Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

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Originally Posted by IndraSyngiwyb

I fell in love with her as she was. This plastic doll that is pretending to be her will never be the character I loved for all these years.

https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...82f84be83e.png

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Why do they hate our old lips so bad T.T (I know there's more than just lips issues happening that one just was such a WOW)

Same with my male midlander. The spark in his eye is gone, so is the sharpness of his features. As far as faces go, this is not a graphical upgrade but a downgrade in my opinion. I want my WoL back. I've never felt less motivated to play, I can't even find any trace of him in that face. It's unacceptable and I will also keep pushing for the issue to be addressed. Also, Thancred's face needs to be fixed.

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Originally Posted by HawkeScream

Why do they hate our old lips so bad T.T (I know there's more than just lips issues happening that one just was such a WOW)

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I wish I knew. Same with Roegadyn eyes and just dark skin in general. My pale characters are mostly fine, but the dark skinned ones all STILL look like they are covered in oil. They just can't figure out how to handle lighting on dark skin and it's frustrating af.

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Originally Posted by IndraSyngiwyb

I wish I knew. Same with Roegadyn eyes and just dark skin in general. My pale characters are mostly fine, but the dark skinned ones all STILL look like they are covered in oil. They just can't figure out how to handle lighting on dark skin and it's frustrating af.

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Darker skin tones are always either waxy or overly porous now. When you combine the former with the removal of catchlights, they look like mannequins.

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Originally Posted by IndraSyngiwyb

I wish I knew. Same with Roegadyn eyes and just dark skin in general. My pale characters are mostly fine, but the dark skinned ones all STILL look like they are covered in oil. They just can't figure out how to handle lighting on dark skin and it's frustrating af.

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Yes, oily or waxy =[ Whatever they changed with the lighting makes anything dark look SO shiny. It happens with dark dye on new texture glams too. There's like an almost gray sheen that makes it look shiny and kind of velvety? You can see it really bad on the Courtly Lover's glams on the roses, or like the neo-tunic t-shirts, ESPECIALLY if you compare it with something that hasn't been re-textured yet. And Great Lengths hair dyed dark always looks wet cuz it's so shiny.

One thing that always got me is how weirdly the old graphics handled very dark skin. I've previously played jet black skinned characters in the same tone range as Erenville, the darkest possible. Tried this on Lalafell, Hellsguard, and Viera. In the pre-DT graphics, those characters would *completely* vanish in dark scenery with nighttime lighting, which was probably as much an attractive detail as much as a turn off.

I recall making a black viera just before doing the GNB opening quest, which it takes you to the Bramble Patch area of the Shroud. In a cutscene after putting on the primarily black starter gear, her silhouette was barely visible, let alone any emotion on her face. I do believe some players probably enjoyed that effect a lot, but I also believe that's a big factor why so few players gave their avatars the darkest options. (The fact we have so few dark elves and black cats still strikes me as odd when everything is there to do so.)

The "oily" and "waxy" effects that those colors on new textures that we are getting now might be how the new system compensates to still show those textures in very minimum lighting, but it's making lighting reflection TOO obvious for some.

There was no mention of a character appearance update in the last Live Letter. Well, let's wait for the fanfest, but I won't hold my hopes high.

Btw, more than a year has passed since Responding to Feedback on Player Character Models was published. Still, most of the issues mentioned haven't been corrected.

P.S. I looked through the document yet again. It's a monument to times when SE felt fat, complacent, and absolutely untouchable. In one of the latest interviews Mr. Yoshida said that he changed his mind about the direction the game had been going around 7.2. Let's hope he acknowledges the problems with the character creation and animations too and this time responds wholeheartedly.

Still praying they fix the male Miqo'te face 1 lips and face, he's a battle hardened fighter, not some pretty boy. Hell, I'd take even just the lips, my WoL does not wear permanent lip gloss.

I was looking back on this just now and figured I'd share a comparison update as it has been quite a while.

It sure has come a long way since 7.0. The eyes in 7.45 are slightly more open compared to 7.21. I've included an edited version, superimposing 6.x's eyes and lips with matched lighting.

https://i.imgur.com/aNxPvBm.png

Seeing the 7.0 face again is making me relive the horrors...

