Graphics Update Discussion

[PEANUT]

I read a convincing article that said this game will never support Ray Tracing and the reason is because it uses reflective lighting. What that means is that colors are decided by the lighting, so if you think that colors look washed out, it is actually because they sometimes do in real life as well due to the lighting.

For example, if you go to the character creator and look at your character's skin or eyes, you will notice they change color a lot depending on the background you choose and that is an example of the reflective lighting the game uses.

Environments are literally a different color depending on the lighting and SE spends a huge amount of development time on the lighting just to make the color look how they want. How do I know that? They did a development panel at one of the Shadowbringers fanfests where they showed how they made environments such as The Crystarium and Amh Araeng and the extensive work put into the lighting.

This extends into the gear design, where they will only use certain colors for gear because some colors, or color combinations, don't work.

So if they went with Ray Tracing to handle everything, suddenly years of work and effort put into designing the game for their lighting system would potentially have to be revisited to make it look good with Ray Tracing.

I don't mean to argue in any rude way please understand, but I think this is what they are changing? The PBR system will make it so that they don't do this anymore and instead will have a physical based renderer that interacts with lighting where they don't manually adjust colors and such to "make them look good in different lighting situations" so to speak. And if I'm true, in the future that would help for the PBR to interact with ray-traced lighting naturally to greatly improve image quality without that extra work.