Thread: 1.0 vs ARR Areas - A Visual Comparison

Originally Posted by DiaDeem

It wasn't on consoles, and it was a struggle to run on PCs of the time. The game ran on Crystal Tools (FFXIII) and now runs on a modified version of the Luminous Engine (FFXV) and among other issues had trouble displaying large amounts of players on screen at the same time, but there were some really beautiful areas.

If you ask me, I'm a bit in the middle. The Gate of Nald area looks way too dark and poorly lit in 1.0 if you ask me. Camp Riversmeet looks beautiful in 1.0 but Central Thanalan looks kinda flat, and could be because nothing is casting real shadows there. What 1.0 had was a rather amazing sense of scale, though that came with very repetitive looking areas and don't get me started with the copy-pasted corridors of the Black Shroud.

I'm tempted to find a better place in Toto-Rak from 6.1 because it's clearly way prettier than what you normally see in the game right now, and more in line with what I expect for the 7.0 visual update.

That makes sense. I guess I'm just more partial to darker areas and more saturated colors as a personal preference. I actually like how dark the Gate of Nald is but the Chamber of Rule is too dark to me.

Originally Posted by Ghost_of_Ebina

I've watched videos of Yoshi-P saying 1.0 graphics were so highly defined that it drained a lot of resources just to keep the world running. He said he downgraded the graphics significantly to make sure the game would run without significant lag, so the faded-out / downgraded look was definitely intentional.

I thought the issue with 1.0's poor performance had to do with small items having way too many polygons than they actually needed? That and just poor coding and optimization in general. But I remember frequently seeing some meme about flower pots.

I dig for this sort of comparisons Are there more?

look up the noClip documentary series on FFXIV. it will explain a lot.

Originally Posted by Rannie

I may be going crazy but wasn't there stories circulating during 1.0 where high end PCs were basically burning out and dying due to how hard it was on them? I don't know how true that was but I also remember once my friend's screen going green when some of us were screwing around casting holy and Flare at one time. (Though his pc wasn't the greatest I think.)

I think a lot of people with "high end" pcs were stretching it. If you were zoomed in all the way and had people have a spam Holy Party, it would stutter and lag like it does now - and kick some people off the game. In the albeit short time I played I'd never heard of anyone blue screening/shutting down if their computer was properly set up. You aren't supposed to play on Ultra with a potato - same as now - but some people still do.

1.0's specs was extremely demanding for PC and even people with a decent computer had difficulty running it. And while zones were big and open, there was nothing in them and there were a ton of copy and pasted assets. The Black Shroud was basically a copy and pasted maze of repeating pathways.

Downgrading the graphics to allow the game to run on PS3 did have a bit to do it with, but also to allow people with older PCs to play the game as well. One of the reasons why WoW was so successful was because anyone could play that without having a super PC, and the FF14 team wanted to replicate that.