How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Now I can agree with you that it comes down to either the genre or the engine, and not the art style.
Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

I am not a game designer or engineer so I don't have the specifics but I do know it has something to do with how many different details can be displayed at once. I am probably not going to explain this well but...

Imagine Limsa has 30 players gathered around the Aetheryte. There's currently 5 races each with 2 variants so thats 10 possible different racial types. Even though some have only minor differences like skin color or eye irises, others like the Hyur have a more notable difference in body. Then there's like 4 or so different faces for each race. Then there's 2 genders for each. Then there's other details like make up/tattoos/tails. Then each of those players is wearing different gear. Each of those 30 players can look very different from the other both in model and gear and the more differences there and/or the more players there are the bigger the load on the server.

All those differences eat up resources and the more players you have, especially if gathered in one area, the more effort the engine has to put out to keep up. A game where there is only one player character or only a few player characters that are pre-rendered and don't change or have limited options to change their appearance eats up MUCH less resources. This is one reason why single player games can look so much better than MMO's. So I imagine that more face options means more differences which means more work for the engine to do and more data eating up bandwidth.

It's a sad truth that despite the advances in technology we are still hamstrung by the tech of our time. Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

[Shurrikhan]

I am not a game designer or engineer so I don't have the specifics but I do know it has something to do with how many different details can be displayed at once. I am probably not going to explain this well but...

Imagine Limsa has 30 players gathered around the Aetheryte. There's currently 5 races each with 2 variants so thats 10 possible different racial types. Even though some have only minor differences like skin color or eye irises, others like the Hyur have a more notable difference in body. Then there's like 4 or so different faces for each race. Then there's 2 genders for each. Then there's other details like make up/tattoos/tails. Then each of those players is wearing different gear. Each of those 30 players can look very different from the other both in model and gear and the more differences there and/or the more players there are the bigger the load on the server.

All those differences eat up resources and the more players you have, especially if gathered in one area, the more effort the engine has to put out to keep up. A game where there is only one player character or only a few player characters that are pre-rendered and don't change or have limited options to change their appearance eats up MUCH less resources. This is one reason why single player games can look so much better than MMO's. So I imagine that more face options means more differences which means more work for the engine to do and more data eating up bandwidth.

It's a sad truth that despite the advances in technology we are still hamstrung by the tech of our time. Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

How is it that another MMO with 41 sliders worth of 100 points of precision each manage to render 80+ players at a time, then? I'll admit it bogs in those times, but those fps drops are scarcely more than those of XIV despite the orders of magnitude fewer options in the latter.

[Astarotha]

because thats not a problem of server traffic, where youre receiving character data with lines like 42,45,51,91,24,05,15,15,15,25,25,25 all telling your client what to render, the problems come when you either run out of BUS speed (bottleneck) or you run out of ram allocation, or you overtax your graphics card (usually its the other 2 that run out first)

also when the devs say they cant increase something due to server stability concerns, those packets constantly hitting and leaving the server is what theyre talking about, now other than keeping track of the position of all those values at once and making sure they are consistent the server has no need to render anything at all, but any time they add more data to track its actually an exponential increase if it involves data others can see and a doubling of traffic if youre the only one that can view it

[Berethos]

How is it that another MMO with 41 sliders worth of 100 points of precision each manage to render 80+ players at a time, then?

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

[Alien_Gamer]

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

Black Desert Online has a character creation menu thats almost beyond belief and the game is popular enough that it will have that many players together. For all its faults it is a very visually impressive game.

[MistakeNot]

Black Desert Online has a character creation menu thats almost beyond belief and the game is popular enough that it will have that many players together. For all its faults it is a very visually impressive game.

It's funny. I hear lots of people talking about how great the character creation in Black Desert Online is. I hear very few people talk about how great the gameplay in BDO is.

[kikix12]

It's funny. I hear lots of people talking about how great the character creation in Black Desert Online is. I hear very few people talk about how great the gameplay in BDO is.

Black Desert Online is a game outside of any franchise, so it loses points on that alone, especially with critics. Considering that, the metacritic scores are:

Black Desert Online: 73 from critics and 7.0 from players.
Final Fantasy XIV - A Realm Reborn: 86 from critics and 7.3 from players.
Final Fantasy XIV - Stormblood: 87 from critics and 8.4 from players.

Considering that Final Fantasy is a famous, beloved franchise from a developer that does one thing very well, story, the scores show that mechanically, Black Desert Online is as good as Final Fantasy XIV but lacks in the story and brand. That being said, A Realm Reborn was graded by half of what Black Desert Online was, while Stormblood by about 2/5 of that.

So yes, sorry, but Black Desert Online is not a significantly worse game mechanically going by metacritic. I cannot really say personally, didn't play it, but it's most likely just "different".

[Shurrikhan]

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

BDO, B&S, Moonlight Blade. Within the year, you'll probably see a couple more. Only the first bogs noticeably in its cities -- far more packed than XIV's -- and no more on my comp than XIV does. Each has certain areas of poor optimization, but the characters are not it.

So unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish for waterfalls or the like, and that saving a few more frames in viewing the latter is worth so much more...

[Pluvia]

BDO, B&S, Moonlight Blade. Within the year, you'll probably see a couple more. Only the first bogs noticeably in its cities -- far more packed than XIV's -- and no more on my comp than XIV does. Each has certain areas of poor optimization, but the characters are not it.

So unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish for waterfalls or the like, and that saving a few more frames in viewing the latter is worth so much more...

There are many things you can say about B&S but well optimized isn't one of them that game runs like trash complete and utter trash its optimization is a meme and a well deserved one. This is coming from someone who still plays the game doing the latest raids it runs horribly.

[kikix12]

There are many things you can say about B&S but well optimized isn't one of them that game runs like trash(...)

Its optimization actually is not worse than FFXIV. It is far more PING-reliant, but that's got nothing to do with optimization. If the cooldowns in that game were the same as in Final Fantasy, I'd still be playing it instead of Final Fantasy XIV because it had less issues otherwise being enjoyable enough...while being free. Really, its PING dependency is the only real issue with it.

Unless you want to tell me that my laptop somehow plays a less optimized and more demanding game better than a more optimized and less demanding game...Yeah...no.


The reason why Final Fantasy XIV is so restricted is not to save bandwidth, to ease up calculation costs or to get optimized. It is so restricted because doing it like that provided the developers with tools to make a lot of content at lower money and time expense. However, that comes at the cost of any single change requiring a massive undertaking. In most different games adding a new race that is not just another human is a matter of just going through a rendering of every armor on that race and making corrections only to the parts that look poorly due to the game operating on 3D models. In Final Fantasy XIV every armor needs to be redone from scratch because it operates on textures. Every change requires hundredths of hours making sure that the game will know how to react to it in every single situation. Every emote, every movement, every animation. EVERYTHING. That's why this design sucks. Changing something retroactively is massive undertaking that can require changing several percent of the game.

As for super custom avatar, I'm willing to bet most MMORPG use a trick in which the custom avatar you create is localized onto your PC and the actually model transmitted to other gamers isn't as in depth as what you are seeing. I other words, the game would have to upload your custom avatar and download that specific design file to every player you meet and vice versa. All the upload and download would really start slowing up everything and would be almost impossible for console gamers.

The "model" of a character is actually several hundred bytes at most. It's just a few dozens of numbers that the games engine renders accordingly to a formula that it already has. Every player that have the game have the tools to render such a file.

It really is no different than this game. Except that in this game the numbers are from 1 to 4 or some other small number while in those other games they are from 1 to let's say 100. And instead of a set of maybe 8 numbers, you have a set of 16-20 or so.