What if (PS4 and PC become seperated)

[OurMom]

What is with this kinds of post? I see em over all sorts of sites.

"What if we threw new born babies into the ocean? I don't think it's a good idea but I want to hear you guy's opinions."

Obviously it will never happen.

[ChaoticCrimson]

Aside from the obvious community separation issues this would cause, the sheer technical implications of such a thing would be staggering, if not outright impossible without completely reworking the game itself (again). Just the logistics behind delegating servers between PC and console on its own would be a nightmare to implement. Do you keep all the existing servers on one platform while creating brand new ones for the other? Or do you then have to decide which servers go where? Either way, many players would end up displaced and forced into a server transfer. That's a fair amount of inconvenience, to be sure, especially if you've established yourself in an fc or linkshell local to your original server, and then get ripped away from some, if not all of the people you've played the game with because you're forced into another one with no means of interacting with your old sever aside from either external options or setting up an alt and having a game license on both PS4 and PC, which isn't practical for many people. In short, even if it were possible it would be wildly detrimental in many regards.

[Niwashi]

And where would people who play on both PS4 and PC end up? Would their characters be duplicated? So for instance, I'd have a PS4 copy of my Y'kayah Tia character and another copy of him on a PC server, with the two diverging as separate characters from the time of the split on? Or would we divy up our characters between each, so I might only be able to play Y'kayah from PS4, but only play my Navarre alt on PC? Either way seems really awkward.

[xLucia]

Yea no thanks. Several of my friends play on PS4 while I'm on PC. If they seperate it, I won't be able to play with them, that would suck.

[LineageRazor]

Folks who think ditching PS4 would open up a wonderland of PC features are fooling themselves. FFXIV caters to a broad playerbase, not just a handful of l33t powergamers with liquid-cooled monster machines. I'd reckon that the performance level of PS4 is actually ABOVE the average level of the PC SE would like to target.

So what would happen if they were to be separated now? A lot of heartache and broken communities, and NO improvements to the PC version whatsoever.

[KisaiTenshi]

Though if there is no positive reason to separate platforms (either for us or the company), why do we discuss it?

There is no positive reason to split a community. The reverse really should be true, where the Xbox and Switch players should be able to play the same game with the same visuals, and unfortunately the weakest system dictates the visuals for the others. Just no port is available because Sony.

Like, imagine if SE decided they would make FFXIV for the iPhone/iPad. The android users would be going "where's mine", and SE would have to go "sorry your platform is too fragmented to support", this is the same reason why we got a bad Mac "port" of the PC version. It would be too expensive to support different versions that fragment. Either you play with a configuration comparable to the weakest system that can be supported, or you just don't bother.

For what it's worth, FFXIV absolutely melted weak GPU's when the DX11 version came out, and there won't be a DX9 version at some point in the future, so those people who don't want to invest in a 1000$ PC may get a better experience from the console version.