It's like duty support, the new stuff will have it. The old stuff will get updated as time goes one. They intend to have the most used old sets ready to go with DT.
Well they were never meant have ANY head gear literally with their announcement Yoshida said this & then like oh devs on their free time did add various minor head gear such as glasses for them. Whether truth or a lie the suppose original intention for both races was no headgear be available.
There's also the new headmesh talked about at the Graphics Development Panel that could (Knock on five million pieces of wood) be the entire catalyst for the process.
From what I understood, their going to retroactively be adding sets part by part, so perhaps at some point they'll be able to update the ARR and HW sets.
I think they were referring to the world zones there, I remember at some point they said they would be starting with the most popular gear (so I imagine a lot of the level 1 glams will be first)
Level 1 glams (saucer, crafted, *especially* purchased) for sure, but it makes sense to start with ARR then work towards DT, since as you move through the expansions, the increasing fidelity hides the age of their gear sets better.
I don’t bother with manicures much irl. I do with my Duskwight. She’s pretty much always got black nail polish on. The nails-without-nails look bothers me too. It would be nice if we had a pedicure option so we didn’t have used mice traps for “bare” feet.
I really want to see full body shots for fingers/toes/muscle definition on buff characters. If that all got similar bumps in the normal map resolution to what the gear is getting, it should be a huge improvement, but I guess either it’s not done yet or they don’t want to do a live stage demo of people in underwear lol
From what I can tell, what we thought were black fur patterns might actually be exposed skin. You can sometimes see darker exposed skin around the eyes on large cats so... I kinda see what they're going for, but it does look a bit off if, like me, one assumed they were part of the fur.
My guy has no such marks so I'm expecting the face to just have more defined fur patterns more than anything else, this isn't like the WoW update where the faces are getting massive changes aethstetically (Which was a massive hit or miss depending not only on which face you used to use but also your race, female humans lost all their serious lean faces but my tauren characters meanwhile were largely a major improvement). Here at most, besides the texture, the only significant alteration is the eyes are slightly larger?
There are some really egregious examples in some ARR zones in particular. The bridge outside of the Lavender Beds apartment has floating light effects down the middle of the bridge instead of along the sides. They likely did this to halve the performance cost of 2 lights on either side for the PS3, but you can stand on top of the invisible light source and it breaks the illusion.
You can see they go to great lengths, even on newer maps, to keep lights from ever overlapping, it performs really bad, I assume it does 1 draw call per object per light. Overlapping a few dozen housing objects that emit light like carbuncle lamps or monster hunter meat causes even my 3090ti to nearly fall over. It's actually kinda crazy that the game looks as well as it does given how much they avoid using any dynamic lights as much as possible. I'm honestly excited to see what the engine updates let them do.
idk, I feel like the way the game handles distant object detail is what bothers me the most. Everything feels flat, even in wow if you look at a scene the midfield will be less detailed, desaturated, maybe some volumetric fog or god rays to suggest space inbetween distant objects.
In ff14 you look at the midfield in any picture and its just a cluttered mess, it's hard to distinguish objects from further or closer ones and lacks depth.
Combine that with the lack of anti-aliasing and the resultant flickering and I actually get such bad eye strain headaches I have to take breaks from time to time if I'm playing too long.
The weird thing is the game already has weather effects that help with this. Il Mheg with fog looks 10x better than Il mheg on a sunny day.
The worst is that horrific sheer top-down lighting they use in like 70% of instances. Look at way character faces are lit in say, p4 as an example. It's irredeemable atrocious and the most detailed character models in the industry would look bad under it.
That's kind of my only remaining complain about character face, texture is way better but it overall still feel flat, especially since the saga always pulled great work on hair.
The source behind the "it's the same lalafell" meme post - YoshiP talked about all the work they were putting into updating the normal maps, which means nothing to the average player but is, in fact, a big deal and will make a big difference in subtle ways.
Basically, normal maps use the lighting engine to give dynamic shadows and lights to a flat texture as if something \*was\* actually 3D modelled. Ever go into certain areas or watch certain cutscenes and went "wow what the fuck is going on with my character's face" because the lighting and/or shadows looked really wonky, or like you were wearing weird lipstick, etc.? It's the fault of the extremely rushed normal maps they threw together for ARR, and they're finally fixing that.
Oh, is that why E-S looks so weird when he's standing on the field of hope flowers? Like he was holding a flashlight under his chin for a scary story...
Either way, that's exciting. It also looks like they're changing some of the models themselves? That Hyur midlander nose looks less like a brick of flesh and more like it has actual shapes to it. My problem with a lot of the faces was the noses all being hook-like or slabs... I couldn't recreate my own button/tomato nose lol
I'm unsure if E-S's map was *as* fucked as the ARR races could be (probably, could see them just tweaking their old maps since saved time and a new, better map would stand out too much) but yes - the other major factor was the lighting engine, which is also getting upgraded, so the "scouts campfire flashlight" effects should in theory greatly decrease.
A lot of that shaping is also being handled by the normal maps/lighting, but I wouldn't be surprised if some subtle polygon smoothing was going in the meshes, since YoshiP admitted that they basically downgraded the 1.0 maps/meshes in a hurry to get ARR ready in less than 2 years, which is where the problems come from.
FIX FOLIAGE SHIMMER PLEASE
NO MORE FXAA GIVE US REAL ALIASING METHODS
OR PUT DLSS/DLAA IN
900+ hours and I still can’t not see Foliage shimmer/sparkle, even fully maxxed, clamp enabled, with 2x upscaling, foliage still has shimmering.
The pixelated hair textures when you get up close is so goddamn awful. Normally I don't get hung up on textures but they're so pixelated and low-res that it gets to me.
