How Does This Game Have Good Graphics?

[Zante]

[Laraul]

I just started playing this game and a lot of people say the graphics are really good, well when I look at them I think their ugly, even for 2010. Am I missing out on some settings or something?

You got what you wanted. A bunch of opinions on the graphics. Yipee!

[Emulord]

This game has pretty impressive graphics for an MMO (even if to me, LL and Ul'Dah don't look that great), mainly in the country.

A Realm Reborn should fix the biggest part of the little graphics problems one can currently point out. It will most probably bring new ones, though.

[Soukyuu]

Here is the thing about the ground textures. If you look at them at an angle (ie our typical perspective) then yes they do look all blury and horrible. If you move your camera so its looking directly down. then they look prety damned nifty.

What you describe is lack of anisotropic filtering. And tbh, I never noticed it happening.

Moral of the story? Square Stop using Normal mapping on every thing in the damned game.

Normal mapping makes the flat textures look 3D and is used to save resources because you don't have to actually make a complex geometry for your model. It doesn't have anything to do with blurry textures. You should probably inform yourself more before you post something like this.

[Eclipse]

Anything becomes dull with repeated exposure, regardless of how amazing it is. So the copy-pasted landmasses of FFXIV present an issue in this regard, but the fact that they are so intricately designed, even on the umpteenth visit, there's always some new item to take account of, and marvel at. The level of detail is always still striking, to this day.

This is what's wrong with many other MMOs. On first glance it's interesting, on second glance it's already boring because there's no intricacy in the design. In FFXIV, although there are copy pasted segments of landmass, the original places have more longevity by virtue of the fact that they are so expertly crafted.

Well said.