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bigtakilla on 23 January 2015
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vivster said:
bigtakilla said:
vivster said:
bigtakilla said:
vivster said:

Ever heard of draw distance? The game is focused on graphics. So unless you want to see huge pop ins, a horizon that is 50m away or a massive graphical downgrade as soon as they board the ship I wouldn't count on it. Welcome to Gen 8 where gameplay is still bound by hardware.

What they might do is make an airship service in hub towns. Essentially a glorified warp point between towns.

The sad reality of what has happened to Square-Enix. Take out controllable parties, gameplay, world size and customization because their hair needs 40,000 polygons. /sarcasm but you get the point.

FF was always about graphics. Since the SNES era. There was no game where they didn't push for the highest possible graphics at the time.

The difference now is that graphics are complex and expensive. So they have to leave out other things. Things that are technically possible but for which they have no capacities for.

I would argue art style for 7, 8, and 9 and the fact that they didn't actually push the PS1's graphics to it's limits. Look at Chrono Cross (another game by Squaresoft). It looks graphically much better than any of the Final Fantasies. Look at the Resident Evil series. Same thing, Resident Evil looks better. Same with Parasite Eve. 

Before Square had a great balance between graphics and gameplay, where they seem to have completely ditched one for the other now. 

That's just not true. You can see a clear progression between 7-9 and what what possible for them at the time. I mean look at the elaborate CGIs. Those certainly took a lot of resources to make while being less than essential to the gameplay. FFIX is absolutely demanding for a PS1 game. The polygon count for the characters alone was great. Go back and play them again and you will agree.

Same goes for the SNES and PS2 games. both FFVI and FFXII were pretty much the best of what was possible on their respective consoles. There might have been a handful of games that looked better but that's not saying that Square's focus  was not primarily on visual presentation. On the PS3 games they even sacrificed fps for the best look. Look at their CGI, tech demos and movies.

Graphics were always the strongest focus for FF. It's Square's flagship and they treat it as such.

I will not be surprised when they sacrifice resolution and fps for visual fireworks in FFXV.

Yes the CGI was elaborate, but that has nothing to do with the majority of a games graphics. Did it cost resources? No, because all a game has to render and process during the cut scene is the cutscene. What it took was MEMORY on the CD. That's why PS1 games had a staple of being 2 or 3 CDs long.  

Also, I agree there is progression with every entry. They were trying to get used to creating 3D worlds (the biggest change to video games in video game history). Just because there is progression however doesn't mean something is being pushed to it's limit. As a matter of fact it kind of points in the other direction.

As far as VI, I don't think it was the graphics it was pushing. It looked like a regular Snes game. There were Snes and Genesis games that were creating 3d effects to them. Even if we just go off of sprite graphics A Link To The Past looked visually better and had an open world as well. We won't even get into the fact that at the time a Tales Of (Phantasia) had much better graphics and was also open world. That's right, a Tales Of game completely graphically destroyed Final Fantasy. What VI gave us was one of the biggest worlds known at the time, one of the biggest parties which included the mascot Mog, and a musical score that was jaw dropping. It also gave us the ability to use whatever magic we wanted just by learning the ability through an equiped Esper and the ability to equip any Esper to a person to summon while before a summoner was a class all its own. It brought so much innovation to the jrpg that it's insane! It's arguably better than the materia system. 

Graphics were never the strongest focus. They always wanted good graphics, don't get me wrong, but it was never their strongest focus until around the PS2.