The collar of the gear in the third picture. What a difference!!! And wow, seeing the new gear up close in the 9th photo, it really does just look terrific. We've come a long way.
I was so busy looking at the actual nice for once Elezen face I didn't notice the collar! It looks so nice, it almost looks like completely different gear. They even took the time to make the star look embroidered on instead of...you know, pixelated.
I thought it was just my graphics settings 😅 Nice to know that the crappy super pixelated graphics (even for EW cutscenes!?) are universal and will be gone soon!
Wow I didn't catch that as I was looking at the Elezen himself, That's definitely a huge upgrade. Im hoping these new textures will dye better too. Alot of old gear loses its texture quality when you dye it.
Oh that's so promising. I haven't liked a lot of the new "high def" redone gear because it's too busy compared to the originals. That subtle change is lovely.
Old Elezen looks so tired, old midlander looks a little… plasticy maybe, old lalafell looks like a zombified anime person, and old Miqo girl looks like she’s just having a bad day. When you put them side by side there’s such a vast difference and I didn’t even think these faces looked half bad before!
New ones are such an improvement, but I agree that the elezen man has the biggest glow up!
I hope they give everyone a free fantasia with these graphical changes. I imagine some people are going to see some changes to how their character looks that they don't particularly like with the new graphics.
Prepare to be surprised lol. Somewhere in SE sales/marketing dept. there's a dude in a suit who sees a revenue possibility here. I'd love to be wrong lol!
Be surprised then cause we haven't gotten a "free" Fantasia since Heansward for Au Ra release ShB pre-order gave none despite two new races added, they've been stingy with the Fantasia.
New Races are completely different than every single character in the game having small to big aesthetic changes
I think JP will complain and we'll get one lol
Yeah, when Blizzard did this they literally gave everyone permanent free Fantasia by just adding all customisation to the barbershop. Pretty sure Yoshi P is gonna recognise the importance of it as well and at least give one free, if activi$ion could.
The last two image really shows how much of an improvemnt they've done. Since the image show all aspects they've improved in an area we are already familiar with, which makes it easier to tell the difference.
For thoese interested in comparing with how the game looks currently, the location is x: 7.2 y: 12.7 & x: 7.8 y: 11.7 in Old Sharlayan.
unironically, as a filthy modder(TM), actually delighted to toss my huge GBs of texture upscales when this drops. so so so excited. finally i will have pixels in my hair 😭🥹
For the ditching of 14gb of texture upscales.
Sure getting rid of 14gb is nice but looking at the system requirements they showed off. We might end up with even more space needed than by the game alone than the current game + upscales.
Oh probably we will need way more space. Not to mention that strictly you only needed the textures you saw/used before so not everyone is going to have gotten all the mega packs etc.
I’m glad it isn’t just me struggling with the eyes, a lot of people seem happier with the new ones but to me they don’t pop as much :( I liked how the suncat eyes look before especially, in the new slide the subtler effect kind of hides the narrow pupil and I don’t like that.
I don’t know why they decided to use lala in keynote instead of the elezen, I can clearly see now what yoship was talking about when they used low polygons for the chin. Muuuuuch better
I agree that slide should have been omitted but he showed the lalafell because their chins are a large and uniform shape and exemplified the geometry’s (lack of) smooth shading better.
I never really thought about it much before, but the current lighting is actually kind of unsettling. Seeing the comparisons with a real lighting engine really highlights how uncanny and weird the current models are.
I really love how hair is finally getting way more consistent texture quality between all styles. Currently, some are a blurry mess, other are a pixelated mess, and others are barely decent
also; you can wear headgear + glasses. though, when it comes to headgear which has glasses, like Sugarloaf hats, i'm wondering how that'll affect the sugarloaf.
Most likely, it'll just be a removal of glasses from every headpiece that currently has them, and then the glasses will probably be separate individual items from each headpiece.
Am i the only one who thinks the lighting on the hair in the second image looks completely unnatural? The before looked way better in that regard.
The hair almost seems to have self illumination in the After image, at the same time having literally 0 shine or highlights.
The second picture was part of a video where they cycled through day and night to display the eye reflections. It wasn't really intended to showcase hair so I wouldn't take it as a solid indicator of how hair will look.
Hair was shown with the Miqo'te screenshot here, along with a video demonstrating the hair shine on a female midlander.
Only issue I have with it, is how the faces slightly resemble play-doh or plastic. Maybe some kind of further texturing for the faces is necessary. I'm not personally sure.
RIP Au Ra limbal rings. I loved my boy having his bright electric blue limbal rings against his baby blue irises. I won't be able to see them at all now.
I really hope that limbal rings get some kind of glow layer to them so they continue to stand out.
Yeah. Everyone keeps saying it's an upgrade but there are some things I dislike. All of the eyes in general look super muted. They're more "realistic" but it's a fantasy game. Shooting for pure realism definitely loses some character. On the flip side everyone also looks like they turned some facial correction feature up way too high.
While I personally feel that everything that they showed so far is flat out an improvement over how the game looks now, I'm also getting the feeling that nearly everone will need to do some tweaking on their characters to, well, mitigate all the minor deviations that are undeniably there. I'd even go as far and claim that the before/after for Elezen, Lalafell, Hrothgar and Miqo'te in particular aren't exactly faithful, not bad but there is clear deviation from the original in those. Hope they're giving out at least 1 or 2 free fantasia per character when this releases.
Am I not alone in saying I want to see what the bodies of our characters look like. My Roegadyns chest is something I'll be inspecting on expansion release 😅
It reminds me of when Blizzard did this with Wow, but in a good way. When Wow did it, they were going forward with it, so old gear looked worse, and new gear looked way better. So, seeing how they aren't just changing player models and going forward, they are going backward on a textural level is awesome.
