My Three Main Wishes for 7.0 Graphical Update

[DiaDeem]

Lighting

Lighting is a huge part in gaming graphics, and good lighting can often make up for low triangle counts and average textures. When lighting mocks up, it can bring down an otherwise good looking game, and XIV needs to improve its lighting. We spend a lot of time in The Ocular in Shadowbringers, and the lighting and shadows there look really weird. Faces looks like clay, with very unnatural looking shadows:



Emet in particular looks... really weird (really bad imho) in this place, and we spend a lot of ShB chatting with everyone in this location.



There's also places where light behaves very weirdly. Here we have a bright red source high in the sky, and the area looks properly lit, actually:



Until you flip the camera and suddenly the character is completely in the dark and very poorly lit. What happened with the big red source of light in the sky?



XIV's light model was fine, for 2014. They've said a lighting revamp is on the table, so I hope they can stick to landing!

Anti Aliasing

XIV uses an implementation of FXAA for its AA, and it's... really bad. I'm running the game at 1080p so millage may vary on higher resolutions, but the bad AA tends to pop out like a sore thumb, and some details end up looking just terrible:







It's also why stairs have this weird wobbly effect thing I'm sure everyone has noticed:



It's easier to notice in motion.

AA tends to be some of the less expensive graphical tweaks on modern engines, so I'm hoping this improves with 7.0

Textures

Just by improving lighting and AA, lower quality textures are gonna look way better than they do right now, but once you have some newer textures on, the game has the potential to truly look amazing. Not much to share here. We've all seen the low quality leaves, or Hien's clothes. This is the last thing I feel will help the game look super nice without destroying performance.

What wishes do you guys have in particular for the Graphical Update?

[Khryseis_Astra]

+1 to everything you said.

Personally I’d just like hair that doesn’t look like yarn close up, but that might just fall under the textures category. lol

[Arrhin]

Agree on all counts. For now, if you have an NVIDIA GPU you can clean up the shimmering a bit by setting Texture filtering-Negative LOD bias to Clamp in Manage 3D settings>Program settings>Final Fantasy VIX A Realm Reborn in NCP. Not perfect but it does clean things up a bit. Looking forward to 7.0

[Atelier-Bagur]

My biggest wish for the update even though it was never in the initial conversation but to allow more customization options. Or at least free up certain clan specific option looks to be available for both clans of their respective race.

[Ishe-P]

The lighting in this game is absolute dogshit. I can't wait for them to fix it. Hopefully.

Can we have more than 4 faces to pick from plz. That's my other thing. I feel like a lot of stuff will go a long long way if there were more customization options in general.

[Rufalus]

LIGHTING upgrade would be a game-changer. I hope they also redesign the Gold Saucer with more colorful textures instead of brown everywhere, and many more light sources placed there so it's much brighter.

[Oizen]

I'm not expecting anything thats better than you can do yourself with reshade.

[DiaDeem]

I'm not expecting anything thats better than you can do yourself with reshade.

ReShade is post. A new light model should change how lighting works at an engine render level, and ReShade can't go that deep.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Didnt they show off a Demo of how the Graphical Update will be?
They used the Dancing Plague as an example and showed a Before (current) and After (When Graphics update hits)

I think it 'mostly' covers all of your points

[Shougun]

I believe your desires are going to be addressed but certainly explaining what concerns you have might help them focus on something if it was missed, so the pictures and text is nice still

They also mentioned potentially weather, and that is definitely one of the ones I think could have a 'major' subtle impact. Water would be another. Some high quality snow and sand shaders could make the snow and sand zones next level without much else than just a shader giving them better sense of traction and dynamic shape. For example sand skirting across the surface, appearance of movement, sinking. Snow is more obvious.. make it crunch lol. Semi-related but a surprisingly a decent amount of mounts don't have 'footprints' or at least logical ones.

Further improving parallax would be nice.

Game is far from ugly but I could imagine quite a few 'systems' under graphics that could have large impacts to the game without many small individual changes. By that I don't mean 'easy' just for example if you said update the textures (and we're not using some AI lol), that could be billions of textures XD. Meanwhile if you upgraded the shader for sand, water, or what have you- it would be a lot of code / work but you'd re-use it over and over and over. So my personally the 'I don't feel guilty to desires' / votes are to some of the environmental shaders and systems like weather, water, snow, sand, etc. Grass is another one they mentioned where improving the system can have wide reaching impact once developed, and the example they showed was very nice- if they're going hog wild and while not really necessary light filtering through (translucent) and flora responding to physics (like spells and physical body mass) would be neat (though just looking better is already great).

A guilty example would be a particle system like they have in their more recent FF games (flashy SFX with dynamic particles) lol. Fire particles blasting out into the environment and scattering with physics into the walls XD... So unnecessary but I'd turn it on if it was an option. Melt computers if you left the setting on for all entities in a large battlefield.