The 7.0 Graphical update preview is an objective failure

Hah, makes sense on the bones. I avoid interacting with people on Twitter (and reddit) so i never would have known

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Originally Posted by hymmeli

I'm not making a disagreement with you in these last few comments, to be honest. I'm genuinely trying to engage with you in a discussion since my initial comment, and in the following responses from you, I get the impression that you're frustrated because you've gotten negative reactions somewhere or somehow. Again, I don't mean to be rude, but your tone in your comments tends to, like in this response to me alone, doesn't come across as you engaging in good faith. Anyway, that is it from me since, to be honest, there is nothing else I can add that would contribute anything to the discussion of this thread in particular.

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It's all good. Things have been heated the past few days. I genuinely hope everyone's voices and concerns are heard and that the development team takes it seriously. I think we're on the same side about this. Misunderstandings happen. Sorry if I wasn't more clear. <3

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Originally Posted by Doopliss

I think it's extremely interesting that two of the people who are downplaying changes are Face 1 Fem Highlanders--you know, one of the faces they used to showcase for the past several months

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Well, I think it's "extremely interesting" that you lead-off with an ad-hominem attack.

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Originally Posted by Doopliss

"Negativity" is being posted on Twitter, Reddit, and the JP side of forums.

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If there's one immutable constant for FFXIV, it's that negativity is always being posted on Twitter, Reddit, and the JP side of forums. So that alone doesn't mean much -- especially when positivity gets responded to with personal attacks (see above).

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Originally Posted by Doopliss

And regardless of semantics, they made a promise that character impressions would change as little as possible.

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The controlling phrase there is "as possible." And only SE knows what that means.

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Originally Posted by Embran

I have gone out of my way so many times to include this in my comments because people have been eager to be upset with me for daring to like the changes to my character. Please stop.

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I for one am happy for you. My own characters (the eight I have at or near EoC) are a mixed bag, but the character I made specifically to turn into a fem-hroth (Kiitara, from Thundercat's "Cheetara") looks promising. OTOH my goal of a puma-esque character seems to face some obstacles, since a dark-gray face does not a puma make.

Now, having said all that, my own take:

Only a tiny minority of the 30 million player of FFXIV every post to any forum, and the sample that does post is self-selected and therefore cannot be relied on as representative of the larger population. SE should monitor the forums for what they can learn from it, but at the end of the quarter they'll use Dawntrail sales as the primary measure of success, and game-site reviews probably as the second one.

Even if some current players leave because their character doesn't look right to them -- and I haven't seen much of that sentiment expressed BTW -- if the number of subscribers increases with the Dawntrail launch, SE will take that as a win. Given how gorgeous the new environments look, and that new players have no investment in pre-DT character designs, an increase in subscribers seems likely to me.

But will Yoshi-p be satsfied with that? Maybe not: he freaking loves this game, it's his healthy little 10-year old child, and I'm sure he wants to see it hit a healthy age-of-majority. So I think he'll do whatever he can to make as many players as possible happy; that's who he seems to be.

Please look forward to it.

there are two things I'd like to add to this discussion:

Of course there will be more negative feedback in the forum than on social media, because the official forum here is the right place to provide feedback for the devs to read. So while praise can be posted anywhere with little impact, the best chances for valid criticism to be actually heard is for it to be posted here.

And also, the free Fantasia is not the solution for all of the problems posted on the forum. The character creator in FF14 is far more simple than that of more recent games, so the issues with some lips, cheekbones, and facial sculpt cannot be corrected by fine tuning them. A preset is a preset, after all.

Its a good thing though that there are a lot of people that post legit side by side comparisons so differences can be spotted. Heres hoping the devs take these comparisons to fine tune the sculpts.

Overall I am very happy with the graphical changes, all I have to complain about is that they have missed a great opportunity to fix flaws that have been in the game for the longest time.

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Originally Posted by Bun_Vivant

The controlling phrase there is "as possible." And only SE knows what that means.

