From the post Shadowbringers MSQ (SPOILERS?) we see not much has changed with our friend's um... ailment? However notice the floor and most of all the surrounding crystals.
From the post Shadowbringers MSQ (SPOILERS?) we see not much has changed with our friend's um... ailment? However notice the floor and most of all the surrounding crystals. This is a comparison. It shows what has changed and what has not changed. Literally nothing in the video is a complaint. However this is showing the live game at two different times. A complaint is not a bad thing. It is how you express it that matters. If you feel something is wrong with what has changed now, while things are in transition, is the time to express that. But express it well and without aggression.
If I remember correctly, the pixelation was intentional. I think it was in relation to the Pixel ReMaster releases for the games, hence why it was like that.
Dang halfway through shadowbringers and this thumbnail popped up. Couldn’t have been the hooded version for thumbnail sake 😂 it’s been 5 years so can’t blame you also I should have expected it but man rip
Yeah I feel that’s the primary problem. It kinda messes with the lighting of the cutscene and visually makes no sense since the magic effect that goes to the peak of the tower is still there- 🥲
i think we should bring this to attention to the devs, tower looks aight but it needs some shine/glow imo cause the crystal tower itself should be the eye catching but now it just blends into the sky color,. The convocation crystals on the floor looking like we puked some light onto it too (the crystal itsself looks good but the lighting there seems bad i think)
@@phantomchaos2491 They are. At EU fanfest one of the devs said it was his job to oversee updating EVERY instance, cut scenes area and zone before 7.0 released. We can see they did just that, but they said NPCs and gear will take until 7.4 at the latest; that was stated during the final PLL before early access.
There's been a rampant complaints or issues being brought forth where Yoshi P already explained or addressed. He already stated that graphical updates are an ongoing project which will continue thru 7.x series. The prominent changes done at the early stages are NPC that used character creation assets and various texture reworks for older releases. Custom characters like Ryne, Crystal Exarch, Vaultry, and etc will be done later.
Yep, seems like majority of those who comment did not understood that or they were not reading the newsletter or have even heard the live letters...sad really. Truthfully, this video would be great if original poster did this when the graphical updates were done.
I really REALLY hope for some sort of optimization. According to the benchmark everything should be fine but my game runs absolute horrible with huge lag spikes. It takes sometimes almost minutes till everyone "Loaded" in for me im Frontlines. I already tried to tweak a lot and lowered the settings but the update did so far more "harm than good" for me.
@@QuixoteX Not sure what you meant with your statement but if it's about the graphical update, the Dev team have explicitly mentioned this will take around several major patches across 7.x and not just a few weeks meaning the visual changes may not be as apparent OR only a few items/surfaces have change if you play cutscenes from the previous expansion.
They said this with Viera and Hrothgar hats, then they stopped even making new headpieces work(along with event and mogstation stuff). They say a lot of things. To keep us hooked and hoping. Because they know most of this fanbase is too scared to put their foot down and demand value for their money, and for them to stop false advertisement(no really, you can go down the rabbit hole of yoshida interviews, and you'll have your eyebrows raised quite a bit). This game's community would do well to take after communities such as OSRS in 2012, and to some degree the WoW community during their Shadowlands expansion, where the consumers had been blatantly telling the company "no, I want my money's worth", and would then stop playing altogether. Because that's the only way companies will actually listen, when you withhold the sole reason why they're making the product - to make money. It's still hilarious to me that people still think that Yoshi-P cares about the playerbase directly, when in reality, SE is milking his good reputation for everything it's worth by using him as a scapegoat to cut corners, so that they can profit even more. And it works really fucking well. Because, again, this community generally believes they're building and supporting a hard effort to restore the game. It's frankly incredible that SE has managed to spin an absolute disastrous result of neglect(1.0) into a sob story that they got their customerbase attached to. And before you assume, I've likely been playing this game longer than you, the reader. I've watched its ups and downs. I've paid attention to the direction the game is taking, and my friends who have been playing even longer than me share a similar sentiment. SE is very obviously cutting corners(I remember their LL addressing concerns of shadowbringers having less content compared to stormblood, and their counter-argument was written msq line count LOL). Because they can. Because this playerbase is allowing them to. Stop allowing this shit to happen. Stop defending this. This cutscene is a very important part in the msq, and it's incredible that you're defending what's probably a day's work for an artist to brush up. I don't even want to imagine how other cutscenes with him like this look like lol.
The big change is in the hair textures and the much improved lighting model which makes it feel that much more realistic. The graphics may not be 4k ultra hd, but they are significantly improved and feel a lot better to look at. The fact the update went this smoothly is a credit to the team.
