Hello everyone, this is Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of FINAL FANTASY XIV.
We have received numerous reports that the housing system's lighting settings are brighter than usual when set to 0. Conversely, when set to 5, the lighting is darker than it should be. The team has been hard at work investigating the source of the issue and how best to resolve it.
I apologize for taking so long to address the matter, but I would like to take this opportunity to inform you all of our progress.
The Effects of Updates to Lighting
Thanks to the graphical update in Patch 7.0, the game has seen significant improvements to lighting and the number of light sources that can be processed simultaneously. While this has resulted in greater graphical fidelity, it has also fundamentally changed how lighting is handled compared to Patch 6.58, making it impossible to recreate the same visuals when compared pixel by pixel.
It was our goal to match the lighting settings for housing seen in Patch 6.58 as closely as possible. However, we’ve determined a mistake was made when adjusting the parameters required to accomplish this.
I will explain the source of this issue down below, but I would like to reassure you that we are doing our utmost to fix the lighting settings to match what was previously available.
Because the process involved carefully testing various lighting settings against several combinations of furnishing layouts, we expect a fix for this issue will be ready by Patch 7.05. My sincerest apologies for taking so long to resolve this.
For those of you who have already finished designing or redesigning your estates and apartments, please bear in mind that you may need to further adjust brightness settings in the near future.
The Issue with Changes to Lighting
When fine-tuning the lighting settings in our improved graphical environment, the newly added baked reflections were mistakenly set to “On” when determining the base lighting level for housing. Because of this, even with lighting set to 0, there is a persistent lighting effect that makes the environment appear brighter than intended.
The highest brightness setting, meanwhile, was adjusted several times while trying to strike a balance between the player characters' personal lighting and that of the surrounding environment. The end result inadvertently made lighting darker than what could be seen in previous patches.
To ensure housing remains a place for players to comfortably express their creativity, originality, and sense of style, our plan is to disable the baked reflections, and rebalance the environmental lighting to bring these new settings as close to the original values as possible.
As mentioned previously, the lighting cannot be made exactly as it was before. It's also affected by a number of outside factors including your monitor, its brightness settings, and gamma levels.
Even so, we are committed to reconfiguring the brightness settings for housing to more closely resemble their previous appearance. Together with the improved graphics introduced in Patch 7.0, we hope to provide you with a more enjoyable housing experience.
Thank you for your patience and continued support of FINAL FANTASY XIV.
Naoki Yoshida
FINAL FANTASY XIV Producer & Director