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The thing is, the changes people are asking for are entirely possible. I don't understand what's not to understand. SE is a multi-million dollar company. FFXIV is their primary money-maker. The graphical changes people should be getting used to is how new lighting, textures, and the slightly higher poly count affect their character, not literal, physical features changing into something else.

I appreciate that you're trying to look at it from both angles, but it feels like you got caught up in the whole deal about negativity. I put that in quotation marks because, while a lot of thread titles are worded a little questionably, I hardly see people being outright malicious; just worried.

Most aggressiveness I've seen has come from people who do enjoy how their characters look posting in threads of people feeling anxious and emotional. Like, of course they're going to be heated! I had a moment myself in this very thread, in spite of also being fine with how several of my characters look!

There are plenty of places to spread positivity or excitement on every site listed, and I've absolutely seen it shared successfully. Perhaps less on the forums, admittedly, because on average people are less likely to stick to newly made threads.

Overall, though, I can't really grasp the conclusion your post is trying to come to. Claiming only SE knows what 'as close as possible' means and that the people disliking the changes is only a small sample size feels weirdly like a 'get over it' statement, but then there's the calling SE and Yoshida to action to monitor the forums so they can make as many people happy as possible.

They...already do that? We've seen this work for Viera noses and Au Ra limbal rings? I get that they're not 'tuned' as close as possible to what's currently in-game, but there is still clearly a difference from their before and now.

EDIT: Actually ovIm put like, half of my sentiments into significantly better words than I did. My ass needs to read more.

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Originally Posted by Doopliss

The thing is, the changes people are asking for are entirely possible.

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Theoretically possible, sure.
Possible to do and still release DT this year? You and I don't know the answer to that.

And the "multi-million dollar company" line of argument doesn't get off the ground with me:
I spent 30 years working for multi-billion dollar high-tech companies, including being technical lead of a microprocessor development team at Intel, and the fact that the company made billions every quarter didn't do us any good. Upper management gave us schedules and budgets, and we were expected to meet them. (Plus we had to compete with other projects for immutably-limited resources like wafer starts and C-suite mindshare.)

And even if we'd had unlimited money, it wouldn't have helped: real talent is always rarer than you'd like, and adding even competent people to a high-performance team, if you can find them, does nothing but slow things down; this has been recognized since at least the publication of The Mythical Man-Month. It's just human nature that throwing more than seven or so people onto a project leads to inefficiencies (if not outright sabotage when internecine office warfare breaks out).

So when Yoshida-san say "as possible," he means "as possible given the temporal, fiscal, human, and technical limitations we have to operate within." And there aren't many people outside CBU3 who really understand what that means.

Yoshida-san has a track record, and that track record makes me believe he is going to do his best.
His best has been pretty good so far, so I believe it will be enough. YMMV.

Eh, as long as the overall graphichs improve I don't mind if people need to use their free fantasia to fine tune their characters.

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Originally Posted by Turtledeluxe

Tbh, these threads aren't generating tons of likes and posts, from what I've observed. On other social media I see a lot of flattering photos and people pleased with their character.

I'm going to say there's a bit of the usual forum change resistance happening right now, mixed with some actual poor design decisions like making lips duller, making eyes look dead inside, etc. I'm not saying there isn't real criticism but it's buried under a certain segment of the player base that craves outrage and just like up the echo chamber of outrage posts to varying degrees of success depending on the topic at hand.

Tldr Objective failure is a reach. A lot of characters do look better and people just don't like it. But yes, some have problems.

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https://media.tenor.com/nIqO3N_3e4EAAAAM/ina-garten.gif

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Originally Posted by Bun_Vivant

Theoretically possible, sure.
Possible to do and still release DT this year? You and I don't know the answer to that.

And the "multi-million dollar company" line of argument doesn't get off the ground with me:
I spent 30 years working for multi-billion dollar high-tech companies, including being technical lead of a microprocessor development team at Intel, and the fact that the company made billions every quarter didn't do us any good. Upper management gave us schedules and budgets, and we were expected to meet them. (Plus we had to compete with other projects for immutably-limited resources like wafer starts and C-suite mindshare.)