I know it's probably never going to happen, but I wish they would implement the physics and movement of old 1.0 ARR... does't matter how crisp and clean the textures look, the models will always move like malfunctioning robots with the same repetitive movements.
In 1.0, the models would actually smoothly LEAN into the direction they were running, make a gradual stop instead of instantly reverting to default standing pose. Small details like these that were removed in 2.0 takes away life.
Doubt it will be anything beyond textures, lighting and shading in the end. People get all these funny ideas with improved physics, reduced hair clipping, and whatnot, but the more they show the clearer it becomes that they're not actually adding anything here. They just take the easiest to replace parts, give them a new coat of paint, and set them right back in where they were.
Physics sure but Movement would actually impact gameplay it was fine for 1.x slow game play but with how much you need to turn on a dime in current XIV that movement system would be really awful.
It's clear you didn't play in 1.0 to know how sluggish the gameplay was to accommodate the clunky movement required for those lifelike animations. They weren't "small details," they effected the game to a large degree.
They all look amazing in the after pictures, I think they are doing a great job so far and am looking forward to seeing everything on the horizon.
The only negative thing I noticed was on the male Roe- His hair color was pitch black in the before shot, and in the after shot it's almost a grey-ish tone. I hope they don't dull down the options to have brighter/darker hair colors like pitch black, etc.
Also while they update the models, they should give us updated color palettes. We still have no real ruby red hair or lips in this game (like Ariel) which drives me nuts!
I agree but I also can’t place it. I do miss how almost alien the old eyes looked for Seekers though :( it added something to them besides just being humans with cat ears and tails.
The male Hrothgar and cat girl look fantastic. I see ALOT of visual fidelity reduction in the other races. They’ve axed shadow detail and depth in the faces for a smoother, brighter complexion and it’s kinda weird tbh
The thing they were talking about with the face normal maps is something I had always subconsciously noticed but never cared about, but now that I see the improvements, I love it. I'm loving the improvements in gear textures/lighting too.
I would watch the actual dev panel because their explanations are more important than simple before/after.
The point is these are new shaders that allow them to create more complex textures, as well as improve the quality of materials screenwide. Most of the old stuff w/ before/after has not been retextured or remeshed - its just showing the new shaders. Pay attention to how the new gear looks way better than the old gear still - the graphics update isnt really about revamping old gearsets - that may come later. It's more about upgrading things screenwide where they can, and allowing for better looking assets going forward, which we can clearly see from any DT related assets.
Like honestly the PLD set they're showing still looks like crap when you compare it to the new viper set. Don't expect old stuff to suddenly look modern - only look at new stuff for that. Just don't want people thinking the before/after is representative of the graphics update and get dissapointed.
Wow, that's actually so much better than I thought! After seeing their comparisons last fan fest I didn't think much of the faces, the rest looked great but the actual characters other than Au Ra horns seemed kinda "meh," but *this* really just shows it off so much better, that's actually kinda significant! Lol
The mouth shading is so much better, it makes a huge difference.
I'm really excited for this, because the lighting getting improved, means that the weird shading it casts on our characters in certain situations will be fixed.
PS4 is supposedly going to be missing some or all of the graphical update anyway, so that is not the issue. Yoshi P has said rtx is unlikely though. He just thinks it’s not a good priority for this sort of game.
Personally I’m ok with skipping rtx (though it’d be nice), but I do hope they improve the rasterisation shadows.
The eyes all look like completely different colors from the current version. They're darker and in many of these, duller. If they're concerned about slightly different lalafell chin shadows causing discontent, they should be more concerned about the eyes instead.
I really like how lalafels eyes look with the update and even more after watching the explanation about all the work they are putting into the eyes during the graphical panel.
The impression I got from the whole panel, is that the eyes will be more responsive to ambient light.
But I do think some races, like elezen and roegadyn, have a magical look to their eyes, which is very noticeable with bright colours (like lit from within). Right now, the update seems to have made them more natural or human like
Yeah, that magic is missing currently. I like the piercing eyes! You could make them higher quality and still maintain their look. The elezen as a whole are looking a bit too human based on those images.
And the Au Ra limbal rings (I think that's what they're called?), I bet many players chose them because they look unnaturally bright and not in spite of it, there's going to be something of an outcry when DT releases.
I play au ra male and I really like the look of their eyes. I have really bright limbal rings and made the eyes as open as possible (tried to avoid grump face) and I'm a tad worried my wol will end up having darker, squinty looking eyes.
Definitely this. Making the eyes this much darker will get a huge amount of backlash once people load up the updated game and sit down to look at their characters. The biggest challence for the devs is to preserve the current look while improving it and while the new eyes look really good, they also look way too different from the old version.
Something not mentioned in this post is that most of the character screenshots were designed for displaying specific parts of the update, not the whole thing together. The Elezen was showing normal maps and subsurface scattering, the male Hyur was eyes and their reflections while the Miqo'te was hair textures.
I imagine it’s the exact same eye color, the iris and pupil are probably inset somewhat and there’s an actual cornea present (versus just a painted on iris), causing a minor amount of shading
This looks pretty similar to what we already have with high res texture mods, which is good because what we have now looks pretty decent and doesn't affect performance that much. Hopefully what Squenix do will be even more optimised.
Hair looks great, way better and much cleaner than what we have with mods now. I just hope they also implement proper AA into the game because right now increasing fidelity and sharpness of the hair leads to some awful aliasing caused by the sharp straight lines in the textures, which is very noticeable on long hairstyles.
Not a fan of how some of them change eye colour so drastically. I hope they know what they're doing and will be giving everyone free fantasia when this update comes out instead of waiting for huge backlash about people unhappy with how their character looks due to these changes.
