Even with a newFinal FantasyMMO available for players to join their friends in, some players still never abandoned Square Enix’s original attempt at this type of title inFinal Fantasy 11. For those players that still regularly sign into the almost twenty year-old game, one modder has introduced a new update to bring it in line with thebetter lookingFinal Fantasy 14.
Modder Ashenbubs has been periodically updating this ongoing project since Summer of 2020, with the fan-made remastering covering huge sections of the game. Specifically, the mod adds a huge amount of new textures to the game to giveFinal Fantasy 11an HD feel, which is a substantial upgrade for a title originally released in 2002.
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This new mod, titled AshenbubsHD, comes as a 6.5 GB download, roughly six times the size of the vanilla version ofFinal Fantasy 11, in the form of all new textures. The file includes roughly 240,000 new HD textures to replace a huge amount of the ones that would normally determine the visuals for the entire game. While this mod doesn’t add anynew story content toFinal Fantasy 11, it can definitely enhance the experience for players still interested in logging into the game this many years later.
The new textures themselves are exceptionally vibrant and smooth, giving the game a much brighter look than the originally more dull and muted visuals available with the original graphics. However, the design style is still impressively faithful to Square Enix’s textures, giving them more of a remastering update rather than the afullFinal Fantasyremake treatment. Additionally, this mod doesn’t add any new polygons or other additions that might bring the overall graphics more up to date, so this mod is mostly meant to takeFinal Fantasy 11look the best it can with modern PCs.
It’s somewhat surreal to see players still creating mods for a game that released as far back as 2002, especially with such a substantial new update like AshenbubsHD. The time and energy dedicated to this project is impressive due to the modder needing to go in and touch up almost a quarter of a million individual textures to reach the level that the mod has at the time of this writing. Even more incredible is that Ashenbubs still claims on the Nexus Mods page for theFinal Fantasymod, that the project still isn’t finished after already racking up so many textures to have already been retooled in this way.
