Quote Originally Posted by Deithwen View Post
And yet nothing prevents the dev team to increase the quality further. The textures we have now are not by 2018 standards, even for a MMO. AA is lacking too, no physical interaction with the world etc.
Many MMOs other than BDO look better on those parts. Even F2P ones.

There is no justification for lacking those basic features in a 2018 AAA MMO made by one of the biggest gaming company in the world.

And for your information, say we get increased textures quality, nothing has to be trade for this to work, the only thing needed is enough vram on the client side, and that's it. There is no direct perfomance impact on this.
Of course it's graphics are not up to 2018 standards, it wasn't made in 2018 (ARR's development started in early 2011, replacing 1.0 which first started development around 2006! For a comparison, SE's earlier FF MMORPG, FFXI, was launched in 2002 and it's still running in Direct X 8 with the same PS2-era engine it's always had!).

You're not going to see SE spend a fortune completely overhauling the engine just to chuck in a few fancy graphic gimmicks simply to appease the wishes of a few players. SE are far more likely to simply create a whole new MMORPG with 'today's tech' and leave FFXIV with it's current engine alone, that's just being realistic.