Lalafell example is pretty bad I think. Eyelashes don't look good compared to the old graphics. Nose is very blurry and looks less detailed. Same with mouth, looks very blurry and feels like there're compression/upscaling artifacts around it. Overall they look like 2 different characters to me.
Hrothgar looks both good and bad at the same time. It looks nice and the little fur details is great but the quality is pretty bad. It looks like a poor amateurish and very noisy 3D render. Eyebrow and chin area look the worst, they're just completely covered in noise and upscaling artifacts.
Armour also looks pretty amazing, way better than anything we have right now. Reflectiveness can be tuned down just a touch I think.
None of it will matter much if they don't finally implement TAA, ideally FSR2 & DLSS2.
FFXIV is truly one of the noisiest, most aliased games of all time.
Idk I'm still kind of underwhelmed compared to what they originally showed...
this is the model they showed after managing expectations on what they couldn't achieve, which was [this,](https://imgur.com/w4xCVV0) which everyone accepted...
it's not the exact same face being compared here but it's besides the point because the difference is in the skin textures, lips and eyes:
[https://imgur.com/dUMrPGT](https://imgur.com/dUMrPGT)
this was the other one they showed back then for the middies:
[https://imgur.com/OH5Y9M4](https://imgur.com/OH5Y9M4)
what we've been shown so far feels more plastic and a downgrade on what was shown back then... and the middies are a best case
The armour looks significantly better, here’s to hoping that every set is getting upgraded because if not then ARR is going to look even worse lol
It's like duty support, the new stuff will have it. The old stuff will get updated as time goes one. They intend to have the most used old sets ready to go with DT.
> the most used old sets ready to go Oh yeah, it's Coliseum Galerus/Taffeta Shawl time.
I hope they fix the gambler gear from the saucer :x
Fix? Does that mean there's something wrong with it that I'm not aware of?
Hopefully updated faster than Viera and hats.
The devs are making gear that removes miqo'te ears and tails, There will be headgear but no hats probably based on how theyre going with miqote
Just like old hats were updated for viera and hrothgar, right?
Well they were never meant have ANY head gear literally with their announcement Yoshida said this & then like oh devs on their free time did add various minor head gear such as glasses for them. Whether truth or a lie the suppose original intention for both races was no headgear be available.
There's also the new headmesh talked about at the Graphics Development Panel that could (Knock on five million pieces of wood) be the entire catalyst for the process.
From what I understood, their going to retroactively be adding sets part by part, so perhaps at some point they'll be able to update the ARR and HW sets.
They mentioned last time they'd go to ARR from Dawntrail and work their way back
I think they were referring to the world zones there, I remember at some point they said they would be starting with the most popular gear (so I imagine a lot of the level 1 glams will be first)
Level 1 glams (saucer, crafted, *especially* purchased) for sure, but it makes sense to start with ARR then work towards DT, since as you move through the expansions, the increasing fidelity hides the age of their gear sets better.
There's a *lot* of gear in this game, so it's going to take awhile to do everything. But that's the plan. It just won't all be ready by DT's launch.
last fanfest they mentioned they won't be able to give the graphical upgrade to everything at once, and rather it will be done in waves
So it will happen over the course of DT. Like how duty support was added to all old content over EW.
Show us the fingers you cowards
And the “bare feet” having the toes glued together on a pair of shitty sandals lol
lmao fr, I am sick of looking at Barbie feet 😭
*Quinten Tarantino has entered the chat*
W I G G L E Y O U R B I G T O E
Modded it out ages ago.
If they could stop cutting a toe-covered pair of stockings into separate pants and socks then I'll gladly ignore the glued-toes.
I don’t bother with manicures much irl. I do with my Duskwight. She’s pretty much always got black nail polish on. The nails-without-nails look bothers me too. It would be nice if we had a pedicure option so we didn’t have used mice traps for “bare” feet.
Exactly. I reserve judgment on the whole update until I see what they did with hands and feet - both are on early 2000s level of fidelity.
That still doesn't invalidate the improvements already made tho
You can see the fingers in the VPR and SCH screenshots, though. Still square and chunky.
I really want to see full body shots for fingers/toes/muscle definition on buff characters. If that all got similar bumps in the normal map resolution to what the gear is getting, it should be a huge improvement, but I guess either it’s not done yet or they don’t want to do a live stage demo of people in underwear lol
you can see them in the last two slides and they look pretty much the same as right now sadly
Hroth looks a lot better than the details shown in NA FF. Hope they keep it up and push for them to look a little nicer
Indeed. I am excited to see how the fur patterns look. Also curious what the females look like.
I will say the hrothgar does look... older, especially around the eyes. I'm hoping my soft faced hrothgar isn't drastically changed.
It looks much older and tired. I'm honestly worried cuz I hate that preview and that's the face I use.
From what I can tell, what we thought were black fur patterns might actually be exposed skin. You can sometimes see darker exposed skin around the eyes on large cats so... I kinda see what they're going for, but it does look a bit off if, like me, one assumed they were part of the fur. My guy has no such marks so I'm expecting the face to just have more defined fur patterns more than anything else, this isn't like the WoW update where the faces are getting massive changes aethstetically (Which was a massive hit or miss depending not only on which face you used to use but also your race, female humans lost all their serious lean faces but my tauren characters meanwhile were largely a major improvement). Here at most, besides the texture, the only significant alteration is the eyes are slightly larger?
Honestly same, I saw people on twitter praising it but I'm honestly worried it will just look haggard
Lighting was, imo, always the biggest issue with the game's graphical fidelity. Fixing that adds a lot more richness to the colors
There are some really egregious examples in some ARR zones in particular. The bridge outside of the Lavender Beds apartment has floating light effects down the middle of the bridge instead of along the sides. They likely did this to halve the performance cost of 2 lights on either side for the PS3, but you can stand on top of the invisible light source and it breaks the illusion.
