Ah ok thx for the clarification.
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I wouldn't take that, way too cheap on their part!...
Please do a good job with the character models Square Enix, if adjusting the height if required then do so, it would be worse seeing floating people around!...
I honestly dont think floating around, at a height equal to the width of the sole of the imposed sandal, would be at all noticeable. I mean, we already float above many surfaces anyway if you take the time to look (very easy with stairs), and a lot of running is sliding on the ground. :p
Were people not wearing shoes in the swimming preview?
What if... we just made you shorter by the amount the heel of sandals made? Lower your booty into the ground a tad, maybe just a very slight float to keep your toes from sinking into the cobblestone too much - sort of a comprise from full float and not.
Of course the slider bar height you picked at creation wouldn't be the height anymore if that's how they calculated things but when you don't wear shoes in real life you also shrink.. so.. its not that magical to expect you'd be smaller xD
Perhaps combining that with a naked foot model working as a "shoe" to probably define the bottom of the foot we don't have defined since they've never needed to show it before.
This was a theory someone suggested when speculating about possible reasons, and people have been repeating it ever since as though it were actually true. But the really wide variety of different heel heights already in the game clearly prove that it's not. SE is already adjusting for different shoes with different heel heights. This would simply be one more, with a height of 0.
(I'm pretty sure they take the shortcut of shortening/lengthening your calves to make up the difference rather than changing your overall height as would happen in real life, but that would work here, too. So what if our calves end up an eighth of an inch longer when barefoot than they are with flats, a half inch longer than with the default sandals, and a couple inches longer than they do with heeled shoes? All the rest of that variation is already there.)
So I used to think the "no bare feet" thing was because the character models were incapable of displaying flat feet (so a barefoot character would be walking around on the balls of their feet for some reason), but no.. there are several pieces of foot equipment that flatten out your feet. So it's really just a matter of taking that standing pose and lowering the character's z-position by a few pixels to put them on the floor. The sound effects for bare feet walking on things is definitely a wrinkle since it'd be strange to have a barefoot character clacking around on stone or something like that when none of the character races have hooves.
Still I think it'd be a worthwhile thing for them to work on, especially with Stormblood's emphasis on underwater activities. Wearing sandals while doing that is weird.