NIGHT TIME!!

[Zenaku]

Actually, I'd give the points to the non-doctored FFXIV screencap for highest accuracy.

The real life photo has way more stars than you'd ever see in RL, even from a dark location. More technically, even if you could see that many, the difference in brightness would be drastically different since the eye responds to light more logarithmically than most cameras (and to me it doesn't look like they've applied a logarithmic stretch to the image data to mimic that), and thus individual constellations should still noticeably pop out from the rest of the starfield. I can barely discern constellations in this photo, and that's just because I know where to look (the teapot of Sagittarius, for example just to the left of the largest part of the dark dusty lanes low to the horizon. It's way more conspicuous to the naked eye). For the record, on Earth there is about 3,000 stars brighter than the limit of the human eye's capability, so that's the most one should expect to be able to count across the entire sky, and only half that at a given point in time since the other half is below the horizon.

The FFXIV screencap also has a crescent moon in it... even from a dark location, the moon being in the sky has a dramatic effect on what you're able to see. During full moon, you can't really count on seeing much of anything besides the brightest constellations and planets. If anything, there should be fewer stars visible even in this one, especially in the vicinity of the moon. Astronomers call the time around full moon "bright time" because the glare is so bad it even prevents certain types of full-on research observing.

Now, pixellation, yeah that's something that could be smoothed up for the game's stars, but overall I'm satisfied with their general brightness and visibility from 1.0.

Source: 4-years spent in observational astrophysics grad school with many weeks spent on remote mountain top telescopes...

On a clear night with no moisture and the moon not showing you could see up to 5.000 that up too how good your eye sight is tho . But you also see man made stuff up there so ya 3.000-5.000 point of light is about human eye's capability but seeing how we talking about a final fantasy game when most race have better eye sight then humans i think they could easy make the night sky look just as cool as this

[Myranda]

On a clear night with no moisture and the moon not showing you could see up to 5.000 that up too how good your eye sight is tho . But you also see man made stuff up there so ya 3.000-5.000 point of light is about human eye's capability but seeing how we talking about a final fantasy game when most race have better eye sight then humans i think they could easy make the night sky look just as cool as this

The photo you posted is a bit more believable for what someone might actually see, with some stars significantly brighter than others. I'd believe yeah maybe Miqo'tes have better eyesight than humans do, maybe elezen too, but I'd probably rate hyurs, roes, and lalafell as more or less human-equivalent in eyesight. So I probably still wouldn't prefer quite that many stars but somewhere in between would be a decent compromise. That and too many stars rendered I think would make it generally look like distracting clutter rather than something I could appreciate.

If we really wanted to be ultra-realistic, it would also be mostly wrong to include the color of the galaxy. Cones just don't work that well in dim conditions, and the rods would take over, leaving only the brightest objects with some slight amount of color distinction. Stars colors from red to blue, yeah the eyes can pick that up but the galaxy in color, nah. Just a smear of grey...

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with a little low-saturation color to liven it up... it's a game after all and I'll take some prettiness over hyper-realism hands down.

[Also yeah, you were right, the number of stars brighter than magnitude 6 is closer to 5000 not 3000. Lapse in my memory :P]