Would you trade new ingame content for an engine upgrade?

[Shuuli]

the ever present elephant for these kinds of things are, its an old game, people play it on potatoes. not everyone, but the danger they run is, lets say that they upgrade everything, and suddenly all those old machines/consoles cant run it. sure, you might be able to turn down the graphics settings or what have you, but people in general do NOT like doing that if they are used to things looking a certain way, they do not want, ever, to turn down graphics settings, even if it makes things run more smoothly. some will, but lets face it, few people will want their game to look less pretty.

so, it will boil down to either SE saying "this is the direction, if you want a new engine, you will have to put out cash to upgrade your computer, plain and simple", which I cant see SE doing, because they arent a NA game company. The other option is developing 2 versions of the game, one old engine, one new, which I also dont see SE doing because from a cost perspective, makes no sense.

would it be awesome? sure would. is it possible? sure is, but its a very tricky slope.with the way the dev team works to make the game accessible to everyone however, I dont see them really upgrading things enough to keep some happy with new HD components etc, if its going to drive off the people on potatoes.

But this is the whole point. The new gaming engines out on the market are also capable to cater to people with less good hardware... For example the nanite tech in Unreal 5 makes rendering so much simpler and 5 times better. You know the settings in every game where you set "field of vision" (meaning how far your character should see in a given area? This is no longer a problem with this engine. It is truly incredible.

On the other hand, I have very bad news for people who have old PCs. The hardware and software industries are usually working together to force people to upgrade.

Greatest example is the new Winshit 11 upgrade that does not want to run on considerably good older hardware... (of coruse there are ways to force it)

When Winshit will stop providing support for 10... al the applications/ programs in relation will do the same too... and eventually your hardware will be unusable...

It was the same when we changed HDDs from IDE to SATA. Anything else that you wanted to update was not compatible with your old motherboard caus they were aligned to SATA that was aligned to SATA compi motherboards.

[Jeeqbit]

What's wrong with the engine?

Lots of people here have been talking lately about their desires for a grand update to the game to bring it up to modern MMO tech

I mean, "modern MMOs" only just came out. Before these MMOs that literally just came out, we only had MMOs with cartoon or pixelated graphics with FFXIV being one of the best ones graphically until this last year or so.

The graphics could be better but they are not on purpose because better graphics means more work on the graphics when creating fights, at the expense of making the fights good. All of the models need to be even in detail so that there isn't a 1.0 situation where a plant pot looks really good, but everything around it is noticably worse. Instead there is a medium balance in detail between everything with strict limits on how detailed any model can be so that it's not more detailed than everything around it.

The game was also designed with the future in mind so that the graphics can be improved over time. It seems that they did AI upscales already and I remember we were told how they can slowly increase the limits for character bones.

The engine is already getting changed in the background as well. In 5.0 we got an upgraded choice selection in cutscenes from what was a little popup and the trust system, which is really good and in 6.0 we got a lot of great RPG features such as allies following us in the world and stealth quests. These are really big improvements to a previously simple quest system the was not this interactive. In battles we have had improvements such as the charge system.

There is no reason the engine can't be upgraded over time and it is being upgraded over time.

[Eraden]

I must say this: If you want this game to die out, then by all means, don't bother upgrading it to the point where the minimum specs for a computer to be able to run it, increases. If this game is to seriously have a future, it MUST be upgraded. However, having said that, upgrading for the sake of upgrading is a non starter. There needs to be a plan of what features can be improved and what new features can be added to improve the game play. As some have already mentioned, there have already been new features added and small improvements incorporated. At this point, I strongly suspect that SE already has a long term plan in place to keep pushing the functionality of this game. So I guess...we are all musing about things that are already in the works?

[Momo_Kozuki]

Depend on which one that has to be sacrificed:
-Deep Dungeon?
-Instanced Zone like Eureka?
-Trial series and its Extreme?
-Raid series together with its Savage?
-24-man raid?
-Limited Job content?

-New classes?
-Player's QoL?

[Nafreyu]

Absolutely. It's not a small fish title anymore. Time to give it the resources it deserves.

[Azuri]

MMOs live and die by their content and telling players that they won't have anything new to do for the next 2-3 years but the game will "look pretty" once we are done is a simple way to bury even a highly successful one.

[Moomba33]

Personally no. Playable content is the most important part of the game to me. I find the graphics good enough, and the inventory issues irritating but not game breaking.
I could accept a longer patch cycle while SE worked on engine updates.

[Krotoan]

MMOs live and die by their content and telling players that they won't have anything new to do for the next 2-3 years but the game will "look pretty" once we are done is a simple way to bury even a highly successful one.

What if they promised that not only would it "look pretty" but things like a glamour log, greatly increased storage, and expanded character customization would be happening?

Cause "look pretty" is updating textures. Engine upgrades usually mean a complete change of potentiality.

[Jin-]

Yes and double yes if it's in house custom engine

[TristanX]

I'd like more eye candy. My rig just yawns at FF14. They just need to add another preset and more options so that people with older rigs still can play.