The sad state of customization

[Niraves]

Server limitations. Because server limitations is the go to all time favorite line of bullshit that SE loves to resort to despite this game being a multi-million dollar revenue source for them. I swear, I hope someone punches the next developer to use that line as their excuse as to why we can't have something..

[Pori_Dessu]

What's the point of posting on a forum if you're not open to understand any good argument against your point? Both the OP, and some others in this thread are refusing to understand the basic problem with the request: This game does not have the engine to add more customization options, other than some more presets in options we have (Face, hairs, facial features and such), and even those require investment, that the team would have to take off other things, and they clearly have their reasons not to. Yes, this kind of thing is usually built into a game from start, but the start of the engine this game uses was a messy excuse of a MMORPG engine, and to change that would need more than simply tweaking and patching. There's no problem in requesting more of the things we can have (More preset options and such), but if you request it while simply complaining and comparing this game to games that are built to have better customization, you're being immature. I'd love more presets (Elezens presets are kinda "meh"), but asking them to add those simply cause "other games have better customization so this game should too" is not a sound argument if you can't understand the technical limitations this game have.

[Felis]

As stated by Vidu, the user who posted before me and said basically the same thing, but in less details.
And if you take your time to do some research before saying wrong things, you would quickly find that this game runs on a modified version of the 1.0 engine, that was built in 2 years or so (As I stated before). If you truly believe they could've made a whole new engine from scratch in 2 years, while also patching and creating content for 1.x, you seriously don't know anything about coding.

Crystal Tool was completely abandoned for the rebuild. The current engine have parts of the Luminous engine in it.

[Pori_Dessu]

Crystal Tool was completely abandoned for the rebuild

I know, otherwise this game would be as bad as 1.0 in most aspects. But Crystal Tools was a middleware, it wasn't the engine itself. I worded my first post very poorly in that regards, and for that I apologize, I don't even know why I talked about Crystal Tools, since it isn't even relevant for this version of the game (I guess it just came to mind when talking about 1.0). A middleware is not the same as an Engine, as Unreal has many middleware that were integrated in it for example. Anyway, sorry about the confusion on that part.
Edit for some correction and additional info: The Crystal Tools was indeed an Engine, and not just a middleware (They call it Middleware in an interview with some of the team in XIV in a recent documentary tho), however, much like the current engine that uses parts of the Luminous Studio Engine, as stated by Felis, the original 1.0 engine used some parts of the Crystal Tools engine (I believe mostly for graphics in particular). The engine that ARR used during it's release was a modified version of the 1.0 engine (that had parts of the Crystal Tools engine on it). At the moment they have replaced some parts of the old engine with parts of the Luminous Studio Engine, but even then, said engine main game and focus is currently FFXV, which besides clothing, doesn't have any customization options, and has clipping issues (I go crazy with some of the clipping in that game), and is very likely not aimed at an MMORPG game anyway.
Sorry about my mistakes in regards of the Crystall Tools subject.

[DPZ2]

Character customization in GW2 ... WildStar ... Rift even has more customization.

Customization in GW2?! Not much different from FFXIV, actually. Sure, 9 faces instead of 4, but they're all pretty much the same, and aesthetically there are maybe 4 worth choosing. Only thing it's got going for it is 'body types', several of which don't fit the Final Fantasy genre image.

Wildstar? Deliberately cartoonish and the selections were unsatisfactory for me. Might have been a lot of them, but I wasn't enamored by my character's possible looks.

Rift? Nice armor/glamour system.

The thing is, they may have a couple more options [not THAT many -- I checked], but then everything looks pretty blah going forward (with the possible exception of my Kelari mage in traditional garb).

FFXIV is the best looking game I've encountered over the years.

[Annah]

Server limitations. Because server limitations is the go to all time favorite line of bullshit that SE loves to resort to despite this game being a multi-million dollar revenue source for them. I swear, I hope someone punches the next developer to use that line as their excuse as to why we can't have something..

[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.

[Naunet]

Only thing it's got going for it is 'body types', several of which don't fit the Final Fantasy genre image.

What the hell does this even mean?

Not sure how you can say that those games are "not much different from FFXIV" though. That's simply not true. Whether you personally LIKE the options or not is irrelevant.

First and for most, no other game has graphics like XIV.

That's a load of nonsense. FFXIV doesn't even have high resolution textures.

Also your assessment on WoW is dated. Blizzard has been steadily and significantly improving their graphics - both on the character models and in the zone design - ever since Wrath. The difference between a WoD or Legion zone and vanilla zones is incredible. It's also a GREAT example of a game dev doing something absolutely right. Blizzard recognized that the product they presented didn't look all that great compared to what else was out there and so they put effort into improving it.

[Razor]

Also your assessment on WoW is dated. Blizzard has been steadily and significantly improving their graphics - both on the character models and in the zone design - ever since Wrath. The difference between a WoD or Legion zone and vanilla zones is incredible. It's also a GREAT example of a game dev doing something absolutely right. Blizzard recognized that the product they presented didn't look all that great compared to what else was out there and so they put effort into improving it.

Perhaps I wasn't quite clear enough, I was not criticising WoW for it's development process. I would agree and say that WoW has done a great job continuing to try and keep it's game relevant to the modern competition, but Blizzard has also completely rewritten the game's engine at least once, within it's lifetime of 13 or so years. In it's prime it competed (or rather, was tried to be competed with by) FFXI which took on the traditional SE mantle of "Premium graphics, and we'll swing the rest". Vanilla FFXI was gorgeous for the time period compared to WoW, but suffered in many other ways as a result.

