GiftedChild wrote:
I know I'm preaching to the wrong choir, since after 6 pages of posts, I see 80% folks are here just... love the franchise regardless of what they spew out. So I'm not here to put down anyone or convince anyone. People should form their own opinions, try the game during launch, pay them the first month and see for yourself.
In conclusion, FFXIV: ARR sacrificed every bit of graphical feature for a... smoother game play. And if you are one of those who don't give a rats *** about eye candy, you only enjoy good game play, story line, character development and whatnot, I suggest you turn this crap off and go play FF6 instead.
Graphics were bad in 1.0; you're just not remembering it right. First, even high-end machines experienced screen tearing. You couldn't load more than 40 characters including NPCs, and the engine took a long time to unload and load up the people you were actually standing next to especially if you crossed an invisible zone in town (the Gridania inn was incredibly bad for this). What got drawn on screen was not optimized either. It would waste time rendering things you couldn't possibly see behind walls, while ignoring the fact that you'd sooner do something simple like turn around than develop x-ray vision (there was a surreal effect of characters standing right behind you being perceptively invisible for a split second if you spun around too quick). In the field, there was copy-pasta everywhere or the zone would be too expensive to load up, so sure the detail was great, but only if you liked looking at the same clearing a dozen times in a 2 minute walk in one direction.
From what I've seen in ARR, you can see far more characters around you (you know, the people you're there to play with). You aren't waiting around for a minute or two just for a vendor NPC to load in a busy part of town. The terrain is unique and varied and actually worth exploring for something new to see instead of it all being a repeated mix of Clearing A, Clearing B, and Clearing C. And you don't need a high end machine just to clear the minimum requirements to even play the game (which actually accomplishes the most important thing: getting the game accessible enough for most people to play). This is a vast improvement.
FFXIV is not single-player RPG like Skyrim. You'd be hard pressed to find any MMO that can go high-end graphics and not have any issues with so many players connected at once. I can't think of any that's pulled it off and I doubt you can either, or you'd be playing that MMO right now.