Its a little sad (?) that the tower doesnt "burn" as bright anymore... Now it looks like not much is happening... Refering to 0:50 . On the other hand, this might've been on purpose...?
Maybe making it less bright was intentional, but without brightness at all it kinda just looks like ice. The "crystal tower" more like a giant stalagmite.
@@kou7191 It's probably unintentional. The inside of Syrcus Tower looks really good, and even the Crystal Tower in ARR cutscenes from after the Xan'de fight looks really nice.
Time to weep again, but also dayum look at all the metal and crystals, those convocation crystals look so tastey... I also love how that the gold on the floor reflect the blue light
I am going to hold my judgement until the Devs announce the updates are finished, then I will judge, and I am Ok with this. These things take time, despite how some thing people think. My new cat girl stares back into my soul, and I am satisficed with that for now.
They did say that the model upgrades for characters will happen gradually in some cases,pixel exarch is probably one of them thatll get his upgrade within the patches
Agree, some characters noticeably got up-rezzed like the core Scion members (player chara, Alphinaud, Thancred, etc), but others who only appear in a smaller number of cutscenes are not (Varis, Graha). They're clearly prioritising the models with the most screentime. The amount they did is not small. The reflectiveness and highlights of shaders improved for clothes, buildings, everything. They've added new texture maps I believe, and increased the texture maps resolution by 2x at least. New lights for certain scenes got added. The animation for newer expansions is also getting better and better, the Player has more varied expressions in cutscenes (speaking as someone who's going through them for the first time right now). The eyes of each character has extra lights to bring out the shine. The hair textures have highlights and better definition.
mind you, this is a big thing a lot of people seemed to miss, The visual update was not to every single aspect of the game, characters look better yes, however they said they would be releasing DT in full graphics and as time goes on we will see them roll out the graphics BACKWARDS, meaning endwalker zones get the full upgrade including characters, then shadowbringers, so on and so forth.
@@sharkgirling Because Koana's jacket is (afaik) the 6.0 Machinist Artifact gear. Which they said they'd be updating 6.0 Artifact gear in 7.1, except Paladin, which they used as a testbed for the new graphics to begin with, so they added that into 7.0 since they had it anyway.
@@Zakjuh Feels like it should have been something they focused on to update sooner than later considering it's what one of the main characters in Dawntrail's story is wearing. I'm not saying they should have updated all artifact gear, but they absolutely should have updated that set knowing they were going to use it.
@@Shatterstar You could say that a bout a lot of things, though. :p Like pick anything at random, and then someone else could've said the same thing about another part of the game. I dunno how much they've done at all right now, gear-wise, other than obviously the 7.0 gear, and the 6.0 PLD AF. Anyway, 7.1 isn't too far off. There's probably some gear that will have to wait until 7.5, so by comparison, the first major patch isn't something I would consider "low priority". Not sure about the cadence myself, though. Will have to see about how they plan to update gear and NPC models and at what pace whenever they get to discussing it (and hopefully they do a bit more work on zones, too. Some are great, and some are... well... lacking a little bit of polish. The Crystal Tower in this cutscene is a good example of lacking it.)
The more subtle effects being lost, like the shadow effect during the big attack on Elidibus, is slightly more tragic than the lost glow, cuz I’m more worried that the small artistic touches will be forgotten.
Yeah I noticed this too. Though the team did make it clear that this visual update is ongoing. There are still many assets and textures that haven't been updated yet. But this will all come in time. The game already looks so much better.
My guess has to be that Crystal Echarch is considered a special model. If you remember they said that special model characters will take time to change, we see this with some outfits as well, and we will see some old models around for the moment.
Crystal Exarch have more detailed hair now, but dem clothes still have pixels. 😵💫 Also, the crystal tower now looks more like an igloo because the texture gave me the feel that it looks more like ice than actual crystal. It needs more luster and reflected colors. Hopefully the graphic updates are still going. 💖
yeah about what i expected. unforunately a graphics update would have this effect on alot of scenes with special effects due to having to remake them all. they said they would be slowly updating older stuff as time goes on so we will just have to see ig
They said not all NPC's would be updated at once. And "him" in that universe is technically a different NPC than the current one. They'll work backwards.
You can see the difference on some elements that are used widely, while some independent assets like Exarch's must be done individually. With the amount of individual things in the game, you are asking for DT to be delayed if they needed to update EVERYTHING before release.
