The sad state of customization

[Razor]

Unsure about BnS in final release. I know when I played it, it had about as much customization as TERA (which really wasn't that much IMO). BDO is really pretty, but that's about all there is to the game. Prettiness- there's no meat to it. IMO, no game has ever been as customizable as Perfect World International (2005). Speaking of TERA, their solution to hair clipping was simply forcing the hair up into a bun or pony tail. I absolutely loved my long haired elf constantly wearing it up because of my armor. Always made me wonder why I was given a long hair option to begin with.

I really want to echo this because this is the thing that always just irks the shit out of me when people talk about the lack of customization in this game. As someone who was hyped to the moon for BDO and actually dropped quite a bit of cash on it, I can completely second this comment. I also tried out ESO and had a similar experience.

First and for most, no other game has graphics like XIV. Sure you can argue that BDO has an incredible character creator that can make beautiful faces (and it does), but if you ever played the game you would know that the beauty of the game really grinds to a halt past the character creation screen. BDO can't even render hair color right. ESO, again, lots of customization in the character screen but what do you get when you actually log into the game? Bad polygon counts with mediocre textures smeared everywhere. It shows in the UI of both of those games. Standard boring fonts that are easy to render, basic gradients for HP/MP bars that could be drawn on MS Paint, the list goes on.

Second of all, look at the sheer number of gear items that are in game. Both ESO and BDO especially suffer incredibly in terms of gear customization. Sure you get a pretty face and maybe a weight slider, but in BDO there's literally only about 5 different gear models (excluding the cash shop.) World of Warcraft is the only game to my knowledge that even comes close to FFXIV in customization where it matters, in-game. And guess what? Up until some short while ago when WoW got an engine upgrade, it also had lackluster character creation options.

WoW chose the push the envelope of what an MMO could do because they deliberately chose to (initially) use low polygon counts and easy to render graphics. 15 years later they are still doing the same because it works. Almost all F2P models copy this recipe. With FFXIV, you get premium graphics and UI that no other MMO can compete with, but it comes at a cost. It's easy to sit here and think "Oh whatever it's just servers SE has the money." when no one here actually has a clue how many millions of dollars may already be invested in the best hardware.