no noticeable graphical improvement)
Upon ARR's release at Desktop (Standard) settings I ran around 30 fps (whether in Full Screen or Borderless).

They bogged equally (little) under particle effects and (noticeably) when loading many characters at once on screen. Shadows in some cases bog more heavily in Luminous than they did with Crystal Tools.

Luminous came with the advantage, apparently, of supporting more doodads on screen at a time, allowing for the more cluttered / compact ARR world design. But it has yet to show that it can maintain the same graphical fidelity as Crystal Tools, while averaging nearly the same FPS (at least with my old potato of a computer and my newer but equally powerful laptop). Maybe ARR just struggled with those particular computers, while providing some huge FPS jump to others, but I would imagine, after fixing the Fullscreen issue on 1.x, that the FPS increase in the transition was more the outlier.