SE needs to take a look at this, as it is clearly unintentional. Seems they used the old lighting system as a clever trick to get the Crystal Tower to glow, but the new system removed that effect; So they'll need to patch in an alternative. The original glow is still there, but it is obtruded by the way the engine changes have effected how lighting casts through transparency layers and reflects off surfaces.
I remember being confused by the aetheryte at Dawntrail's launch, and my character's hair being a darker shade of brown. Even though I'm on PS4, game looks good
Unless your framerate is dipping neither seem to be doing much at all. The 99 trick forces FSR to to rescale and sharpen the image. Personally I think that looks bad. Most of what is visually different between the two is the Anti-Aliasing that is used.
Lighting got better for character models and worse for everything else. This cutscene isnt as cool without the gigantic glowing pillar of "go fuck yourself, Elidibus" behind Graha
@@QuixoteX For further clarity; things that were changed already include characters using the in-game character creator foir their models, the lightning engine, shadows, and universal materials (such as gold, stone, grass, etc). Models that use specific materials or character features (such as the Exarch, newer armor sets, etc.) will be being updated patch by patch. They even mentioned in one of the early livestream talks that this meant you would end up with some weird situations where updated and non-updated npcs would end up interacting in some cases but they'd all end up getting a glow-up over time. It's just a LOT of work goes into updating the hundreds of thousands of textures in the game + development of new things going forward so it's broken up to make it more manageable for the team.
prolly an oversight. just updated the shaders, but the new shaders don't react the same way. report it as a bug or something like that, and they'll look into it. see, the old crystal tower shaders aren't actually super crystally. they feign it with a diffuse map and a gloss map. the new ones have something approximating actual crystal more, which means that they're way, way more influenced by the surrounding area/environment lighting. ergo, because in 5.3, the sky is dark alongside everything else, there isn't much light for the crystal material to catch compare this to the syrcus tower version of the crystal tower (which uses the same shaders, since they both got updated in 7.0), and because the scenes there are in broad daylight, the crystal effect looks way better. They'll need to do something to illuminate the crystal tower in 5.3, like give it self-illumination or embed some light that does not affect anything but the crystal tower so that it can be lit up, but that's a manual process. something they can do if they're aware of it.
Lots of people seem to not really understand how the models in videogames work. They updated the **shader engine** which is what describe show light casts onto objects. Shaders are completely and entirely removed from textures, and any textures that they updated were done **manually** such as character's faces. A shader update will not change what a texture looks like (the "paint" that wraps around a mesh), only the color and glossiness it will appear. Textures are manually created and painted in things like photoshop, wheras a shader uses computer technology to alter these paintings. Think of it as an instagram filter, if you will. Things like the Exarch's crystal body was done as a hand-crafted texture, and there was likely only so much they could have done with the texture before it begins to hit technical limitations of texture size in XIV. How they did it in-game is they created an "invisible layer" over top of the Exarch, and as the cutscene played out, they slowly revealed more and more of that layering. There is only so much data a model can contain before it overflows the memory of the game engine, so the blocky pixels were simply a compromise, and looks fine when viewed from afar. Overall, the crystals look better because you can see actual light refracting inside of the crystals. This is very evident on the crystal tower its self, where you can see mirror like reflections. It's evident that they only used the "super ultra-bright neon" look of crystals to make up for the shortcomings of the graphical engine at the time. Overall, expecting the ENTIRETY of the game to look better is quite an unrealistic expectation. The graphical update was a colossal win overall, and if there are any parts that seem significantly damaged, I'm sure they will fix it in future patches. They have clearly communicated that the graphical update is "ongoing development", and many more things will get updated.
The funny thing is that the complaints about the tower being too dim, while fair, have nothing to do with the new shaders being bad. Just that they're too reactive and dependent on light, whereas the old one wasn't at all. It was way more flat, but that also means it couldn't be influenced by different lighting as much. Compare 5.3's Crystal Tower to Syrcus Tower Crystal Tower (the main difference being a brightly lit up sky vs a dark one), and you'll see that the Crystal Tower is way more beautiful after 7.0 than pre-7.0 if lit correctly. The fact of the matter is that they didn't (yet) go in to make manual touch ups, so right now the 5.3 Crystal Tower is accurately lit by a dark sky, meaning it too is dim. To fix that, they'll need to add some light that affects only it, or give it self illumination, or whatever.
Endwalker cutscene did it better. The Crystal Tower looked more alive during the previous iteration. Exarch had more emotions. 8:57 I think Exarch's skin tone on the left being more pale made a lot more sense, seeing as he's in a lot of pain from being crystallized (and blood crystallizing means no blood circulating, therefore no blood to keep complexion healthy). Also I did not need these feels right now.
