The sad state of customization

[usalia]

[QUOTE=Ametrine;4322373]
They drop ps3 and what? Now its pc that is the problem?ps3 can run gta5 but not one more face in ff14?
Next it will be ps4?ps5?
This just more work that a dungeon and they are not willing to do it sadly.

[KisaiTenshi]

PS3 limitations. Although now it's more low-end PC limitations. It's still the exact same creator as could function on PS3.

Interestingly, from personal experience of playing on a mediocre laptop on PS3 up though HW, it appeared that the PS3 was graphically tuned lower than the lowest settings on PC. It really was that weak.

Just my opinion, but I actually think some of the crappy textures we've been seeing in SB are a result of the game being "tuned down" or were re-used from assets originally used on the PS2 for FFXI, Dissida or FFT. Like there is no reason for some of the ugly NPC's or gear if it was not for some middleware probably having assets still set at their original PS2 or PS3 export settings.

There is a bunch of things where you can literately see huge pixels on various gear sets, like there is no reason for Hien's gear to look so crappy.


Likewise the Ananta (the Lamia-like tribe) don't look that much different from a similar tribe in FFXI, and their eyes are these huge pixels.

The alternative is that maybe some of the corners that were cut with SB were simply they reused the assets from FFX, FFXI, FFXII or FFXIII un-altered.

[Theodric]

I want Hien's stubble as an option...

[Critical-Limit]

As stated before, the game runs on an engine built on top of the 1.0 engine, which was released in late 2010, but the actual coding probably started in 2004-2005.

I swear I remember Yoshi talking about a meeting where they said how much of 1.0 they could salvage. And he said ultimately they agreed none of it, and started from scratch. Exemption: lore.

[Kohdo]

I doubt they built an entirely new engine and game from scratch and released it in just two years.

[hynaku]

Reminds me of really old mmo with no customization to it. Even Aion has better customization to it and its a lot older game. What really gets me is the block feet and toes which look very bad for a dx11 game. Makes me wonder if took platform for this game from ffxi. I'm pretty sure a ps2 could play this game with how bad graphics are. Don't see why they dropped ps3 support game doesn't look any better than did in arr.

[Spiroglyph]

I will not be satisfied until I can make my lalatato as fat as I possibly can. Ideally they would also add a sanic-esque run where I would move by rolling around at the speed of quick.

[Berethos]

I doubt they built an entirely new engine and game from scratch and released it in just two years.

It wasn't entirely from scratch, as you can tell many of the art assets were re-used/repurposed alongside new stuff. Art asset creation has often been cited (by the devs here and other notable devs, like the ones at Blizzard) as being one of several potential bottlenecks in content creation - if you have enough of that usable (with some minor changes) ahead of time you can cut out a good chunk of time...and when faced with what was viewed as an impossible task at the time, taking any advantage they could get was needed.

Then there's the Noclip documentary that actually interviewed some of the devs, and part of what they talk about is how Yoshi-P went about managing the project in a sort of SCRUM style, with weekly or biweekly "sprints" toward very specific goals. You can get a lot done that way, but it's also draining to do and isn't advisable long-term.

There's also this interview, which is the only citation I've seen (compared to the numerous speculative posts making the claim that what we have now is still the 1.0 engine):

https://gamerescape.com/2011/10/19/g...-is-out-there/

Relevant quote from the article:

Yoshida: First of all.. the current engine like Crystal Tools or the Luminous project, are made more for console games where they’re able to show the greatest level of graphics in a passive environment whereas an MMO is an active environment where, while you still want it to look beautiful, you also have many many people coming together in the same world. You have something like MW3 where the graphics are beautiful but what would happen if you had like 3 or 400 people on the screen at once. Would the engine be able to handle that? So what we wanted was something that could handle more of an active gameplay that we’re aiming for but also be able to provide beautiful graphics and landscapes. We found that Crystal Tools and Luminous would not be the optimal solution for this so that’s why we’re going to develop our own.

One of the reasons we had some trouble with the original launch of FFXIV was because we went through Crystal Tools and it was an engine that wasn’t really optimized for an MMO and so we’re currently working with technologists that are working on Luminous to make us a custom, optimal engine that will work for FFXIV.