New 7.1 hairstyle looks nothing like the winning hairstyle from the 2023 contest

Seeing replies here like "oh maybe it can't be done in the engine/style of the game" when they're out here making the wildest, most complicated monster and armor designs with motion physics and everything? Depressing...

replying to add my voice to the support for this complaint. i thought the hairstyle was fine, but i hadn't seen the winner it was "inspired by". knowing this now is actually disgusting. devs need to do better.

Chiming in as another person who made a forum account just for this - but it is laughably bad borderline horrendously racist and upsetting. This game pulls from so many different cultures and claims left and right to be more inclusive and less offensive - and this is how they do a loosely textured, mildly curly hair? After having the only two universal Black hairstyles be joke hairstyles, and locking two more textured hairstyles behind race restrictions? I have the hair texture of the contest winner's design IRL and so do quite a few of my characters.

This is a slap in the face, especially alongside Square implementing a new outfit that is obviously inspired from Black American outfits. (Seriously, the likeness to basketball/athletic attire that my friends and family wear is undeniable!) I implore them to fix this hair. How ridiculous.

This is absolutely egregious. Players of color have been asking for textured hairstyles and watched as other games showed it could be done. When this won the contest, plenty of fans were excited for a chance for their character to have that.

I really hope the devs right this wrong.

The fact that this was viewed as acceptable is pretty disappointing. I hope that the dev team takes an opportunity after patch to clean it up and go back to the drawing board. Yes this is a winning contest entry and 'inspired by', but its just a weak imitation of the original design. If there can't be a commitment to it being implemented properly, then it's insulting to the original winner to have this put in instead.

"inspired by" is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas at this point...

I agree with the rest of this thread - the hair in and of itself isn't bad necessarily, but as a render of that contest entry it is absolutely terrible. It looks nothing like it, someone had to put the entry it was based on in front of me with the rest of the options for me to realise which one it was supposed to be!

This needs a second pass. Perhaps keep the initial hair in and add a second, much more faithful representation of the contest entry so the people who liked the presented option aren't denied it? But regardless, something about this needs to change.

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Originally Posted by lucatracy

Took a look back, and oh my god you're right, they've ALREADY implemented a winner without this "inspired by" shit. There's no way this wasn't intentional then, they put more care into their wording instead of the actual hair as a form of damage control. At this point, I refuse to believe otherwise, and the fact that they seem to have known this would've happened and still released the hair as-is is so unbelievably ridiculous and unprofessional.

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It's especially bad when comparing the quality of the two hairstyles. The kpop hair has a noticeable high quality "prettiness" that no other hairstyle in the game except Ketenramm's comes close to, it's very clearly designed to take advantage of the graphic update. Meanwhile this new style has a noticeably inferior quality to even the new DT ponytail, having a smudgy, flat look on par with pre-graphic update ARR hairstyles. It'd be one thing if it was an actual "inspired by" hairstyle, but this one doesn't actually look it. Rather, it looks more like a failed attempt create the Natural Curls style that got released as-is with the "inspired by" wording slapped on.

Just replying to support!

First of all, I want to say that I realize the dev team works incredibly hard. By and large, I have been very happy with the graphical update and it's very apparent that it remains the primary point of focus for the team in the 7.x series. They have a reason to be proud of what they've been able to accomplish with the engine they're running on.

That being said, to realize that the hairstyle in question was "inspired by" something that was very clearly meant to fill a niche for natural styles, something that has been highly requested by many players (myself included), has disappointed me beyond words.

I obviously have no insight into the work processes that CS3 uses when they're creating new additions to the game. Perhaps the designer that they asked to work on this particular asset has no familiarization with the hair texture that this hair was meant to be modeled from (though I would argue the provided breakdown in the original submission offered at least a vague idea of how it was supposed to work). It could well be that this was a last-minute addition to this patch and this model was made on the fly. Again, I have no idea.

What I can say is that I would much rather this hair not be released on Tuesday and go back into development to at least be remodeled closer to what the original designer intended. Reading their message in this thread was heartbreaking. I can only imagine how disappointed many more people who were looking forward to being able to use a natural style are right now. It's my sincere hope that everything being said here is reported back to people that can make a difference. Those of us who continue to love this game for all the joy it brings and in spite of its faults would appreciate you honoring the person who took the time to offer something very special to the game they also love.

Its disappointing how unfaithfully its been added, I had genuine hope and it died so quickly.

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Originally Posted by Madqueenmomo

Hello, I’m the original creator and artist and i just wanted to say thank you for fighting to fix the hair or at lest have SE do better for the other hairstyles that won.

