This makes it look like just really well animated turn based combat. The interface certainly seems to suggest that. Pretty sure it's an 'active battle' format where time still has some sort of flow and doesn't just pause while you decide what to do, but I don't think this is an Action RPG at all. Seems like a menu based system.
It's hilarious listening to how impressed the IGN guys are with the particle effects and lighting. It looks good, don't get me wrong, but I'm so used to effects of this level of quality or better that it just struck me as kind of silly. First thing that popped into my head was "Sure, they look good, but they're not anywhere near as impressive as they're trying to make them sound."
I mean, even for Final Fantasy this isn't some new upper tier of quality we're seeing here. If anything I think some of the effects look a little unfinished.
I'm not talking in a PC vs Console kind of way here either, these sorts of effects have been pretty standard for Playstation 4 and even Xbox 1 games for a couple of years now. It's really just direct lighting we're seeing there with the light reflections off the sword. The PS3 could manage effects like that easily, it's commonly used on water to give it that nice shiny look. GTA V made use of the same effect on the previous gen systems, you saw it on the cars, water, and windows a lot.
If they can get the PS4 to pull off a decent Global Illumination effect with graphical quality of this level at a good framerate I'll be impressed. No way the old systems could handle the normal maps or textures they're using here, and not a chance they'd manage animation like that, but the lighting we see here could be managed easily and the PS3 with that hellish Cell Processor could probably do a better job than you'd think at trying to run those particles, it'd probably drop frames like crazy, but it would probably still be a playable game, even if barely so.
The particles do look nice, but again, nothing we've not seen for a couple of years now on any current gen system that isn't the Wii U. These sorts of effects were present in launch titles for the new consoles. They're nice, but not so impressive as to ooh and aaah over as if it was the first fireworks display they've ever seen.
I do like how this looks. It's got a nice occlusion filter on it that keeps it from looking too sharp and overall is very well animated. It looks good because it's Square doing a flagship game at their usual quality level. There really isn't much that's technically impressive or particularly innovative visually about it outside of it being very well crafted visually because it's Squenix and Final Fantasy.
The lighting is clearly still in early stages. I want to see what this looks like once they slap some AO and AF effects onto it. A little depth of field would be nice too and wouldn't give much of a performance hit. I expect they'll use Bokeh DoF in the final release as it would probably give the best effect at the lowest performance hit. It's shown up in a lot of games recently, including a few from Squenix I don't think they've got anything like that going on here. The PS4 should be able to handle that and still manage 25-30 frames. No way is this going to run at 60, the hardware would fuse together in a hot lump of molten plastic and metal. While not optimal, that's more than good enough for an RPG like this.
This looks good for an early demo, but the post processing stuff clearly isn't finished yet.
