Quote Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus View Post
If the graphics update takes us half way to the same level it will be amazing, but it shows that they can definately make better characters if they really want to, even with the current assets.
While this does demonstrate that a single character can be made with more detail, what it unfortunately doesn't demonstrate is that FF14 can support having player characters with that much detail. That's because at any given time, there's guaranteed to be only a single Clive on-screen. However, there can and often are a hundred different player characters on a screen. Because the limitation in graphics quality isn't due to not being able to create higher-fidelity assets (although there is certainly a cost to that) but rather hardware's ability to render assets while staying performant. More assets on screen uses up hardware's limited bandwidth, and similarly higher-fidelity assets use up that bandwidth as well. Thus, whether Clive levels of detail would or wouldn't overflow the budget for player character assets is uncertain.

Personally, I'm going in with low expectations. My best guess is that they gave Clive all that extra detail as a compromise because without it he either wouldn't look like Clive (because Clive was designed for a game with much more detail) or he'd look like a meaningfully bad version of Clive.