Dawntrail came with a hefty graphical upgrade! Some places are extremely different, with some others looking about the same. Here is a mishmash of different areas from every expansion that I thought might make good comparisons, or were suggested in my Discord!
I will go through every expansion in order, with a bit of spoilers at the end for the Endwalker section. Unfortunately there was just some areas I felt really needed to be shown⊠Thinking more on it I probably should have checked a certain Shadowbringers area too. Little late for that!
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#FFXIV #Dawntrail #graphics
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4:06 Uplander has fungames on their tomestone?
My favorite part is the color change of the whole game. Before it was so grey I found it unbearable and used Nvidia filter, now I don't need to đ
I was impressed, and then I saw Il Mheg and I was FLOORED. The flowers are absolutely gorgeous!
Foliage, crystals, lighting, and global illumination methinks>
I think the biggest graphical change has to be Wesk's paissa minion
If you want to see a dramatic change due to the lighting engine updates, visit Mor Dhona during the "gloom" weather condition. In the old version, the gloom makes the sky all purple and full of glowy purple special effects. When you see it in the new version, that purple light gets reflected all over the walls of the town, and you realize, yes, this is how it should have looked all along.
me : can't wait for weskalber guides!
weskalber : rocks.
They should've put some bloom on crystals, they look rather flat without it
This graphical update is the sort of case where as I'm playing casually, I'm thinking "This looks nice. A little touched up here and there, nothing too crazy. A good little polish."
Then I see it side-by-side with old footage and go "Holy SHIT."
The only way I can think to describe the changes is that it's exactly how XIV looks when I think about XIV. And I love that.
Hey bro, are you gonna do some leveling skills guide like in previous expantions?
nooo,, my pc meybe explode with this graphic đ
7:52 The difference here is insane, especially the rock texture.
Hey wow your little monkey really got an upgrade! Jokes aside the vast changes go unnoticed by me. The few that do fall into three camps, meh, OH DEAR GO NO! And, huh cute. I could have happily played 14 as it was for the next ten years but I get why they did it.
Shame that the crystals in mor dhona no longer have that bloom effect
Am I being gaslit here?
People acting like this is the second coming, and Iâm here checking if I have the graphics update turned onâŠ
Thank you very much for the time spent in creating very similar shots and day/time/weather conditions, also thanks for the 1440p resolution as well!
I'm not even a graphics guy, and I was honestly surprised how good everything looked. I wasn't expecting much of a difference at all.
Note: If you want a REAL idea of what the changes can be like, go do Syrcus Tower
7:49 what happened to the crystal effects? Looks so much worse now.
19:26 to 20:08 Is it just me or Resident Evil Vibes lol.
Thanks for the video! I noticed an improvement, of course, but this side by side comparison shows how drastic these changes have been (and I daresay it's for the better, a lot). Toto-Rak is an interesting one. I always had the feeling the new version is kind of a teaser for the graphical update, considering how much better it already looked after the rework. It's so pretty… for a slimy spider infested dungeon. đ
I wonder about further improvements for NPCs with unique faces and all. Tried to check them out in cutscenes but really wasn't sure if e.g. Aymeric or the Alliance Leaders already got their personal face lift. They all look better because they are all affected by better lighting and shaders and whatever was changed, but they are still quite a bit away from Handsome Squidward Roe in Dawntrail. (I also think I've seen some artifacts in Aymeric's face in the eye region, so there is that.) But who knows if this style is what they're actually going for for all of them. Of course it's a bit more obvious with the Pixel Exarch in Shb. He's still patiently waiting in line it seems. đ
Either way I'm excited to see how this game will look like once all updates are complete!
Wow your paissa minion underwent the biggest change I think!
Its like they just deleted that washed out filter.
12:44 the way light falls off looks near CGI in some shots
17:23 look at that ground
23:27 lakelands trees dont look like pixel soup anymore
Also, sheathed ultimate weapons finally don't look gross lol
Your character looked a lot like wesker more now than before đ
Any idea to upgrade your youtube profile picture maybe?
Hey there Wesk! Thanks for all your hard work on the guides. I check them out frequently for the best tips and if a class is right for me. I'm new to the game so they are very handy. Will you be doing a lvl 1-19 for the viper class? Been waiting for it to see if that will be my class or the Dark Knight đ
Anyone else waiting for the 1-100 guide for VPR and PCT? đ
Thanks for all the work you put into, not just showing the changes, but preserving the record of them. Now we can point the sprouts to this video and go, "Back in my day…"
Some of it looks much better, but others.. I feel like the atmosphere was completely changed. Like the crystals no longer glowing. The bloom being taken down is fine and all but all of the glow seems to have been stripped. Also the hardwood floors lost their gloss. Kind of sad. Guess the floor polisher quit haha.