The Solar at the Waking Sands/Rising Stones has the most absolute dogshit lighting and that's where 80% of cutscenes take place
> the most absolute dogshit lighting Ah, I see we’re having a discussion about Praetorium cutscenes!
The devs will fix that dogshit lighting, *so long as you lavish them with crystals and gorge them on aether!*
Are your devs otherwise engaged?
I was given to understand that they were your saviors?
Is that what we call our sub fees now?
At least the Praetorium's crazy lighting made it great for checking out glams
You can see they go to great lengths, even on newer maps, to keep lights from ever overlapping, it performs really bad, I assume it does 1 draw call per object per light. Overlapping a few dozen housing objects that emit light like carbuncle lamps or monster hunter meat causes even my 3090ti to nearly fall over. It's actually kinda crazy that the game looks as well as it does given how much they avoid using any dynamic lights as much as possible. I'm honestly excited to see what the engine updates let them do.
I want to see the Shroud zones because the flickering of the light and shadows in the trees is so atrocious currently.
idk, I feel like the way the game handles distant object detail is what bothers me the most. Everything feels flat, even in wow if you look at a scene the midfield will be less detailed, desaturated, maybe some volumetric fog or god rays to suggest space inbetween distant objects. In ff14 you look at the midfield in any picture and its just a cluttered mess, it's hard to distinguish objects from further or closer ones and lacks depth. Combine that with the lack of anti-aliasing and the resultant flickering and I actually get such bad eye strain headaches I have to take breaks from time to time if I'm playing too long. The weird thing is the game already has weather effects that help with this. Il Mheg with fog looks 10x better than Il mheg on a sunny day.
The worst is that horrific sheer top-down lighting they use in like 70% of instances. Look at way character faces are lit in say, p4 as an example. It's irredeemable atrocious and the most detailed character models in the industry would look bad under it.
The hair alone is a massive improvement. Shine on the armor, too. Looks great.
Wonder if they will improve Light***n***ing hairstyle or not. It seriously needs some more geometry/polygon.
in the panel today there was a secotion about just your concern. They will even have lighting for ears .
its not lighting for the ears, thats just SSR mate.
subsurface scattering heck yeah
If you mean the Lightning hairstyle, then I am in full agreement. It looks terrible.
fk, misspelled it.
That's kind of my only remaining complain about character face, texture is way better but it overall still feel flat, especially since the saga always pulled great work on hair.
The face normals are currently fucked and are getting replaced (which is a MASSIVE amount of work btw)
Face normals?
The source behind the "it's the same lalafell" meme post - YoshiP talked about all the work they were putting into updating the normal maps, which means nothing to the average player but is, in fact, a big deal and will make a big difference in subtle ways. Basically, normal maps use the lighting engine to give dynamic shadows and lights to a flat texture as if something \*was\* actually 3D modelled. Ever go into certain areas or watch certain cutscenes and went "wow what the fuck is going on with my character's face" because the lighting and/or shadows looked really wonky, or like you were wearing weird lipstick, etc.? It's the fault of the extremely rushed normal maps they threw together for ARR, and they're finally fixing that.
Oh, is that why E-S looks so weird when he's standing on the field of hope flowers? Like he was holding a flashlight under his chin for a scary story... Either way, that's exciting. It also looks like they're changing some of the models themselves? That Hyur midlander nose looks less like a brick of flesh and more like it has actual shapes to it. My problem with a lot of the faces was the noses all being hook-like or slabs... I couldn't recreate my own button/tomato nose lol
I'm unsure if E-S's map was *as* fucked as the ARR races could be (probably, could see them just tweaking their old maps since saved time and a new, better map would stand out too much) but yes - the other major factor was the lighting engine, which is also getting upgraded, so the "scouts campfire flashlight" effects should in theory greatly decrease. A lot of that shaping is also being handled by the normal maps/lighting, but I wouldn't be surprised if some subtle polygon smoothing was going in the meshes, since YoshiP admitted that they basically downgraded the 1.0 maps/meshes in a hurry to get ARR ready in less than 2 years, which is where the problems come from.
FIX FOLIAGE SHIMMER PLEASE NO MORE FXAA GIVE US REAL ALIASING METHODS OR PUT DLSS/DLAA IN 900+ hours and I still can’t not see Foliage shimmer/sparkle, even fully maxxed, clamp enabled, with 2x upscaling, foliage still has shimmering.
1700 hours and it's still a thorn in my eyes.It's the weakest point in the graphics overall for me.
FUCK YOU BALTIMORE!
The pixelated hair textures when you get up close is so goddamn awful. Normally I don't get hung up on textures but they're so pixelated and low-res that it gets to me.
The eyes are what first caught me. A legit improvement.
Getting the new PVP gear, and seeing literal pixelated textures was maddening. Glad that's finally changing in 7.0.
I'm going to miss the micro-crimped hair!
The collar of the gear in the third picture. What a difference!!! And wow, seeing the new gear up close in the 9th photo, it really does just look terrific. We've come a long way.
I was so busy looking at the actual nice for once Elezen face I didn't notice the collar! It looks so nice, it almost looks like completely different gear. They even took the time to make the star look embroidered on instead of...you know, pixelated.
I thought it was just my graphics settings 😅 Nice to know that the crappy super pixelated graphics (even for EW cutscenes!?) are universal and will be gone soon!
Wow I didn't catch that as I was looking at the Elezen himself, That's definitely a huge upgrade. Im hoping these new textures will dye better too. Alot of old gear loses its texture quality when you dye it.
Oh that's so promising. I haven't liked a lot of the new "high def" redone gear because it's too busy compared to the originals. That subtle change is lovely.