I understood that the hair would not be an exact 1 to 1 to my design but , since i saw how to treated previous designs that won including my mch gun, i had assumed that would at lest find a way to make it somewhat recognizable.

The thing that really bothers me is the fact that I made this hair for my friends and for people who needed this representation.
All three of the hairs i submitted were made with them in mind while i specifically also toned it down enough that they could be used with non poc characters. Especially since curly hair is something that anyone of any skin color and ethnicity could have. (Which is why i even added the examples of non dark skinned characters using it)

When the hair won, i had so many heartfelt and emotional thank you messages from so many people around the world because their hair was finally going to be in game.
So many people who were just happy to finally be themselves.
Now i’m just here so angry and disappointed for them because not only does it look nothing like it while being of strange odd quality, it just also feels like they didn't even try and now all those players lost something they needed.

I would love to be wrong. I would love to learn that someone tried really hard, and even fought to have more curly hair in the game.
Cause atlest then it wouldn't be such a letdown or betrayal.


I want to end with, i know the dev team is probably overworked and overwhelmed. And i do not mean them any hate or bad words. I just wish they can take their time and get things right next time.

Sorry for the long post. And thank you.

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Don't know what to do beyond echoing the artist's words here and throwing in my +1. I genuinely hope this style gets another look, people were so excited to see hair with this texture make it into the game.

made a forum acct to voice my support for this complaint as well. At the rate we get new hair and considering how the devs seemed to have focused on accurate portrayal of american cultures, this ramen noodle hair is downright insulting. "inspired by" is a flimsy excuse when the hair doesn't even look good out of this context. Please take it back to the drawing board and give it the respect it deserves

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Originally Posted by Fatch38

what's is even crazier, the female hairstyle on the bottom right is what the contest hair should look like ig

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More ingame images of that bottom right hairstyle for reference:
https://i.imgur.com/IEV3EyP.png
https://i.imgur.com/nLyB5rT.png
https://i.imgur.com/br5xUpR.png
https://i.imgur.com/VJcVwAR.png
https://i.imgur.com/QQyV7M2.png

(bad video quality but better than nothing??)
https://i.gyazo.com/0fa3c95dbdc23330...21deae5c50.gif

The in game model is so bad that I have to wonder what the point of even selecting this as a winner was. I sincerely hope this was just incompetence that somehow slipped under the radar of management because they could have chosen any loose curl hairstyle and not gotten peoples' hopes up to have actual POC-coded curls that aren't the afro...

holy hell i didn't even notice that's supposed to be the winning hairstyle if true. I just thought "haha Muzan from Kimetsu no Yaiba looking ahh hairstyle" and moved on. This is unreal. When they picked it to be a winner, I thought "finally, SE cares about representation and varieties" and then for them to botch it this hard is impressive

it's honestly so disappointing to see the hair implemented this way

this whole situation is wild. the design won for a reason, why on earth wouldn't they put it in the game how it's supposed to be designed?

i don't think it would be this upsetting if it was a random hairstyle introduced, but the fact that it's a changed up fan-made hairstyle is... let me just say it's weird, to put it lightly.

c'mon squenix, you're better than this, i hope.

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

Does the game handle curly hair like that well though? The pompadour and Affro are like 1 flat cylinder/ball with a texture not actually curls.

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The thing is the artist had actually laid out the 'panels' of hair, just like every other hair in the game, in sheets. The hair they actually made is mechanically the same. They just made it stringy and wavy and weird instead of sticking to sets of tight curls that would have been wavy/bumpy sheets in the model with a texture on top to bring the curls to life. There are mods for this game with curly hair that I've seen pictures of, so we know it's possible.

This is offensive. I had to look up the contest winners to even realize which one it was supposed to be and when I figured it out my heart dropped. This is so far off the mark that it's an insult to the artist who put so much work and love into their submission. I know so many people who were looking forward to the submitted design, so hopeful for hair that finally resembles theirs, and for THIS to be what's released? My god. I'm just. Wow. Black people exist, devs. The continual erasure of anything to do with them at this point just feels... Well. Deliberate.

I didn't even realize it was supposed to be that hairstyle, it looks nothing like it at all.

This is really disappointing.

Seeing this hairstyle in the patch notes, I was shocked at how bad it looks before I knew it was a winning player design. It is unexpectedly low resolution, somehow looking crunchy and wet at the same time.

Once I saw that it was meant to represent THIS adorable, natural Black curly hairstyle... I don't have the words. I am shocked and appalled that this has been so badly butchered in-game.