Blizzard chose to upgrade WoW's engine and continue the game, SE chose to cut their losses with XI and start an entirely new game, which we well know had a very bad false start with 1.0. To what degree ARR suffered as a result, is up for discussion, but the begging question is will this development style continue. FFXIV has just received it's second expansion, and does that mean that the next FF MMO is currently being planned out in secrecy? ARR to some degree helped save SE's hide from financial strife, but that doesn't necessarily mean XIV has an open checkbook. Resources could be stipened for XIV because it is being diverted to the next FF MMO, which will use a completely new and up-to-date engine that XIV may never recieve.

[KisaiTenshi]

This triggers me everytime.... Personally i find most hairstyles in the customization horrendous. Those that i find decent have this problem...

That's why I keep the short pig-tails style. Clipping on long hair and Au Ra/Miqo'te tails I find distracting. My Au Ra alt has below-the-shoulder straight hair and every piece of body gear clips through it.

Its want .
How can a f2p mobile game give more customization that this p2p one?
What in the code prevent them from adding new fsces to the game at last? The onlly code thst is bad in this game is thw net code and the servers. I will ask ones more. How a f2p game have stronger servers that can have this things?

A lot of things this game has however is for more flexibility elsewhere, lest we all have "Mass Effect Andromeda's creepy face animation" due to customization removing flexibility.

We have 4 face styles per race, each of heads are capable of doing like 100 something emotes and conversation animations with the eyes and eyebrows being independent of the mouth/jaw in animation. Look no further than Hildibrand to see where this gets used to some stylistic exaggeration. Also some NPC's have their own head model like most of the storyline NPC's we see involved with the storyline.

So I'll take that over the customization that results in little or no animation in pretty much all other games.

That said, some of the customizations that we lack, we seem to lack due to gear being complex. V1.0 actually had even less customization, and the breast size of the female characters was actually linked to another attribute. What we got in V2.0 was a height and bust sliders, but the difference between the largest and smallest setting is almost negligible. I'm not expecting Lalafell sized Miqo'te but I'm disappointed that you can't make a buff character that isn't a Roe. If you want to be androgynous you pretty much have to play Lalafell, sometimes that works for people, sometimes that doesn't.

Aion (and several games based on the same CryEngine family like Archeage) have some fantastic customization, but ultimately these games have practically no character cutscenes, and hence most of the flavor text is just a text window, no animation. Other games like Blade and Soul, TERA and Lineage II are based on Unreal engine, and are much less flexible, but still offer a degree of customization that FFXIV does not offer.

We seem to take for granted that every living thing in FFXIV at least looks like it's living, even if it's glued to the floor. You approach a NPC, it looks at you, you talk to it, it's eyes, eyebrows, and mouth all move along with hand gestures. My largest complaint with this, is that there are no props. When you're asked to take item X to give to NPC Y, you are just shown handing nothing. If you pick up anything large, well let's not show you actually picking it up, click on it and it disappears. This makes it look like most NPC-Player interactions are mime'ing like two children would pretend, rather than actually having such props. The reason I make a special case about "lifting large objects", the game does have you do some quests that change your animations (like getting the bath water in Kugane) , sometimes there are props, it's just rare to see your character interact with anything like it's actually there. Meanwhile look at all these NPC's wandering around carrying large objects like it's an in-joke, the animation for it clearly exists in the game.

Other games, barely do anything but make NPC's nod their head.

Blizzard chose to upgrade WoW's engine and continue the game, SE chose to cut their losses with XI and start an entirely new game, which we well know had a very bad false start with 1.0. To what degree ARR suffered as a result, is up for discussion, but the begging question is will this development style continue. FFXIV has just received it's second expansion, and does that mean that the next FF MMO is currently being planned out in secrecy? ARR to some degree helped save SE's hide from financial strife, but that doesn't necessarily mean XIV has an open checkbook. Resources could be stipened for XIV because it is being diverted to the next FF MMO, which will use a completely new and up-to-date engine that XIV may never recieve.

Square Enix likely would just as soon build a new MMORPG using Unreal Engine if it wasn't for the fact that all these game engines (Unreal, Cryengine, Unity) are hamstrung from not being purpose-suited MMORPG-grade engines. They simply can not have large worlds, and usually what you see as being pretty graphics, stops at character creation. Unity is especially bad and shouldn't be used for MMORPG's. Unreal uses really small zones. Cryengine (if you've played anything else using it) actually has very large maps, but even it isn't seamless. But Cryengine has just as many problems with lag as Unreal does. You have to remember that Unreal engine was originally designed to 'beat Quake' (id software's engine.) You'll note that no MMORPG has ever used the Quake engine (which was forked into the GoldSource engine, which was then forked into the Source Engine, which HAS been used for MMORPG's, which again have small zones.)

FFXIV and WoW have their own game engines that are tailored specifically for MMORPG use, and that is why they are the top Fantasy MMORPG's out there and the only ones that have a sustainable subscription model.

It's entirely possible, and that is in fact what happened in 3.0 with the switch to the DirectX11 engine for them to rewrite the engine again if they need to, but it's pretty clear that the game supports much higher resolution models and textures, they just choose not to ship it that way, and my guess is that if they were to do so, the game would probably be 100GB and the loading time would be 4 times longer with much more "pop-in" problems.

If they decided to retroactively give us another face, there is nothing stopping them from adding it. What is currently stopped by the current game engine is other body shapes (eg a fat shape) because that requires a different walk cycle. Take note of how characters walk when they have stupid amounts of gear on them like Zenos yae Galvus, and Grynewaht.