In the 7.5 Preliminary notes I see the mention of GPOSE now having an eyelid tracker thing, but I'm assuming this means we still will have creepy gazes in our Adventurer Plates.
Hope I'm wrong though.

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Originally Posted by Sunhwapark

In the 7.5 Preliminary notes I see the mention of GPOSE now having an eyelid tracker thing, but I'm assuming this means we still will have creepy gazes in our Adventurer Plates.
Hope I'm wrong though.

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There was also a line that said “model/texture resolution and quality of faces has been improved,” but I doubt this will fix the many shape changes that so many here have been concerned about.

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

There was also a line that said “model/texture resolution and quality of faces has been improved,” but I doubt this will fix the many shape changes that so many here have been concerned about.

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I think this is for the remaining NPCs that still weren't updated.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

I think this is for the remaining NPCs that still weren't updated.

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Please by the Twelve let them fix Thancred! T.T

(But from the screenshot in the patch notes, it would appear they have not…)

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

Please by the Twelve let them fix Thancred! T.T

(But from the screenshot in the patch notes, it would appear they have not…)

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The nose job has been around so long I borderline wonder if he'd look funny if they tried to give him the old one back.

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Originally Posted by Winyumi

I was looking back on this just now and figured I'd share a comparison update as it has been quite a while.

It sure has come a long way since 7.0. The eyes in 7.45 are slightly more open compared to 7.21. I've included an edited version, superimposing 6.x's eyes and lips with matched lighting.

https://i.imgur.com/aNxPvBm.png

Seeing the 7.0 face again is making me relive the horrors...

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6.x is where she looked really cute, idk what devs are doing.

Well, there goes one of the main defining things between subraces.
https://i.postimg.cc/85bwDsww/wah.jpg

They do have a bit in the powerpoint claiming more eye and lip customization, but I wonder if that's truly more options or just simply more colors / gloss.... because I don't care about lipstick, I straight up want BETTER LIPS

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Originally Posted by Gaddes

They do have a bit in the powerpoint claiming more eye and lip customization, but I wonder if that's truly more options or just simply more colors / gloss.... because I don't care about lipstick, I straight up want BETTER LIPS

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My guess would be more colors and removing any clan/race exclusivity from a lot of them. If everyone has the same base head meshes, transplanting features from one race to another should be doable.

I don't like the idea, but plenty of people would.

We'll see how it goes and if mouth customization affects bones (and smiles, those damned smiles). I still hope that SE still preserves some kind of subrace identity, but its previous modus operandi doesn't instill much confidence.

P.S. I've rewatched some moments from the Keystone, and it seems like the difference is just cosmetics. Mouth structure isn't affected in any way. Oh well… I'm tired, boss.

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Originally Posted by sintea

Well, there goes one of the main defining things between subraces.

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I really hope this new system is still going to come with some kind of preset palettes like we currently have, to indicate what is the intended "normal range" for the character concept.

Overall though, I think it will actually be beneficial for unique subraces, because the current "two" per race are actually doing a lot of heavy lifting to represent all kinds of different populations across the game's settings.

It also has potential to let people do lore-compliant things that are currently beyond the reach of the character creator. For example, perhaps someone would like to cast their character as a Roegadyn of Gosetsu's clan, which would call for using a Sea Wolf with a colour well outside their permitted range.

And not that long ago I was looking at lore on Gelmorra (a combined civilisation of Hyur and Elezen) and pondering whether, given the Duskwight Elezen are descendants of the Gelmorrans who chose to remain living in the caves, there should also be Duskwight Hyur -- and suddenly there among the example characters is exactly that, a grey-skinned Hyur. So that logical lore thought-bubble could now be built into an actual character if I wanted to do so.

There will be lots of people doing weird colours for the sake of it of course, or for claiming their character is a zombie or sin eater or arcane being, but I don't think it will be bad for the existing races so long as they can maintain some kind of frame of reference for what particular clans should look like.

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Originally Posted by Gaddes

They do have a bit in the powerpoint claiming more eye and lip customization, but I wonder if that's truly more options or just simply more colors / gloss.... because I don't care about lipstick, I straight up want BETTER LIPS

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The really big thing, if this update is genuinely going to let us adjust eyes and lips to maybe look like the old ones, is that they need to fix that horrible triangular shape to the face and the way that shadows are cast on it. They're never going to stop looking uncanny until that gets fixed.