This is very unfortunate, the lack of glow on the crystal tower ruins the scene. I feel like this should have been one of the few scenes where they went out of their way to check and fix.
I have a feeling they're still rushing to get everything actually graphically upgraded still... there are a lot of things NOT in Dawntrail that are inconsistently updated.. even faces! Thancred's Heavensward/Stormblood face is still his old one, for anyone not a fan of his Endwalker-and-onwards new face.
I guess you are not familiar with the current state of the game. It is currently set up so that you must have either FSR or DLSS. Neither are really gonna have much effect unless your fps dips. However that determines which AA you have. Actually it is better to match the resolution of the original.
@@QuixoteXfun fact: the DLSS implementation is actually bugged atm. It's not enabled during cutscenes. Was a huge post on the subreddit about it a couple days after DT launch.
I find it weird how they didn't prioritize Exarch, considering he's an important character to ShB? And the fact that they updated Estinien's trueblood armor but when you look to check your own set it's still the old graphics ver.??? (i think the outfit Urianger wears was also updated but only for him). Idk man.
It's because you only see this "consumed by crystal" version of the Exarch for maybe 5 minutes in total cutscene time. They're prioritising the most screentime models first, special models later it seems.
Not really a good comparison video since these areas / models aren't updated yet. Of course "not much has changed" Would be a cool video idea for the future though.
The specifically said that some NPCs were going to get updated with patches and to please bare with this. These videos without context only serve to spread misinformation like a lot of the comments are.
Wait, really? Everyone's textures are vastly improved. I was very distracted when I logged in for the new update because everyone's eyes finally had highlights in every scene and their hair doesn't look like pixel art, and their face had higher res textured highlights.
@@applepie9806 there are definitely differences, I just thought it was gonna be much more noticeable. I should have managed my expectations better, but maybe it's because my settings were at max already before the update?
After a viewing of this scene in both modes separately I see very little difference. I could do a side by side, but what in particular do you see that looks better when using AMD?
@@QuixoteX It's the 3D resolution scaling. NVIDIA remove sharpness of the image since they scale differently from what i have (Imagine does get clearer at 99 instead of 100). Oh, only use Dynamic if you have 4K monitor though, otherwise it doesn't help much.
@@dale7326 Both are scaling schemes If you set 30 fps the scaling never kicks in. Nvidia has built in AA while the AMD offers a choice of of AA, It seems to me the Nivida AA is superior out in the world. The 99 trick is forcing it to apply the scaling and then sharpen the image, much like you might do in a graphic editing program. It looks less natural to me. If that is what you like fine but there are still the environmental aliasing issues that nvidia seems to handle better. Neither is perfect but that doesn't address the question about this scene.
@@QuixoteX The changes mostly relate to models and textures, not scaling. XIV foremost needed none of these tech but rather they added them to reduce the need of extra work and cost. Aside, cutscenes are prerendered so i see not much needed for having neither DLSS or FSR though. The only reason you need them because other games have motions label on top of objects to pixels rendering somewhat work well for that. Otherwise yes, there aren't much different, sure. Since you're talking about how they look like be different so i answered that AMD is working better atm because DLSS is bluring and having flash effect in certain environments.
@@dale7326 Actually no the cutscenes are not pre-rendered. They are rendered in real time. Notice how each player's character is in most scenes and how the camera angle changes according to their height, and how many scenes will change according to the time of day. Blurring happens with both. I don't know what you mean by flashing effects. Perhaps you can reference something specific? DLSS reduces the flickering problem s on the ground and in trees, grass and steps.
A few comments above they mentioned something about special model characters taking a bit longer to update so maybe thats why he didn't get his official glowup yet
Respectfully, I'd like to request that you change the thumbnail. I just started Shadowbringers, and this video showing up in my recommended has now spoiled a major plot point.
@@azadalamiq Yes and no. Dawntrail has significant weaknesses in its storystelling that have nothing to do with it being a beginning - it is a badly paced story. The framework is solid but the panelling is weak.
@@azadalamiq both Graha and Elidibus were completely overhauled in ShB to the point that they might as well be different characters. Same for Ascians. There was no "10 years of build-up" aside from maybe you getting used to the game and your character. 20-30h is *plenty* enough to tell a compelling story. That's twice or thrice as long as most tv series.
DLSS has overall produced better results in game, however both DLSS and FSR seem do about the same on this scene. Can you point out anything in particular?
The graphic update has been mediocre so far, and how much of their time and energy wasted on this "upgrade"? They really fucked up big time this expansion. Shocked it ain't the worst receiving.
