1.0 vs ARR Areas - A Visual Comparison

[Lihtleita]

I wish we could have those run and movement animations back, they look so good!

while they are good looking keep in mind a slow starting run or stop animation like in 1.0 would cause a lot of grief while dodging aoes.
they had a similar problem in tomb raider angel of darkness. gorgeous, lovingly animated movements.....that you got sick of waiting to play out and would kill you sometimes.

the little lean into turns would be nice to have back though

[Etupa]

Textures, animations, weather and... seamless no loading exploration... I will never understand why thoses "PS3 limitations" are still a thing in 2022 where we can have individual settings, resolutions and configuration... moreover, a FFXIV PC licence don't even work on PS3... That was a strange choice.

[Shougun]

while they are good looking keep in mind a slow starting run or stop animation like in 1.0 would cause a lot of grief while dodging aoes.
they had a similar problem in tomb raider angel of darkness. gorgeous, lovingly animated movements.....that you got sick of waiting to play out and would kill you sometimes.

the little lean into turns would be nice to have back though

Technically speaking that's what animation canceling and blending are for. I'm not saying it HAS to be smooth when using such techniques, often in action combat games it's purposefully not to ensure a stronger sense of weight and commitment (with very choice animation canceling actions), just that you can have reaaaallly good movement animations and not feel like you're a freight train. One suggestion I had way back when was to use those two above techniques with also a minor amount of elasticity to your point of detection (SE uses a literal pixel for our "in the bad, not in the bad")- so when you're changing movement your pixel would be slightly elastic to the direction you're facing (if you're trying to u turn out of red for example your character is blending beautifully and your pixel would be 'leaning' with the direction you're intending to go rather than directly under the center of your character).

In combination I strongly feel it would be possible to have high quality, grounded, slightly weighted, movement animations while also not making your character impractical to use. Another solution, but quite substantially changes gameplay and so probably for another game would be to use something like many other games with strong animations use.. a dodge roll. To see dodge roll in an mmo space you could look GW2 and how that adjusts combat, some interesting changes in that you can dodge 'through' a marker. Wouldn't suggest that now, but could be a future game option.

The main issue in that being a quality blending and canceling on thousands of players at once would (or at least could) be impractical, so you yourself would likely look like buttery rich goodness but everyone else would need to be like as we are now (or less players displayed on screen).

[Ransu]

Textures, animations, weather and... seamless no loading exploration... I will never understand why thoses "PS3 limitations" are still a thing in 2022 where we can have individual settings, resolutions and configuration... moreover, a FFXIV PC licence don't even work on PS3... That was a strange choice.

Because the system was built with the ps3 in mind. They'd have to redo A LOT to make zones seamless. That's just straight up never going to happen.

[elizeugba]

Hm. I recall the Limsa Lominsa aetheryte being in a hall near the Drowing Wench... not out in the open on the lower level where it is now. I probably have a screenshot of it somewhere. I'll post it later if I can find one.

I wish someday they remake the old main cities and remove the loading between the layers.

[Packetdancer]

while they are good looking keep in mind a slow starting run or stop animation like in 1.0 would cause a lot of grief while dodging aoes.
they had a similar problem in tomb raider angel of darkness. gorgeous, lovingly animated movements.....that you got sick of waiting to play out and would kill you sometimes.

Yeah, I really miss the feeling of "weight" that the animations had to them in 1.x... but:

1. There was basically no concept of animation "cancel" in that game; if you started a movement, by the Twelve it would play the whole animation, regardless of whether or not that carried you into an AoE or whatever. I'm not even convinced it had blending of any form for transitioning between animations as opposed to playing out an entire pre-made transition sequence.
2. It's actually very, very obnoxious to try to do animation that has weight and have good networked movement when you have potentially many, many players presence. I will spare you the technical reasons for this (unless people want to hear it, I guess) because I will otherwise be my usual wordy-as-all-hell self, but suffice to say that the choices ARR made with animations are far more common than not when dealing with, like, potentially 40+ people in one area all wailing away on a single target a'la a hunt train.

