Preview Final Fantasy 14's Graphic Updates With These Before-and-After Pictures

mmorpg.com:

One of the most highly-anticipated parts of the upcoming Final Fantasy 14 expansion, which we now know is titled Dawntrail , is the graphics update announced not long after Endwalker’s hype died down. 

While the game’s pretty gorgeous as it is, it’s gorgeous in a 2013 MMORPG sort of way, which is because that’s exactly what FFXIV is. There are great new environments, glamours and characters being released but not really being done justice due to existing within old limitations. Even areas painted in gorgeous, bright colors suffer from the game’s outdated lighting and coloring parameters.  

Luckily for everyone (including the very excited development team), next summer will see an overhaul of the graphics in many aspects of the game, from materials to entire character models. We’ve got a summary of what we were shown during the Fan Festival keynote, including before-and-after pictures. 

Put bluntly, the biggest update in FFXIV: Dawntrail will be to overall textures throughout the game.The new areas’ screenshots feature not only beautiful new settings, but lighting that seems to do their bright coloring plenty of justice. Prior areas may take some time to see similar quality, it seems, but it’s mentioned that they’ll catch up eventually — though a banquet chamber of Ul’dah and a Doman Castle area are shown as the previews. 

As for gear, metals will likely see the best upgrades with their similar texture and lighting change. The Endwalker Paladin gear was shown to demonstrate this to pretty solid effect.  

Yoshida seemed very, very excited to talk about this, and just from the initial previews, it feels justified. 

Many of the fields in FFXIV look gorgeous in theory; if you were to put one out as a painting (or