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I'm unfortunately well aware throwing more money at a project doesn't actually make it easier. You're also right in that I don't know the answer to that question. I actually believe people would be feeling less frantic and scared if they weren't worried for the artists' management being compressed into such a short time.

However, I know that no scenarios are ever a perfect 1-1 either, and I often bring up Square Enix's status as a company because I feel like people frequently forget we are thousands of actively paying customers in a live service game, as if we should be simply grateful for whatever is thrown to us.

I've been playing for 10 years now, and while the team has a good track record, I'm unfortunately also equally familiar with many promises never coming to fruition (Personal and FC housing will be separate, FC alliances, the forbidden free third retainer promised in Heavensward launch, the announced plan to unlock racial hairstyles in Stormblood, RPR being an interesting and complex job, to name a few).

Regardless, I think sharing criticisms is more of a good thing than not, even if some aren't exactly eloquent or, er, entirely right with what they're describing. So, if they cannot manage everything straight at launch, I'd rather--and I assume many others--see people continue to speak up so that it's addressed sooner instead of later.

The last live letter showcasing characters literally had "while preserving the looks you all love and know!" plastered on its announcement panel. They've repeated this sentiment multiple times, and while I know natural human error will have an effect in everything, some of these changes seem a little sloppy for an update and make the advertising feel ingenuine. Still, along with you, I'm hoping for the best.

I love how my miqo looks in the update- I prefer how she looks in the update. I'm very happy there is no lip gloss. I HATE lip gloss- it's trashy & gross in my opinion.
I feel like the odd person out when I say I'm happy with what they did to face #4 (except removing the lip gap, Making the skin overly shiny and too overtuned making it look translucent instead of realistic, changing the eyebrows & fangs) Which I've left my own feedback for. I want the obvious bugs fixed and skin/ hair/ textures improved.

Aside from a few obvious needed tweaks, I'd be really bummed if everything was halted and/or reversed. I've seen people asking for such things... I don't want it all reversed- I want it improved. I want our characters to look like better, more detailed versions of how they are now.
I personally do not want to go into DT looking like there was no character upgrade.
I love how my miqo's nose actually has more of a shape in the Benchmark. She uses the 1st nose option, the one that is upturned and fairy-like on face #4 and It's better looking in the benchmark. I love how she looks like a doll- because that's how I see her.

I understand completely others don't enjoy some of these changes- & it's alarming how some textures just are blatantly missing. But some of it is nitpicking- like pixels have been cleaned up on certain parts of characters faces, edges too- it's really an improvement for several face details. BUT there are still glaring issues with Au Ra scales, No Highlander eyebrows, Miqo'te still missing nostril textures & face markings being less visible, Viera & Elezen missing defined facial features, giving their faces an almost stretched rubber mask appearance.

And I've been around long enough to know that it's typical of SE to do character creator stuff with zero foresight. What I mean by that is, They should have figured we'd want more options. Especially since people have asked for YEARS for more. The character creator in ffxiv is terrible. It really is. Many players turn to mod usage to improve what SE is deaf to.

With all of that being said, I do think the devs will improve what we've seen; we just need to be constructive. Not everyone wants a reversal because they like the changes, and not everyone is happy due to the jarring differences. I don't really believe in a compromise because Noone should have to be forced to play something they dislike. We should want improvements, not regression or stalemates. Give specific details & what changes you'd like to see made- rather than reversed. Keep in mind that What you dislike, another may love.

But most importantly, The XIV dev team needs to stop communicating half-measured.

most of the problems are minor fixes tbh. the real failure of the update is we got NO new faces or options. au ra still can't choose horns separate from face. fem hroth only have like 4 hairs and hats prob wont work.

People are rabid over like 2 small things that would fix most problems, these arent even final.

I do like how some are like it’s not even my character anymore I’m devastated and in some instances I agree and some that are literally the same and I’m like you’re so used to ps3 quality it is better now jeez.