But yeah... movement animations -- and oh, god, the cutscenes. I miss the cutscenes.

I just... don't miss watching myself continue walking and skid to a lovingly-animated stop in the AoE I had tried to just avoid walking into.

Textures, animations, weather and... seamless no loading exploration... I will never understand why thoses "PS3 limitations" are still a thing in 2022 where we can have individual settings, resolutions and configuration... moreover, a FFXIV PC licence don't even work on PS3... That was a strange choice.

Technical debt.

No, really. When you make choices early in a project, everything later gets built on top of those choices. And this project has been going for a while.

Think of it like floors of a building: when the building is only one story high, it's easy to completely rebuild that first floor. If the building is three stories high and you want to change the actual footprint of the building, that gets tricky... you can remodel the interior, and build out rooms on the sides and stuff, but it's harder to change the actual building shape without potentially having to rebuild the upper floors. And once you're, like, a 12-story office building, doing anything more than basic interior remodeling is potentially hugely difficult.

Unfortunately, modern FFXIV is a fairly tall office complex in a downtown business district at this point... and the PS3 limitations are baked in at the lowest floors of that building. Renovating the game properly is not just "hey, let's add better textures", but a fairly major rework; it's bringing in a construction crew -- and if you leave the building open for business during construction (which they are), being extremely careful.

(Versus closing off the building to gut and rebuild it -- a'la shutting 1.x down entirely and making ARR separately.)

That doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means it's a lengthy process and a lot of work, where a new game starting right now would not have the same issues.

Hence why we see that they actually have been working on getting away from the PS3 limitations, working on improving the graphics fidelity -- and for all we know, maybe stuff like trying to rejoin the map halves in the early cities -- since some point in Shadowbringers; they're far enough along to show early examples in live letters, but they've said they still aren't going to be at a place close to "done" where the changes make it to players until 7.0.

[ReynTime]

while they are good looking keep in mind a slow starting run or stop animation like in 1.0 would cause a lot of grief while dodging aoes.
they had a similar problem in tomb raider angel of darkness. gorgeous, lovingly animated movements.....that you got sick of waiting to play out and would kill you sometimes.

the little lean into turns would be nice to have back though

People bring this up from time to time but not only was the animation lock for walking or running NOT a thing, it's very trivial to prevent a lock from happening while still having it in. A lot of games do it.

[Packetdancer]

It's trivial now, with a limited number of characters, but you will see many many multiplayer games that potentially have like 30+ people in an area still skip doing IK locking.

The game I'm building with a friend right now allows four players in online play; doing IK locking (both for foot placement and—as this game has parkour stiller movement—hand placement) and slope deformation is a no-brainer; it doesn't have a prohibitively high computational cost and makes everything look so much better.

If I had an environment where I had the potential for 50+ characters in an area? I'd be a lot more careful about making that choice, as doing more than very basic dynamic IK (e.g. the sloppy and imprecise slope deformation many games use) would have implications for the minimum system requirements even today.

When the ARR engine was put together, dynamic IK on that scale would've been an absolute non-starter on the PS3.

[Packetdancer]

Why does the mobile version of this forum lack an edit button to fix typos? And the "full site" button does nothing in a mobile browser?

That should've been "parkour style movement", anyway, if I was not trying to fight with autocorrect on a phone.

[Espon]

People bring this up from time to time but not only was the animation lock for walking or running NOT a thing, it's very trivial to prevent a lock from happening while still having it in. A lot of games do it.

Except that it was? I distinctly remember being amazed at seeing my character slow to a stop when I stopped moving, or doing a bit of a skid when suddenly trying to run in the opposite direction. I was so used to WoW's movement at the time that I thought this was so neat.

I wouldn't want it back, though. I've skidded off enough ledges or into enemies in platform games, I wouldn't want to have to deal with it when this game now focuses heavily on avoiding AoEs.