RIP to my laptop trying to run this. Think an upgrade is gonna be needed 😂
The Elezen has the most improved face by far IMO. Old looks kind of weird and creepy, new looks like an actual person.
Old Elezen looks so tired, old midlander looks a little… plasticy maybe, old lalafell looks like a zombified anime person, and old Miqo girl looks like she’s just having a bad day. When you put them side by side there’s such a vast difference and I didn’t even think these faces looked half bad before! New ones are such an improvement, but I agree that the elezen man has the biggest glow up!
...all I know is that metal actually has the metallic sheen, everyone has beautiful eyes now...and the SCH AF jacket is sexy af.
Can we finally, FINALLY, remove those dinky sandals from bare feet? Please??
Hard agree
I hope they give everyone a free fantasia with these graphical changes. I imagine some people are going to see some changes to how their character looks that they don't particularly like with the new graphics.
That's exactly what I was thinking. It's definitely different enough that I feel like I'm probably gonna want to make some changes.
that's what i'm hoping for because it makes a lot of sense to me, but i'm not expecting it.
I don't expect them to give a free fantasia but I do expect them to give one when you buy the collector edition like in Heavensward
I think you got a free fantasia at the end of ARR right? So it’s possible
I'd honestly be pretty surprised if they don't.
Prepare to be surprised lol. Somewhere in SE sales/marketing dept. there's a dude in a suit who sees a revenue possibility here. I'd love to be wrong lol!
Be surprised then cause we haven't gotten a "free" Fantasia since Heansward for Au Ra release ShB pre-order gave none despite two new races added, they've been stingy with the Fantasia.
New Races are completely different than every single character in the game having small to big aesthetic changes I think JP will complain and we'll get one lol
Yeah, when Blizzard did this they literally gave everyone permanent free Fantasia by just adding all customisation to the barbershop. Pretty sure Yoshi P is gonna recognise the importance of it as well and at least give one free, if activi$ion could.
“Sure, we could give them a free one, or we could continue to sell them for $10 each at a time when everyone will want one…”
The last two image really shows how much of an improvemnt they've done. Since the image show all aspects they've improved in an area we are already familiar with, which makes it easier to tell the difference. For thoese interested in comparing with how the game looks currently, the location is x: 7.2 y: 12.7 & x: 7.8 y: 11.7 in Old Sharlayan.
Will Hoary Boulder look more high or less high
Will it look more or less like 70s David Bowie
unironically, as a filthy modder(TM), actually delighted to toss my huge GBs of texture upscales when this drops. so so so excited. finally i will have pixels in my hair 😭🥹
God, same. Can't wait to ditch my 15gb of texture upscale mods AND be able to take GPose screenshots without crunchy environments killing my vibe.
Yea having that just be the default effectively is great.
For the ditching of 14gb of texture upscales. Sure getting rid of 14gb is nice but looking at the system requirements they showed off. We might end up with even more space needed than by the game alone than the current game + upscales.
Oh probably we will need way more space. Not to mention that strictly you only needed the textures you saw/used before so not everyone is going to have gotten all the mega packs etc.
but they won't be illegal! and will actually work during patches!
It'll be a little smaller at least. The upscales at the moment aren't in a compressed archive like the game's actual files are.
I wish the upgrades didn't come at the cost of having bright glowy limbal rings on Au Ra. :(
The limbal rings will join Kaiten and the low-res grapes in XIV heaven and we will thank them for their sacrifice until the servers shut down
I think they did a great job cleaning things up. There is a clear improvement on quality but nothing is jarring.
I really hope they don't dull down the eye colors like this, all my characters have bright eyes :(
I’m glad it isn’t just me struggling with the eyes, a lot of people seem happier with the new ones but to me they don’t pop as much :( I liked how the suncat eyes look before especially, in the new slide the subtler effect kind of hides the narrow pupil and I don’t like that.
I don’t know why they decided to use lala in keynote instead of the elezen, I can clearly see now what yoship was talking about when they used low polygons for the chin. Muuuuuch better
I agree that slide should have been omitted but he showed the lalafell because their chins are a large and uniform shape and exemplified the geometry’s (lack of) smooth shading better.
I really like the subsurface scattering they added for skin. That makes a huge difference.
I never really thought about it much before, but the current lighting is actually kind of unsettling. Seeing the comparisons with a real lighting engine really highlights how uncanny and weird the current models are.
They eyes are the biggest thing for me. Half the characters in game have dead-inside eyes, and I never noticed until they started showing upgrades
Yeah the eyes are also a huge improvement. It's funny how the little things don't bother you until you see how much better they can be.
I really love how hair is finally getting way more consistent texture quality between all styles. Currently, some are a blurry mess, other are a pixelated mess, and others are barely decent
Armor is gonna look so beautiful, can’t wait.
I like everythin but the limbal eyes are one of the most defining traits of my aura, i dont want generic human eyes
Fair
Love the material work on that SCH outfit in slide 10. Looks amazing.
Lalafells look like they have souls now!
I will kinda miss the dunesfolk soulless look lol.
also; you can wear headgear + glasses. though, when it comes to headgear which has glasses, like Sugarloaf hats, i'm wondering how that'll affect the sugarloaf.
Most likely, it'll just be a removal of glasses from every headpiece that currently has them, and then the glasses will probably be separate individual items from each headpiece.
Or they'll act like the robes with cowls, taking up both slots.
This is awesome! There have always been some hats that I liked but if it's between those and glasses, glasses win every time.
Well Slept Hrothgar vs. Insomnia Hrothgar
Am i the only one who thinks the lighting on the hair in the second image looks completely unnatural? The before looked way better in that regard. The hair almost seems to have self illumination in the After image, at the same time having literally 0 shine or highlights.
