Increase of Assets on maps

[Zer0ofTime]

Regardless, they are still bound to keep the game in line with whatever console is lagging, even if it's only 30%, over niche high-spec PCs.

Moreover, the very fact that it is Cross Platform FURTHER nulifies any "BuT tHe NoObS gOtTa UpDaTe ThEiR hArDwArEs!"

Until the devs decide to drop PS4 support, THAT is the bottom line.

That's kind of a straw man argument. For starters, everyone on the PS4 KNOWS their timer is ticking down to 0 now that the PS5 has been out over a year and will only start to become the norm. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 already have to write off the old gen consoles and the console company themselves really have final say if they keep their online services rolling (like how Nintendo is shutting down all it's older consoles online stuff including the new 3ds)

The other side of things is these games are developed ON a PC somewhere. There are no devs using a ps4 ps4pro or ps5 coding the game (play testing it at best maybe) so it's not like they wouldn't try to see what they are capable of doing despite server limitations, I'm sure there are a lot of fun in house only things as with any dev that only they get to see from that side and never makes it to public because they know it can't be feasible. I am more certain that they have the ability to even bring newer lighting techniques into the game if they worked with nvidia and wanted ray tracing or something added (since it was even able to be added to quake 2).

There are a lot of things they can keep pushing because they are making these games on a PC to stay ahead of that bottom line bare bones minimum system requirements that is the PS4. The moment that system is retired everyone is forced to swap to new hardware anyway like it or not, it's the same outcome at the end of it, got to get better hardware to keep up with the times.

[DezereDawn]

Can't hold everyone back because someone holds themself back with limited older tech.

Until GPU and PS5 prices are reasonable and available at all times, this is a terrible take

Fact of the matter is also that this game is 10 years old now, and while you can expect improvements over time, there's an upper limit to where it becomes reasonable to work with the engine, as it stands, 14 is, as far as i'm aware, still running on a heavily modified crystal tools, and i don't doubt the engine is reaching it's upper limit rather quickly, to go further than that would require exponentially more processing power for very little, if any benefit

i'd argue that's the case for most games though, these days, while i can tell the difference between late ps4 and early ps5 games, i really don't see it being much more pleasing to the eye, and i'd rather have rock solid performance on more machines as a viable option than an extra 2000 polygon's in my character's hair, and some lighting that looks somewhat better than my current settings

[Packetdancer]

and there's a good chance the code that needs editing to make Y work is Ark levels of borked.

I mean, ARK is a pretty high bar for borkedness levels.

This is, after all, a game where frequently no one on the modding Discord -- including the actual dev team, who hang out there -- can figure out why something has gone wrong, to the point that it's tradition to just eventually give up and respond with the emoji of the ARK icon, because "Sometimes ARK gonna ARK."

It is a game with a (thankfully exceedingly rare) bug that can potentially corrupt your character when traveling between ARK servers; when no one -- not the devs, not the modders -- could figure it out, even after a long time trying to track it down, they basically just wrote it into the lore that "sometimes the teleporter kills you permanently; no one knows why" and called it a day.

As I said, I do love that game... but I feel like even FFXIV's harshest critics would have to admit that ARK's a level of borked that FFXIV could probably not reach even if they consciously tried.

(I strongly suspect the reason we're getting ARK II is that the Studio Wildcard folks have probably been praying for an excuse to set the existing codebase on fire, salt the ashes, and walk away to start clean.)