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

[Arohk]

+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

Hair defined is your friend, HD hair textures.

[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.

[Larirawiel]

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

Reshade is post processing. It cannot fix the damage, which is already done by the engine.


Cheers