Was This Graphical Update Necessary?

[Malthir]

Maybe I'm entirely ignorant and I've been living in a cave - but was the update a big ask in the community?

Realistically no, it's not been a huge ask or outcry from the community, it's been a small contingent of glamour focused players who cared, which is completely valid to want done not trying to insult anyone, but by in large the vast majority of players only see their characters faces in cutscenes and are zoomed out 90% of the time.
I agree with you, movement and gameplay in the game would have been a far more important fix, since that is what drives away alot of new players ( 3 core things that puts of new people. Longer GCD than most games, this is only fixed at high level when you get your mechanics and OGCD's which ties into having a poor early game exp, Movement using a ground plane makes you slide about and looks bad, UI is very un customisable in particular things like font type and colour.) . They are not even slightly competitive with the movement of nearly any MMO that's still going, with the exception of runescape.

The issue they have though, is tackling movement is going to be a beast of a job. If they attempted collision based movement, like all other MMO's do, they will have to re animate every attack action in the game. If you look at games like, New World, WoW, ESO, you see that none of their attack animations for moves are particularly long and generally only involve upper body movement, this is because you're movement is collision based so you have to allow the legs of a character to move independently to the animation triggered. It's difficult to do well and when you have an animation like say bloodspiller on the Drk, the animation is about 2-3 seconds long, or soul-eater where you character jumps as part of the attack animation so they would be left in a weird spot where they would have to either lock you in place while the animation complete, or rework every animation in the game. Option 1 while not hard is worse than what we have with the plane sliding along the ground as you can move while the animations fire, you just slide, option 2 is hard and time consuming.

[xxmiamorecadenza]

I’m thankful I posted this. Because it just validities that my brain does not register minor details in FFXiV.
I opened up the game this morning and spent ages staring at the ground or plants to understand if there was any kind of difference present or if it was still all mostly the same . It genuinely just looks like the same game to me.

[Neoyoshi]

It was, and it still is; they've only updated portions of materials and textures so far, so not everything in the game has been touched by the update yet- that will take time and they are doing the update in phases; so consider this 'phase 1' of the graphics update.

[xxmiamorecadenza]

It was, and it still is; they've only updated portions of materials and textures so far, so not everything in the game has been touched by the update yet- that will take time and they are doing the update in phases; so consider this 'phase 1' of the graphics update.

I honestly have no idea what they even did update. Is it suppose to be a super subtle change? I have no idea what I’m looking for here.

[TheRealQuah]

Anyone complaining about the graphics update hasn't seen Ketenramm yet. Oh boy that man is hunky.

Bonus points for the giants teeth.

[BeoCat]

Admittedly the new AA options are the most disappointing part of the update for me, considering its just FXAA on steroids', but at least now with DLSS you can hack your way into DLAA and have the game looking good. Obviously implementing proper MSAA would require them to re-write the entire render engine so that was never an option.
New lighting and character models though look great.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Very pleased with the update and happy they did it. I don't think it was "necessary" but it is very nice to stay more current for an aging game.

[ElHeggunte]

I honestly have no idea what they even did update. Is it suppose to be a super subtle change? I have no idea what I’m looking for here.

It was intended to be subtle, yes. It’s basically a texture and lighting update, not an entirely new engine or something extreme like going from FFVII to FFVII:Remake.

Keeping things close to the original was part of the point, and in my opinion they mostly succeeded. My character looks better without the changes being jarring or uncanny.

[Wildheaven182]

I'm not opposed to the update.

And, considering the fact I'm playing as a FemHroth, I'm generally apathetic toward how characters will change from Endwalker to DawnTrail.

But I'm wondering if it was needed and is it a solid selling point for the game? The game already looks quite lovely from my perspective considering its age. And I wanted to politely inquire as to why the time and effort taken to tune up the graphics wasn't instead invested toward expanding upon character customization, making mount movement more dynamic - which they showcased, yes - improving upon character movement, puzzling out how to improve housing and apartments and so on.

Yes, the grass is prettier. The water does the thing.

Maybe I'm entirely ignorant and I've been living in a cave - but was the update a big ask in the community?

Well, no. It's more of a voluntary design decision from the devs. It's not an upgrade as it rather adds better environmental lighting and shaders, however it isn't compatible with the detail shaders on characters so those are gone. Also, they want your characters to look brighter for the lighthearted expansion, so your character is now a light source. This is why there is no longer shading or highlights on hair at all, and there is no environmental shadows or lighting on the characters anymore.
So it was a choice to favor the environment over the character shading quality.

[Little_Giant]

It was very neccessary, it helped in some areas but I expected more tbh.

Im happy that we finally got some decent "anti-aliasing" with the help of DLSS. However it can be a bit too blurry and Square enix needs to implement a sharpener.
However I rather take the current DLSS blurryness over the shimmering that has plagued FFXIV since forever.

We also got improved lightning and improved vegetation. Textures got some improvements but it's very inconsistent.



FFXIV still has the greenish? tint filter and asses are still flat, -1.