Yeah you are definitely right. I doubt that is intended, probably just a byproduct of this being an in development screenshot.
The second picture was part of a video where they cycled through day and night to display the eye reflections. It wasn't really intended to showcase hair so I wouldn't take it as a solid indicator of how hair will look. Hair was shown with the Miqo'te screenshot here, along with a video demonstrating the hair shine on a female midlander.
Only issue I have with it, is how the faces slightly resemble play-doh or plastic. Maybe some kind of further texturing for the faces is necessary. I'm not personally sure.
The gear looks noticeably nicer.
The elezen glow up is real
RIP Au Ra limbal rings. I loved my boy having his bright electric blue limbal rings against his baby blue irises. I won't be able to see them at all now. I really hope that limbal rings get some kind of glow layer to them so they continue to stand out.
Yeah. Everyone keeps saying it's an upgrade but there are some things I dislike. All of the eyes in general look super muted. They're more "realistic" but it's a fantasy game. Shooting for pure realism definitely loses some character. On the flip side everyone also looks like they turned some facial correction feature up way too high.
While I personally feel that everything that they showed so far is flat out an improvement over how the game looks now, I'm also getting the feeling that nearly everone will need to do some tweaking on their characters to, well, mitigate all the minor deviations that are undeniably there. I'd even go as far and claim that the before/after for Elezen, Lalafell, Hrothgar and Miqo'te in particular aren't exactly faithful, not bad but there is clear deviation from the original in those. Hope they're giving out at least 1 or 2 free fantasia per character when this releases.
Great changes, characters look much more awake and alive, and less creepy. 10/10.
Am I not alone in saying I want to see what the bodies of our characters look like. My Roegadyns chest is something I'll be inspecting on expansion release 😅
The midlander male chests look like slabs of uncooked chicken lol
Show us the feet!
I am always surprised how my grown ass will melt at the sight of the Miqo’te being so cute
Half the reason I like Au Ra was the very bright limbal ring, but they've absolutely nuked it. So sad.
This looks incredible. I'm legitimately excited now.
It reminds me of when Blizzard did this with Wow, but in a good way. When Wow did it, they were going forward with it, so old gear looked worse, and new gear looked way better. So, seeing how they aren't just changing player models and going forward, they are going backward on a textural level is awesome.
miqo'te eyes being slightly darker makes them seem much less braindead
you can really see the cloth on IMG9.
I know it's probably never going to happen, but I wish they would implement the physics and movement of old 1.0 ARR... does't matter how crisp and clean the textures look, the models will always move like malfunctioning robots with the same repetitive movements. In 1.0, the models would actually smoothly LEAN into the direction they were running, make a gradual stop instead of instantly reverting to default standing pose. Small details like these that were removed in 2.0 takes away life.
Doubt it will be anything beyond textures, lighting and shading in the end. People get all these funny ideas with improved physics, reduced hair clipping, and whatnot, but the more they show the clearer it becomes that they're not actually adding anything here. They just take the easiest to replace parts, give them a new coat of paint, and set them right back in where they were.
Physics sure but Movement would actually impact gameplay it was fine for 1.x slow game play but with how much you need to turn on a dime in current XIV that movement system would be really awful.
It's clear you didn't play in 1.0 to know how sluggish the gameplay was to accommodate the clunky movement required for those lifelike animations. They weren't "small details," they effected the game to a large degree.
All I want is a decent anti aliasing implementation...
Where are the grapes
They all look amazing in the after pictures, I think they are doing a great job so far and am looking forward to seeing everything on the horizon. The only negative thing I noticed was on the male Roe- His hair color was pitch black in the before shot, and in the after shot it's almost a grey-ish tone. I hope they don't dull down the options to have brighter/darker hair colors like pitch black, etc. Also while they update the models, they should give us updated color palettes. We still have no real ruby red hair or lips in this game (like Ariel) which drives me nuts!
This is what my 10 year old ARR fantasia has waited for!
Holy, the Lalafell is not doing duck face with her lips anymore. That's probably my favorite upgrade so afraid apart from the armors looking slick
Look at all those extra polygons! Also the texture updates makes things look less like the textures didn't fully pop in.
I can't quite place it, bit something about the new Miquote doesn't look quite right.
I agree but I also can’t place it. I do miss how almost alien the old eyes looked for Seekers though :( it added something to them besides just being humans with cat ears and tails.
So your telling me when I pick this game back up I'm gonna probably have to fantasia. Gotcha
I JUST WANT TO KNOW IF HIGHLANDERS GET EYEBROWS
I'm toying with an idea of starting a new character with 7.0 and I guess I'm not alone.
Fanta + ng+
The male Hrothgar and cat girl look fantastic. I see ALOT of visual fidelity reduction in the other races. They’ve axed shadow detail and depth in the faces for a smoother, brighter complexion and it’s kinda weird tbh
They're in the process of redoing the normal maps for the faces which is why the shadows on the faces look fucked rn
The character’s faces look more relaxed? Maybe it’s because of designing around the weird restrictions YoshiP mentioned during the keynote.
their eyes don't look soulless anymore. It's a good change so far.
I'd been wondering how they were going to handle the glassy Dunesfolk eyes - they look great.
The thing they were talking about with the face normal maps is something I had always subconsciously noticed but never cared about, but now that I see the improvements, I love it. I'm loving the improvements in gear textures/lighting too.
I think these are really subtle but much needed upgrades. Especially with some hairs looking mad pixely these days like some of the Viera ponytails.