Overall though, the game looks wonderful still. Itâs amazing how well it holds despite itâs age. Sure, itâs not anywhere close to FF16 or even FF15 but it doesnât need to be. I know theyâre not done yet, so Iâm hopeful theyâll touch up some of it later. Also happy to say the game actually seems to run better for me now? DLSS probably has a hand in that though. Itâs great stuff either way.
Now if only the dps duty que wasnât a massive hurdle to get through so I can actually get into DT content. Iâm so close⊠PleaseâŠ
I feel like this video doesnt do justice to the graphical update :/ Or I just think the update did too much ?
but I'm in Idyllshire rn and with the rain…… chef kiss!
I know most of the changes are lighting / shadows / metal textures / reflections on ice for example, like it's said Syrcus Tower I was blown away lol. But when it rains, my god i can spend 5 minutes rotating the camera to see all that glow hmmmmmm
So like playing with an ENB
A lot of them are higher fidelity now, but with way less care for the atmosphere. You can tell that the lighting was placed by hand before, and you can tell that the new replacements were done mostly algorithmically, which is sort of what I was afraid of. It looks like one of those AI remasters where the quality went up, but the artistry and vibes of a lot of places got erased.
Some real standouts that benefited a ton. Some of the Heavensward ruins look way better for instance. I think Sharlayan benefited a lot from the shadows too, and some of the canopy shadows in some of the forest locations look a lot better.
Some of the crystals I'm kind of mixed on. Yes, they look much sharper and more crystalline. At the same time, the soft glow used to disguise this. They look more detailed now, but they look like more detailed video game models to me, and it actually kind of takes me out of it.
Across the board, a lot of artistic decisions basically got erased. Gridania used to be really soft and shady – now it's harsh sun and sharp shadows all over the place, and it feels a lot less sleepy and peaceful. Even its aetheryte – it's higher fidelity for sure, but I'm not sure that turning its pleasant dull glow into glass was actually an improvement to the vibes. Limsa's grey fog was rooted in a graphics limitation, but it also contributed to the vibe of Limsa – it's a foggy harbor city.
The Black Mage room just looks worse. Previously, it was lit as if the orange lights were casting a really atmospheric warm orange glow into a shadowy room. Now the candles seem weird in a room that is pretty well-lit and the orange torches just look out of place – little orange point lights in a room already pretty filled with cooler light.
Similarly, the Limsa pillar looks terrible. It was clearly lit with care before to make the whole pillar stand out. Now the lighting looks really haphazard.
The gold in the ground in front of the Crystal Tower looks dull from a lot of angles now. Is it more realistic? Sure. That's what gold looks like. Does it actually look better? I'm not sure.
I'll take artistry and vibes over realism most of the time, so I'm a little disappointed in this, just like all the other mostly-automated game remasters we've seen recently.
I was in the Ala Mhigan Quarter yesterday for NG+ and I just idled for a bit. A few feet away and above my character, there was a flag waving in the wind, and the "sun"light hit it from a diagonal angle, casting a shadow on the surrounding area and NPCs near it. Now, I'm not sure if this is new per se, but I'm used to the pre-7.0 shadows being like 5 FPS. In this case, the shadow's silhouette dynamically changed with the movement of the billowing flag, changing how it projected on the ground, the NPCs and the objects near it in real time.
Not a big deal for modern games, of course. But it is something I hadn't really seen before in XIV. Not that I recall.
I mean kinda pointless comparison since the time of day varies dramatically
I wish they would let us chose how many players can be on screen at the same time before they fade out. Or let us fade out the players in our hitbox instead of ones further away. It looks so empty when players are swarming your character. Maybe some sort of system like they have for fading out people around quest NPC's but centered around the player.
Just like mounts shift a bit depending on direction you go…. Player movement animations need a similar update
i love going to base omicron in ultima thule and moving my camera so the light hits the floor, the reflections are so nice lmao
i notices that they heavily turned down the polish reflection on the stone floors. i dont like that…
things that shocked me overall was the mount tilting animation and dynamic grasses
10:39 What is the name of this piano theme?
Ty for taking the time to make this video! I love the graphical update and have been excited for it for a long time, for a game that has been out for over 14 years it DESPERATELY needed it. As a long term FF14 player and overall FF fan(been playing 14 since 2010 during it's initial 1.0 release) I just hope they continue to make quality improvements. I personally hope that they continue to update graphical capabilities, maybe such as increasing the polygon count on environments similar to how they did so for all character faces and such, as well as ray-tracing options for hardware than can support it, improvements in weather, dynamic skybox, improved animations/physics and so much more to keep the game going since they committed to another 10-year plan for the game and in a few short years we're gonna be getting the next-gen consoles(PS6/Nextbox) so this game needs to keep up graphically, etc.
I see no difference that can't be explained by different time of day lighting and maybe a different color palette