FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

[Aeni]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

They've definitely borrowed heavily from Blizzard in terms of the kind of graphics technology they're using. The characters seem less solid, fairly light, which probably speaks volumes in terms of both textures and implied physics. This allows a lesser quality rig to run the game while not punishing players with less than stellar latency.

However, it remains to be seen what impact it will have on graphics compared with the first version, especially in terms of differences between "low end" and "check out my $25,000 rig".

Edit: I feel like I need to elaborate on the last point ... I mean does the overall graphics quality render the differences minute, yet noticeable, from level to level or are they stark differences, like night and day, between each level. If it's the former, then it would be slightly disappointing, because it will be outdated (like WoW was) in just a short expansion or two, and if it's the latter, then there's going to be other issues which will eventually come back to bite the rear end of every one of their low end PC player. I feel that technology has come to a point where you can get a good price to run the previous incarnation of FFXIV comfortably, so that trying to cuddle players who willfully cling on to their 5+ year old junk will not be in the best interest of the game.

[Raydeus]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I'm hoping for some smart design of the engine that would increase detail the less characters there are on screen, but lighten up detail for the sake of performance the more characters there are. If you could choose what the threshold could be (say 30 characters on a medium rig) before it started sacrificing quality so you could tweak it according to how your rig responds it would be great. But I know chances of that happening are very slim.

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Also, have they mentioned anything about the amount of ram it will be capable of using on PC? More precisely whether it will have LAA enabled by default or not.

[Aeni]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I'm hoping for some smart design of the engine that would increase detail the less characters there are on screen, but lighten up detail for the sake of performance the more characters there are. If you could choose what the threshold could be (say 30 characters on a medium rig) before it started sacrificing quality so you could tweak it according to how your rig responds it would be great. But I know chances of that happening are very slim.

Frankly, I couldn't give a rats ass about who I see in a city, and if they have higher priority on LS/party members, then that makes it less important to see other people. Most games already have this kind of automated system, because there IS NO rig and there is NO NEED to be able to display 1,o00 people around you in any city or zone. Maybe their main draw for ARR would be large scale outdoor events which requires them to display so many characters at once. But to me, that's not where resources should go, and any method on automatically reducing "needless" task strain on the CPU/GPU would greatly contribute to an overall healthier gaming system.

I agree, however, that we should have some control over the number of characters to display if SE isn't implementing an automated function already.

Also, have they mentioned anything about the amount of ram it will be capable of using on PC? More precisely whether it will have LAA enabled by default or not.

They've already said that would decrease slightly over the previous requirements for 1.0 How they intend to make use of the allocated RAM isn't nearly as concerning as whether or not the techniques employ makes sense for the PC rather than trying to emulate a PS3 setup on a PC (which would be a bad idea IMO) I'm also wondering about how updates/patches are being handled as well.

[Raydeus]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I gotta say iddling characters in the cities never crossed my mind when I mentioned that.

I'm thinking more on the lines that the amount of characters matters very much in events and can limit or enhance the scale of battlefields. And I'm not talking about players only, but about mobs and npcs too. Like the huge battle in the final movie, if you could have 100 players/npcs fighting another 300 mobs in a war-like event and were able to see as many of them as possible it would be huge in terms of the scale of things that could be done in XIV. Even if half the characters on screen were in the background it would still make a massive difference if the engine could support it.

And concerning RAM, the amount of it used limits many aspects in a game so both good techniques and a good amount of available ram are needed for a PC game to run well. Developers and specially Console to PC players need to stop thinking less ram usage is automatically better. And with how cheap ram is nowadays and how Windows 7 includes the 64-bit version for the same price having only 2 to 3GB ram only makes sense if you are playing on an iPad. Everyone else should already move on to 64-bit and have 8GB RAM as the default. A well coded FFXIV using 3GB+ of ram effectively would be far superior than one that tries to use 1GB because people still thinks 2GB ram in a 32-bit OS is the way to go.

[Aeni]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I gotta say iddling characters in the cities never crossed my mind when I mentioned that.

I was talking just in general ... I do NOT need to see 500+ players on my display screen in order to feel that I'm in a busy city ... lol.

I'm thinking more on the lines that the amount of characters matters very much in events and can limit or enhance the scale of battlefields. And I'm not talking about players only, but about mobs and npcs too. Like the huge battle in the final movie, if you could have 100 players/npcs fighting another 300 mobs in a war-like event and were able to see as many of them as possible it would be huge in terms of the scale of things that could be done in XIV. Even if half the characters on screen were in the background it would still make a massive difference if the engine could support it.

