How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[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.