How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[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.