How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[TheVigilant]

I'm curious how good is the engine FFXIV is currently running on and how much innovation and upgrade can be done to it and how it would do in the long run?
Seeing as how WoW's engine successfully managed all the improvements being added to the game for more than a decade, I'm hoping the FFXIV dev team chose an engine that will keep FFXIV aging well and still competent in the long run gameplay-wise, graphics-wise and so on.

[Gleipni]

Bad,the dev strugggle to do any improvement with it,at least the reason they tell us to explain to little innovative content we get,that was the reason why they used so much ressources on eureka and had to forget about some dungeon and stuff.
i hear too that graphic speaking,its really week,they removed butt slider cause with the amount of polygone it adds to the texture,the engine could not handle it

[TheVigilant]

Was it not possible for it to run on the Luminous engine itself?

[Enkidoh]

The thing to remember is though, one of the design choices Yoshi made when developing ARR (and thus the choice of game engine), is that FFXIV 1.0 required (for the time) extremely steep hardware requirements to even run properly let alone look good, and that in order to gain the most widest possible audience for ARR (as a means of reestablishing good will with players), the new graphic engine for ARR would not have such steep requirements. It still looks good (compared to say, old MMOs like FFXI), but it's a case of you can't have your cake and eat it too - it's the nature of the beast, a slight graphic fidelity drop in return for more detailed zones and more interesting armour design (as an example). So the RR Luminous-inspired custom engine does have some slight reductions compared to 1.0's Crystal Tools.

I think you're not going to see a massive restructuring of ARR's engine, in that SE are more likely to simply make a whole new MMO with a more modern engine, that's just being realistic.

[kikix12]

The choice of engine does affect graphical level, but it's not like you suggest.

A good engine will allow for wonderful graphics at high cost...or "low-end" graphics that'll work on even ancient computers. In the end, high-end graphics just have more details to them. The formulas for them don't change. Whether you have only one pixel or a million pixels, they are still pixels, data containers for a single color. Each of them is determined in the same way.

That's why an efficient engine is efficient at ALL levels of quality. And why you can make in Unity or Crisis or Unreal something that looks better than Flash AND runs better than Flash does.


I'm sure that their choice of engine was an entirely business-based decision. Square Enix wanted to recoup losses, rather than make a great game. So they used whatever option was the cheapest available, and that included both the cost of transferring what they had to a new engine as well as the fees related to it. It's doubtful they thought far into the future at all. They simply couldn't have imagined the sudden success that the game achieved.

[Jollyy5]

SE tends to use engines for maximum prettiness, I believe that was the case with the original FFXIV too.

Sure, it looked good, but as it has already been mentioned, it ran like crap and was a pain to work with. Yoshida was assigned as the director and he did his damnest to salvage what he could, but in the end 1.0 had to be put down to make room for ARR.

Graphics had to be toned down quite a lot to make it available for a bigger audience and actually put together something functional, such as decent game mechanics and maps that weren't 90% copy-paste grid.

[Xlantaa]

There are several factors. First. The game engine is good. It is a custom version of Luminous Engine, but is not aiming for high quality graphics like the real Luminous. it is aimed for a MMO, a game which has to render hundreds of players on screen. You cannot do that if you try to have the same quality as Final Fantasy XV. It simply won't work, will require a insane computer specs even to run a low graphics.

And second, this game is aimed for a wide player base, with a very high variety on computers, from those with a i7, 16GB RAM and a RTX2080 to those which a laptop which uses a Nvidia mobile GT card.

And I think the second reason is probably the most important. If you vastly increase the quality and the hardware requirement ,you will cut your playerbase a lot. That's why is not good idea increase graphic quality. I think this game has been doing a very good job on this aspect, providing a very good optimization that makes the game run even on old laptops.

«But you can just simply buy a new PC!» It is not that simple as much people pretend. You cannot ask for the entire playerbase to change their computers just because yes, specially considering you have to pay each month for this game. That's why 32bits support has been for 6 years and only now they will stop updating it (not removing, as they said it will still works, but the new features may not work properly and causes issues).

To be fair, since release of Stormblood, I think they are neglecting a bit the optimization, such cases like Alphascape FPS problems. I hope are only exceptions and won't happen again on 4.5 and Shadowbringers.


It is simple, if you want more people to play the game, you need flexibility on graphic quality. The high hardware requirements are, the less players you will have. A bad idea for a MMO. And I think this game engine accomplish with that.

[TheVigilant]

In a very recent interview, Yoshi answered important questions which answered some of my thoughts about the subject, some of which were gladdening to me while others saddened me, I've underline the positive in blue and the negative in red:



Your thoughts?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Bad,the dev strugggle to do any improvement with it,at least the reason they tell us to explain to little innovative content we get,that was the reason why they used so much ressources on eureka and had to forget about some dungeon and stuff.
i hear too that graphic speaking,its really week,they removed butt slider cause with the amount of polygone it adds to the texture,the engine could not handle it

There was no butt slider. Ever. The butt difference is a meme, its not even accurate. There was a difference in sizes between the races to a greater extent than now, which the standardized to make gear scaling easier, that is all.

[TheVigilant]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVLGwudbZTk

Sorry for my ignorance but is WoW running on the same engine it was running on back when it was released?
How do they create these in-game cinematic trailers in the recent expansions? The movements are so versatile, the trailers and even in the game the environment is as smooth, vibrant and clear that it's hard to convince that it's the same game released back in 2004
So I wonder why it matters that FFXIV is running on an engine 2 generations behind while WoW is running on an engine from back in 2004 yet it still thrives and improves to such graphics