That is art direction and a decision made on a more creative level. Technically, it's feasible, but if you factor and multiply a great many players (e.g., 500), then trying to also display 300 NPCs is pretty bad. And you have to understand, it is not just a GPU limitation. There are limitations with connections from all over the world (or just all over the country) and having to figure out what each and every player is doing in order to accurately reflect that on your display is pretty daunting, even if you're running a $25,000 PC. You already seen this effect in terms of "sliding" players in the Alpha videos.

And concerning RAM, the amount of it used limits many aspects in a game so both good techniques and a good amount of available ram are needed for a PC game to run well. Developers and specially Console to PC players need to stop thinking less ram usage is automatically better. And with how cheap ram is nowadays and how Windows 7 includes the 64-bit version for the same price having only 2 to 3GB ram only makes sense if you are playing on an iPad. Everyone else should already move on to 64-bit and have 8GB RAM as the default. A well coded FFXIV using 3GB+ of ram effectively would be far superior than one that tries to use 1GB because people still thinks 2GB ram in a 32-bit OS is the way to go.

They limit the RAM not because they don't think people don't have enough RAM (although that does happen a lot) but it's because you cannot stop accidental memory leaks from happening and if a program is being allocated too much RAM, it will crash the OS. Total War developers didn't do this and that's why I can't play the god awful programmed game.

[Malacite]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

Well, so far I think they've said the high end PCs will be able to display 40+ players on screen at once.

[Raydeus]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

Would that be 40 players plus mobs in a raid type of thing or is that 40 characters in total? Which would be extremely low. <_<

That is art direction and a decision made on a more creative level. Technically, it's feasible, but if you factor and multiply a great many players (e.g., 500), then trying to also display 300 NPCs is pretty bad. And you have to understand, it is not just a GPU limitation. There are limitations with connections from all over the world (or just all over the country) and having to figure out what each and every player is doing in order to accurately reflect that on your display is pretty daunting, even if you're running a $25,000 PC. You already seen this effect in terms of "sliding" players in the Alpha videos.

That's precisely what I was referring to when I said even if half of those characters were in the background. You could be in an event that only had, say the 40 characters Mal's talking about plus another 50 mobs with an actual connection, and then another 100 characters/mobs in the background (the number scalable depending on your rig) which are being displayed and controlled completely on the client side.

That would easily scale fights up without putting unnecessary stress on server connections. The only difference would be people with less powerful pcs would see a much smaller conflict around them than the people with better rigs.

[Malacite]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

40 players + mobs

[Kailea]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

all that fucking jumping around.... that is the shit I am talking about -.- that is more strain on the persons PC and a visual eye sore that what never needed in the first place -.-

[Balfree]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

yeah... the jumpy morons are getting annoying and i haven't even touched the game...

i hope it doesn't become too much of a habit, but im pretty sure people will be jumping around to be more noticeable in crowds, hundreds of people afk selling shit or something with a turbo/loop remote controller set on jump, easy to do with a keyboard macro too

[Aeni]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

yeah... the jumpy morons are getting annoying and i haven't even touched the game...

i hope it doesn't become too much of a habit, but im pretty sure people will be jumping around to be more noticeable in crowds, hundreds of people afk selling shit or something with a turbo/loop remote controller set on jump, easy to do with a keyboard macro too

It's a fad for those players that never touched WoW and its clones. Even in WoW, it mostly has disappeared, especially since you're seen as a "noob" doing it. Give FFXIV sometime and it will eventually just be some distant memory.

[Raydeus]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I'm pretty sure all that jumping in the video was part of the test though. <_<;

[Aeni]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I'm pretty sure all that jumping in the video was part of the test though. <_<;

Nah ... not very many asian MMORPGs allow you to "get air off the ground". That's where "novelty" comes in. Once they've abused the ability to the point that they get sick of it, they'll stop.

Won't change what a small percentage will do if they still find it endearing after 5 years, though ...

[Raydeus]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I don't buy that at all. Specially so in this case considering this was a test made for a producer letter with Wada present.

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By the way, there is one thing I really seriously honestly liked "Katagami" which is pretty much costume for XIV. It may take some time to be implemented, but the plans are already there.

[Aeni]

Re: FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn -- End of an Era

I don't buy that at all. Specially so in this case considering this was a test made for a producer letter with Wada present.

Ray,

How many asian MMORPGs do you know of from two years ago and going back a decade before that allowed a player to literally get off the ground? I mean as in being able to (a) fly or even (b) jump. There's quite a bit of "rolling", "sliding", and "spinning", but not much of just plain old "hop", "leap", "jump". Most of the well known titles are only now adding in this feature or have gradually adopted the ability as a reflection of the changing desires of their playerbase but not indicative of any change in ideology of their older, long-time developers.

Like I said, hardly anyone cares an iota about jumping in WoW, now that the game has reached it's 8th anniversary. You may not agree to my views but I am confident that this whole discussion will be silly once FFXIV (if ever) reaches its own milestone.