Final Fantasy 14 launched Endwalker in December of last year, the MMO's fifth expansion pack, and the game shows no sign of slowing down. Endwalker was not only its biggest release to date, but it also introduced the Oceania Data Center, with more server expansions on the way.
The growth of Final Fantasy 14 in recent years has influenced Square Enix's decision to dramatically increase its budget, and while the effects of this decision have already been felt in Endwalker, the expanded development resources will bear fruit in the next expansion with a long awaited glow-up of the game's graphics.
Announced at the recent "Letter from the Producer" livestream, 7.0 will introduce with it a complete graphical overhaul of Final Fantasy 14 – from lighting, to textures, to character models – bringing the visual fidelity of the game closer to – and even beyond its original vision. The developers showcased test footage featuring several zones from Final Fantasy 14 using the new graphics, as well as footage of the new character models.
The community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with players flocking to social media platforms to post memes and to offer their appreciation to the showcased footage. While the current graphics of Final Fantasy 14 are more than suitable for an MMO that came out in 2010, they are also a compromise. The initial release of the game was not only considered a failure from a design standpoint, but also from a technical one, as the graphics that launched with Final Fantasy 14 were too strong for most of the hardware at the time. A Realm Reborn had to scale those graphics back.
If the release cycle of its expansions were to follow the established pattern, that would put the next expansion pack for Final Fantasy 14 launching some time in 2023, exactly a decade since A Realm Reborn came out. While the game does not officially endorse mods, it does not actively impede their existence, thus many people in the community have taken up the task of creating unofficial graphical overhauls for Final Fantasy 14, or even making some amusing mods such as turning every character in the game into a Lalafell.
Hardware has no doubt caught up in the meanwhile, and the developers from Naoki Yoshida's team are ill-content to let the game stay in the past.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.