My heart breaks for the artist, and for all players who were excited to finally have options other than a stereotypical afro or like one locs style to choose from for their characters.

I sincerely hope the dev team will revisit this design and be more respectful of the artist's intent.

Natural curls are beautiful and deserve to be represented in Final Fantasy.

I am not 100% sure but I think on the Picture of the new PvP Gear from 7.1 the second Character has this new Hair Style in red.

https://de.finalfantasyxiv.com/dawntrail/patch_7_1/

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Originally Posted by Madqueenmomo

Hello, I’m the original creator and artist and i just wanted to say thank you for fighting to fix the hair or at lest have SE do better for the other hairstyles that won.

I understood that the hair would not be an exact 1 to 1 to my design but , since i saw how to treated previous designs that won including my mch gun, i had assumed that would at lest find a way to make it somewhat recognizable.

The thing that really bothers me is the fact that I made this hair for my friends and for people who needed this representation.
All three of the hairs i submitted were made with them in mind while i specifically also toned it down enough that they could be used with non poc characters. Especially since curly hair is something that anyone of any skin color and ethnicity could have. (Which is why i even added the examples of non dark skinned characters using it)

When the hair won, i had so many heartfelt and emotional thank you messages from so many people around the world because their hair was finally going to be in game.
So many people who were just happy to finally be themselves.
Now i’m just here so angry and disappointed for them because not only does it look nothing like it while being of strange odd quality, it just also feels like they didn't even try and now all those players lost something they needed.

I would love to be wrong. I would love to learn that someone tried really hard, and even fought to have more curly hair in the game.
Cause atlest then it wouldn't be such a letdown or betrayal.


I want to end with, i know the dev team is probably overworked and overwhelmed. And i do not mean them any hate or bad words. I just wish they can take their time and get things right next time.

Sorry for the long post. And thank you.

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I don't know what to say more than this + all the things other people have said, except that I am very disappointed. We all know the work the dev team does to give us a good experience. But this is not that. The game has 10+ years and it's the first time in all those years that textured hairstyle is added (apart from the locks and the afro, which are not great at all). It would be great to consider not adding it to this patch and wait more to have the time to remake it, this time by following the reference. The wording "inspired by" doesn't excuse this. We had a graphical update, i'm sure something can be done. Please.

Adding my +1 to what has been said here. I work in the game industry, I know textured styles require a different method to build, so I understand this was a difficult task for the team, but I don't think the results reflects the winning entry's intention. I know the art team wants to make beautiful hairs and we want that too! This one just doesn't meet the expected quality for me.

It would mean a lot to the POC fanbase if this style got a second pass to more accurately represent curly hair and the original concept. It could be released as a new hairstyle if there's concern about players who liked the current appearance.

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Originally Posted by Aneshda

I am not 100% sure but I think on the Picture of the new PvP Gear from 7.1 the second Character has this new Hair Style in red.

https://de.finalfantasyxiv.com/dawntrail/patch_7_1/

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I believe it is this existing hairstyle
https://i.imgur.com/i6h6MuG.png

I'm also seconding what the majority of people are saying here. It's really gross when a textured hairstyle looks like a sopping wet cat when that was not the intention at all. I know the dev team can do better and I wish they worked on it more.

+1. I don't have much to add that I haven't seen added already, but it's disappointing that this is the only hair out of the at least eight hairstyle contest winners that has been implemented in the game, but was only used as "inspiration" and not implemented directly. I wish these textures and models would be genuinely implemented in the game instead of being used as inspiration, and I wish my friends would be able to see themselves and parts of their appearances reflected in their characters

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

Does the game handle curly hair like that well though? The pompadour and Affro are like 1 flat cylinder/ball with a texture not actually curls.

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exactly.
To have such hair in good quality it would need the amount of polygons of whole character.

For those that say the new hair is bad, it would be nice to provide example or suggest way how to model the hair to not completely fry gpus with millions of hair strings.
The player-provided examples from other games sadly don't look appealing.

Yoshi P harping on about dawntrail showcasing different peoples and cultures, and their customization option output is 98% white anime character type trash.
What they did to that artist's design is not only a slap in the face but borderline racist/white-washing.

But what else can we expect from the common japanese/asian artist/developers. We see it so often with games like genshin, taking surface level inspiration from historied peoples and cultures, but when it comes to bodily diversity and representation, everyone lightskin and straight haired.
These developers are a joke.

