Category: Cycle Round

For the final round I asked our photographers to take a shot inspired by Monet. We had shots ranging from his earlier works, to his Impressionist period, to his nearly blind angry years late in his life that were heavy with dark reds and blacks.

The judges all fell in love with the “most Monet” of the shots with the punny title, Bridge Under Peaceful Waters. Congratulations!

The community had different ideas and with some of the most community votes we had all cycle, the winner by one vote was The Wise Trees Stand Sleeping in the Cold. Congrats to you as well!

And that’s it for Scenic Cycle 4! I’ll be putting together a series of galleries to reveal all of the photographers this afternoon, so you can see who contributed each shot, before the final winner is announced!

It’s time for the final week of ENTM Scenic Cycle 6. We always take a cue from classical art for our final week, so I asked the photographers to take a screenshot inspired by Monet and slap it in any picture frame to finish out this contest.

With nine gorgeous shots ranging from classical impressionism to modern avant-garde, we have a feast for the eyes this week! Please look at each image below, and then vote for your favorite using the Google poll below.

Click on the center of each image to open it to full size in a new tab.

If you are having trouble voting on the embedded Google poll, please click on this link to open it in a new tab instead: https://forms.gle/mMxGuP7g66ma5qJs5

Coming in a little late today, not because of the judges, but because I’m sick with a fairly nasty cold and I’m been napping and playing Merge Dragons trying to make the headache go away. (COVID test is negative… it’s just that time of year. We’ve got a frost warning for tonight, wooo!)

This week I sent the photographs to go find some COOL RUINS of a fallen civilization, and while our ruins spanned from 25+ years (from the abandoned Sharlayan colony that is now Idyllshire) to five thousand years (with some Alchemical Research Facility representing the Allagan Empire), the winner for the week from the judge’s votes belongs to Peace showing off the Necrohol of Mullonde from The Orbonne Monastary (at least how it looks in the moments before Ultima the High Seraph turns it into a pile of bricks.)

The community preferred Reaching for Greatness as their favorite this week.

Congratulations to you both! There is one more week to go in ENTM Scenic Cycle 4!

One of my favorite podcasts (and YouTube channel, and now even a book) is named Fall of Civilizations and it covers the ending of the great ancient empires of antiquity, around the world. From Roman Britain to the Mayans to the Khmer empire, you can learn a lot about each of these lost peoples from the ruins they left behind.

https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations

So for this round, I asked our photographers to go out and find some ruins and take a picture in “black and white” – which in ENTM Gpose counts as the first four filters, sepia or monochromatic. These filters present special challenges in lighting, but thankfully the new engine allows for better light scattering on far surfaces, letting us see more detail in the shadows.

We have eight entries this week. Please look at each of the photographs below, and then vote for your favorite using the embedded Google poll.

If you are having problems voting in the Google poll, please click on this link to open the poll in a different tab instead: https://forms.gle/bqJRjG1neUwqzhVP6

Apologies for the delay! We’re short a judge this week, and another judge had a personal IRL crisis that delayed their votes, but they made it in late last night. We’ve always maintained that real life > video game here at ENTM, so please give them some grace. Our guest judge this week was Malkovich.

(Any criticisms may be lobbed directly at me, for dropping the ball and not making sure I had my substitute judge scheduled liked I was warned I’d need to. My bad.)

The three judges who were able to vote had a LOT of disagreement and votes were all over the place, but after it all shook out, the photograph with the best score for the week was Dawnsinger! Congratulations!

The community had other opinions, and really liked Seconds Before Flying Into a Waterwheel the best this week. Also congratulations!

For the week four challenge, I sent our photographers out flying on a mount to capture the view from high above! The round requirements were “any outdoor subject, while flying” and so our photographers dutifully saddled up their chocobos (and beds and brooms and capybaras) and went to try to find an aerial scene of Etheirys using the new engine.

Please look at each of our photographs in the gallery below, and then vote for your favorite in the Google poll. To view each image in a larger size, click on the center and it should open in a new tab. Voting will be open until October 9, 2024.

Bonus Challenge: The photographers are issuing a challenge to everyone not participating – can you take a good aerial screenshot of the Valley of the Fallen Rainbow in Yanxia?

If you are having trouble voting with the embedded Google poll, please open the poll in a new tab and vote there instead by clicking on this link: https://forms.gle/HSTDUzJTTShxuf8L6

The judges all expressed their difficulties with ranking the options this week – every shot was so nicely done.

But in the end, one shot edged ahead by the numbers, and that was our first Untitled shot of the contest. Congratulations!

But wait! We also have the community votes, even if they’re just for fun, and the community also really liked You Never Said How Many Statues There Could Be and Larger than Life this week – they tied for the community votes!

So far we’ve taken a look at New Horizons and revisited the past with a Fresh Set of Eyes, so now we need to use the upgraded game engine to look at some more urban environs and view the giant statues that are scattered around the world of Etheiryis!

Monument: A statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a famous person or event.

For this round, I asked the photographers to take a screenshot of “any statue in any city or town.” (And thanks to Gpose, to hide the people.)

Please look at each of the images below, and then vote for your favorite using the Google poll below! Click or tap on the image to open it full size in another tab.

If you are having trouble voting with the embedded poll on your mobile device, please click on this link to open the Google poll in a new tab instead: https://forms.gle/4GSACYSNeazJ9QrNA

For this second week, I sent our photographers back into ARR dungeons to try to find an area that received a glow up as part of the 7.0 graphics update. We had a lot of amazing views of some of the earliest dungeons. Voting was very close, but the winner this week goes to the sun shaft in the Thousand Maws of Totorak.

Congratulations to Light in the Dark for winning Round 2!

One of the most exciting aspects of the new lighting engine in FFXIV is that it breathed new life into some of the older assets in FFXIV, even without the developers going back and updating those areas to have higher resolution textures or adding additional light sources outright. Video game lighting is a whole specialized field in graphics (trust me, I’ve read enough rants from my old friend Yonder who is now a developer with Sony over something something “voxel cone ray tracing” that is a mixture of English, Japanese, and calculus.)

The challenge this week was to go into an ARR dungeon and try to find one of these spots that we can see with “a fresh set of eyes” – that is, the new graphics engine – and look at them in a way we haven’t been able to before. This round is a background scenery challenge. Here are the entries from our photographers this week!

Click on each image to open it in a new browser window, and then vote for your favorite in the embedded poll at the bottom of this post.

If you are having trouble voting in the embedded poll, please click on this link to open it in a new tab instead: https://forms.gle/p3j6ahRmdNeZoe6B6