How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Berethos]

Thanks for sharing, though a spoiler, I'm glad to see it
But why can't the in-game dialogue scenes be with similar movement versatility? the characters struggle to move, it seems they're struggling to focus their resources only on the most major and biggest scenes while in most of the scenes there is only movements in the neck, the lips and eyes

And I hope you're not dodging my question regarding the jaggedness of the hairs of characters and lack of texture in the majority of scenes, it's like the characters are only designed to be seen from far but then we have to see them from up-close most of the time due to the scenes

Scenes in FFXIV overwhelmingly use scripts to have the characters act out physical emotes that are possible in the game (WoW doesn't have nearly the amount nor the detail of animated emotes we have access to in-game), largely because it actually uses our characters in those scenes. Whatever we are wearing, etc., it's our character being controlled as part of that scene. They've gotten better at this, and you can see recent (like 4.0 and onward, and there's a couple in 4.4 that really stand out) scenes where custom, scene only animations are used (a character move to start jogging, and instead of just starting to run they lean into it and transition into a jogging motion much more naturally).

The nice looking scenes in WoW are not done this way (you'll notice you'll never see a WoW player character appear in these) as they are done ahead of time. It's using the game engine, true, but it's dressed up in the way a video maker might do so in a machinima video. It's all custom animation, custom lighting, carefully synced, the works...using the game engine itself as a base, but not rendered in real time. These both take time and can't show the player character. For a game like WoW, wherein you play a champion that is involved in the story but where NPCs are the main characters, that works. For FFXIV, where you are the main character, that obviously wouldn't work...unless everyone looked the same, and that definitely isn't going to work either.

Here's an example of their attempt at in-game scenes, using what tools are available to render a scene in real time: https://youtu.be/MJlHr-nPxtI?t=433

It's a significant drop in quality, using limited non-combat emotes as animations with some limited custom arm placement, and some thought-out camera placement to improve the overall effect. Also, not a facial expression outside of the default in sight, heh.

And that link even comes with an example of their pre-rendered stuff using the game engine, so you can easily compare the difference.

we saw how much the development had increased for the game starting by Legion. Maybe FFXIV deserves the same?

What Legion got reminded me of the amount of stuff that game would get during the typical patch cycle during Wrath, Cata, and MoP...just with a shorter gap at the end between the last major content patch and the next expansion (7 months instead of what had grown to be anywhere from 10-14 months). Considering we already get patches on a tighter schedule, I'm not sure we have enough additional info to make any real comparison of what they got versus we could theoretically get by doubling the staff.