It means we have people literally saying it looks like garbage, low-budget, and just an expansion for XIV. "It looks like something from the character creator". That's in this thread.
...And it's ridiculous.
OK but again if people are thinking expansion trailer:
(quality of gif much worse than last example but maybe this one will load)
Which does correspond to somebody you can see in-game with the results of a character creator. It's not 1:1, but it's not a ridiculous take on what an XIV with an upgrade could look like given that that characters look incredibly similar. And, I mean, if you look at what some diehard gposers are able to get out of the game and then spam everywhere as screenshots of XIV characters, you can get a much better image out of the existing XIV character creation process than your screenshot shows.
And then you have the flat world appearance the XIV team runs with, some models looking less good than others in the trailer, enough of a thematic tie that XIV fans are fanficcing how the games could be related, etc etc. People seeing it on a stream and getting strong XIV vibes, or upgraded XIV vibes, isn't some great mystery. It looking like XIV was literally how I realized it was going to be for XVI before the chocobos showed up. And part of what it makes it resemble XIV are things about XIV that aren't great.
Like there's hyperbole on both sides--no, the in-game graphics do not look shot-for-shot like in-game XIV graphics. But the idea that the in-engine cutscene stuff resembles XIV trailers and the game in general looks like it has some of the same less great appearance problems that XIV has isn't ridiculous and people fumbling their explanations of why (because a lot of the characters
do look generic for an FF, which might be a choice, but in a franchise known for distinctive everyone looking like a generic hyur evoking character creator jabs isn't a shock,) isn't really either. Going there for the comparison and saying your initial take was that they were maybe the same thing--given that FF has a history of trying to impress with spectacle--isn't this big shock to me.