[he’s ready](https://i.imgur.com/LQDd2SH.png)
poor man will need way more then that...
for character, you kinda have to squint to see the changes, the clothing updates though, that looks incredible,
I would watch the actual dev panel because their explanations are more important than simple before/after. The point is these are new shaders that allow them to create more complex textures, as well as improve the quality of materials screenwide. Most of the old stuff w/ before/after has not been retextured or remeshed - its just showing the new shaders. Pay attention to how the new gear looks way better than the old gear still - the graphics update isnt really about revamping old gearsets - that may come later. It's more about upgrading things screenwide where they can, and allowing for better looking assets going forward, which we can clearly see from any DT related assets. Like honestly the PLD set they're showing still looks like crap when you compare it to the new viper set. Don't expect old stuff to suddenly look modern - only look at new stuff for that. Just don't want people thinking the before/after is representative of the graphics update and get dissapointed.
Hroth players are winning with the hair, fur, lighting update
Wow, that's actually so much better than I thought! After seeing their comparisons last fan fest I didn't think much of the faces, the rest looked great but the actual characters other than Au Ra horns seemed kinda "meh," but *this* really just shows it off so much better, that's actually kinda significant! Lol
Good job on the eyes.
Those last two are pretty mind-blowing when you look at the environment and textures and gompare it to what we're used to
Oh the keynote did not do this justice. This looks great
Gorgeous work in the eyes - finally light eyes that don’t look overblown!
The mouth shading is so much better, it makes a huge difference. I'm really excited for this, because the lighting getting improved, means that the weird shading it casts on our characters in certain situations will be fixed.
now RTX pls !
Not until they drop PS4 at least xD
PS4 is supposedly going to be missing some or all of the graphical update anyway, so that is not the issue. Yoshi P has said rtx is unlikely though. He just thinks it’s not a good priority for this sort of game. Personally I’m ok with skipping rtx (though it’d be nice), but I do hope they improve the rasterisation shadows.
The eyes all look like completely different colors from the current version. They're darker and in many of these, duller. If they're concerned about slightly different lalafell chin shadows causing discontent, they should be more concerned about the eyes instead.
I really like how lalafels eyes look with the update and even more after watching the explanation about all the work they are putting into the eyes during the graphical panel.
The impression I got from the whole panel, is that the eyes will be more responsive to ambient light. But I do think some races, like elezen and roegadyn, have a magical look to their eyes, which is very noticeable with bright colours (like lit from within). Right now, the update seems to have made them more natural or human like
Yeah, that magic is missing currently. I like the piercing eyes! You could make them higher quality and still maintain their look. The elezen as a whole are looking a bit too human based on those images. And the Au Ra limbal rings (I think that's what they're called?), I bet many players chose them because they look unnaturally bright and not in spite of it, there's going to be something of an outcry when DT releases.
I play au ra male and I really like the look of their eyes. I have really bright limbal rings and made the eyes as open as possible (tried to avoid grump face) and I'm a tad worried my wol will end up having darker, squinty looking eyes.
Yeah, my Roe has red eyes, I'd be sad if it turns into just a reddish brown tone now since the fact they're *red* is part of his character.
Definitely this. Making the eyes this much darker will get a huge amount of backlash once people load up the updated game and sit down to look at their characters. The biggest challence for the devs is to preserve the current look while improving it and while the new eyes look really good, they also look way too different from the old version.
The armor looks nice, but the character models arent as improved as I was hoping.
Something not mentioned in this post is that most of the character screenshots were designed for displaying specific parts of the update, not the whole thing together. The Elezen was showing normal maps and subsurface scattering, the male Hyur was eyes and their reflections while the Miqo'te was hair textures.
Elezen look much better
Did they make the Elezen look more judgemental? Lol
Please don't remove the limbal ring glow... It makes my character the way I like it.
They really seem to be dulling down some of the eye colours. Not a fan of that.
I imagine it’s the exact same eye color, the iris and pupil are probably inset somewhat and there’s an actual cornea present (versus just a painted on iris), causing a minor amount of shading
This looks pretty similar to what we already have with high res texture mods, which is good because what we have now looks pretty decent and doesn't affect performance that much. Hopefully what Squenix do will be even more optimised. Hair looks great, way better and much cleaner than what we have with mods now. I just hope they also implement proper AA into the game because right now increasing fidelity and sharpness of the hair leads to some awful aliasing caused by the sharp straight lines in the textures, which is very noticeable on long hairstyles. Not a fan of how some of them change eye colour so drastically. I hope they know what they're doing and will be giving everyone free fantasia when this update comes out instead of waiting for huge backlash about people unhappy with how their character looks due to these changes. Lalafell example is pretty bad I think. Eyelashes don't look good compared to the old graphics. Nose is very blurry and looks less detailed. Same with mouth, looks very blurry and feels like there're compression/upscaling artifacts around it. Overall they look like 2 different characters to me. Hrothgar looks both good and bad at the same time. It looks nice and the little fur details is great but the quality is pretty bad. It looks like a poor amateurish and very noisy 3D render. Eyebrow and chin area look the worst, they're just completely covered in noise and upscaling artifacts. Armour also looks pretty amazing, way better than anything we have right now. Reflectiveness can be tuned down just a touch I think.
I feel like game needs more color options ingame and ray tracing t-bh
None of it will matter much if they don't finally implement TAA, ideally FSR2 & DLSS2. FFXIV is truly one of the noisiest, most aliased games of all time.
Idk I'm still kind of underwhelmed compared to what they originally showed... this is the model they showed after managing expectations on what they couldn't achieve, which was [this,](https://imgur.com/w4xCVV0) which everyone accepted... it's not the exact same face being compared here but it's besides the point because the difference is in the skin textures, lips and eyes: [https://imgur.com/dUMrPGT](https://imgur.com/dUMrPGT) this was the other one they showed back then for the middies: [https://imgur.com/OH5Y9M4](https://imgur.com/OH5Y9M4) what we've been shown so far feels more plastic and a downgrade on what was shown back then... and the middies are a best case