- ps the design they made looks like a sopping mass of greased noodles that would stink up the zone you loaded into. disgusting lmao

It's so disappointing to see. I was excited for this hairstyle and to see it executed so poorly is a bummer

That's not a "Natural Curls" style, that's a "Wavy Bob" at most.
There are two hairstyles that SQEX categorically refuses to get in the game: very long hair (at least past shoulder blades) with front bangs (every long hair has no bangs) and very curly hair/afro.
And I seriously doubt it's an actual game limitation, more like the unwillingness to do so. So we'll get the umpteenth variation of short to medium hair with slightly different bangs varying from straight to very vaguely wavy. If they feel "creative" they'll have a little braid on one side, or a small ponytail.

They could also make a lot of good things by splitting the hair choices between front bangs and back, giving people the chance to mix and match different styles.
But they don't.
And then wonder why there are so many of those things that start with an M and end with odds without one D.

Replying to this to add my voice to the thread, but I really feel like the dev team could do better than this! Even ignoring that it looks nothing like the design they were taking inspiration from it just looks sad... like wet gel hair.... I wish they had at least given it a bit more bounce!

My real question is, what are the tri and texture size limits the team is operating under for hair? Have these standards actually been updated since the PS3 era?

I struggle to believe this is an artist failure any more or less than every other crunchy, weak hairstyle they've dropped over the past several years - it's just a more immediately visible one. The core issue is the engine's poor handling of transparency and the fact that tri limits in particular don't seem to have come up sufficiently to compensate for hairstyles that need more detail than just normal maps can provide.

This is actually embarrassing, i feel like this expansion kinda sold itself on "new diverse land of people and cultures" the first opportunity to create a new asset in that direction, hair. A thing that historically has been lacking in that respect since the game came out, and its done poorly. This combined with the teams strange statements about aspects of ff16 really feel like those in charge don't really care about actually committing to aesthetics of this diverse idea that contradicts whatever aesthetic they have in their head. But I guess we were wrong to expect any better after looking at berets hair in ff7r

I remember seeing the original art for this hair and thinking it looked really cute, the way square enix has implemented it it looks nothing like curls/textured hair. I really hope they can consider redoing this and putting the proper effort in to respect the original artists' vision.

Even if this says "inspired" by the contest winners, I feel like the fact that majority of responses here on the forums and elsewhere have largely been "I didn't even know it was supposed to be that one" is pretty telling. While the previous hairstyle entries done in the past contest pre-2023 were also 'inspired by', I felt like each one was still close enough that you could point to the artwork by the artists and readily identify the hairstyle in-game that inspired it. That one fact alone to me says that this hairstyle needs to be looked at and addressed.

Many players were very excited over a curly-style hairstyle to be in the game, and especially given the graphical updates we just had with Dawntrail. It should not be impossible to put in a hairstyle that is faithful to the creation and I hope the team revisits this hairstyle.

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Originally Posted by MAJRIS

exactly.
To have such hair in good quality it would need the amount of polygons of whole character.

For those that say the new hair is bad, it would be nice to provide example or suggest way how to model the hair to not completely fry gpus with millions of hair strings.
The player-provided examples from other games sadly don't look appealing.

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This creation-within-limitations (again, with limitations quite similar to FFXIV!) doesn't look appealing enough to add to the game...
https://i.imgur.com/IEV3EyP.png

...but this one somehow does?
https://i.imgur.com/vQXyE14.png

Make it make sense, man, lol.

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Originally Posted by astralmoon

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...26fe9f651692e&

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...32126eb7c8b6c&

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In addition to the general complaints, I feel like something the in-game version is suffering from is the absence of the "yellow" section and replacing it with a more severe parting line.

There is also no sign of shorter strands emerging from the overall shape of the hair, changing its basic concept from an evenly spread ball of short strands to an awkward, ragged style that has been cut to different lengths in different sections.

It also has an oddly 2D look about it, which seems to be a common problem with hairstyles after the graphics update rather than a specific issue with this one, and I've been noticing it a lot when I've been making comparison screenshots. (e.g. here, here and here -- the hair reflects light in the old graphics but looks flat in the new graphics.)

I whole heartedly agree! The graphic quality on the FFXIV hair is drastically too low! Those are barely curls! It looks more like someone got wet!

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Originally Posted by Doopliss

Make it make sense, man, lol.

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Please don't twist the information. I never said the xiv version looks appealing. I said it's not easy to make volume of strands to look good and while hitting polygon limits - especially for xiv visuals that up to the past expansions still had to comply for older console standards.
it's not that good curls haircut is impossible, but they probably don't have way to make it look good while adhering to their polygon limits and standards.