How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Alien_Gamer]

Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

The official word is that the game engine can't support it and it would require a massive overhaul to make happen and currently its not seen as a priority.

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You're not wrong in that more polys equals more resources but thats not where the limitation is. The limitation is in how they build character data and reference it.

Basically each race has X (I haven't counted them but lets assume 40) number of customization slots available to it. Most races have the same number of slots for faces, height, tattoos, color, etc, all of these options take up 35-40 of those slots leaving only a handful for other unique attributes like tails or muscle sliders. How character models are built defines how a lot of other parts of the game engine behaves such as physics, gear, animations etc; essentially this is one of the foundation stones of everything else. For them to change it means changing everything its connected to.

As an analogy this is like saying you want to make a basement wall in your house 2 feet taller. It sounds simple until you realize everything thats built on that wall that will be affected by it.

As to why they did it this way? Restrictions left over from 1.0 possibly or a lack of foresight to see people might want more options or a bit of both. When 2.0 was in development MMOs didn't really have a lot of customization options for races so it may not have been seen as an important thing to develop and when 1.0 had a perfectly servicable framework already...why make the effort?

Textures are a bit different though. PS3 and lower power PCs were definitely the restrictioin that made them go with textures that were much lower resolution. And thats not really a bad thing in my opinion, however what I do have a problem with is that they made the original texture files in that lower resolution instead of making a high res version and downsampling it to what they could effectively use. Thats also why a high res texture pack isn't being offered now; the files don't exist. They would have to effectively recreate every piece of artwork in the game at a high resolution and thats something that could take a year with several artists working on it. Thats a huge expense for something that not many people want. I think most players would appreciate better textures but few are saying it should be a priority so for SE, this isn't a priority to develop.