Also I hope the lip update will let us adjust the resting position of the mouth so I can finally get my Au Ra back to a more neutral expression and not the frown he's been stuck with since the update.

their previews with the miqo'te and au ra slide in the keynote today did not inspire confidence. i hope they don't mess up my midlander's face yet again

I'm not very thrilled about the color picker for admittedly anal, OCD reasons that I'll ultimately make myself get over. I want to hope they don't remove the clan-specific selection of colors though and place the color wheel as an additional option on the side or something.

What is interesting to me though, is that in one of the slides displaying the additional eye and lip customization options, they showed a difference I thought was relatively substantial but not pointed out much: The Au Ra woman in the bottom image increases her pupils to a never-before-seen size with the new adjustments.

https://i.imgur.com/9v4m6L0.png

Like, an actually extreme degree, which is really funny considering the update already increased female Au Ra pupils to an extreme degree. I hope this means that we'll be able to decrease the size as well. I think it'll help with some faces a lot.

I personally dislike giving dilated pupils to other races because it was one of the defining traits of Moon Keeper miqo'te. One thing is letting other clans within the same race have access to a specific trait (whether it's good or not is a different topic of discussion) and another is to give it to entirely different races. There should still be some uniqueness to each race and clan, in my opinion, so unless they expand traits specifically for Moon Keepers, I will not welcome this change.

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Originally Posted by faiarrow

Casual reminder with both another PLL and FanFest coming up in the next two weeks that the dev team can, do, and will lie per the above.

Until we get to try any supposed updates to the character creator ourselves:
Don't believe their PR.

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Taps the sign.

(I'm praying for a pupil colour adjuster/opacity, I miss the roegadyn jewel eyes terribly and have since they got obliterated in the GFX update circa October 2023 when it was clear they were giving us huge black pupils instead of what we've had. At the very least I might be able to make her pupils smaller again? Back to what the large size pupils USED to be pre 7.0, along with her skintone losing its warmth and getting WAY darker as of DT without changing her actual colour, but I won't count my chickens before they've hatched etc.)

After seeing a green hyur (???), it doesn't feel like characters will have a race-based range colour palette any longer hahaha.
Regardless, I'll embrace the possibility of finally making my hyurs paler. I'm also very excited and thankful about the new lips textures; so far they look better than before (I have trouble with the current lips most characters have, and half of the problem is definitely the texture.)

I'm eager to see more in the next Fanfests!

I'm excited to play around with that under-eye shadow, personally. I'm not sure exactly what has caused it, be it the changes to lighting, reshaping of facial features, or something else, but I feel like a lot of the time our faces just look really......flat and bland. Too smooth? Whatever is it, I'm not a huge fan. Hopefully this can add a tiny bit of dimension, but we'll see.

Also, the miqo & Au ra both have different colored eyebrows in that last SS. I don't use that particular eye shadow option myself, but does that one normally affect the brow color like that (similar to how blush can change the color of miqo stripes)? I've always wished we had the option to choose a separate eyebrow color, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that being one of the changes. I feel they would have mentioned it if that was the plan.



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On a general note, I'm still pretty bummed about the graphics update and what it did to our characters. I've been able to make tweaks to my miqo'te and one of my Viera to where they're slightly better, but maaaaaan, my Lala. I'm still so disappointed about my Lala. I know I've posted about this before, but all the updates since DT launch have not helped her at all.

https://i.imgur.com/UVfrEF2.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/rnpg5s1.jpg (new SS from today!)

The complaints...

*Her eyes are a completely different shape, the irises are less round and now have those lines around the edge. The lashline is far too dark, hides the lashes, looks like it was painted on with a smudge tool, and it extends too far down onto the iris as well. Overall there is no twinkle to them anymore.

*She lost her adorable button nose. They added visible nose bridges to face 1 which just elongates the (now button-less) nose which is not a good look.

*Upper lip still MIA. Mouth is now downturned vs. being slightly upturned as it was before.

*The lighting as a whole just makes the face look rough and extremely lifeless. It's so very flat looking.

Sadly, there's no fixing that face. ><

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Originally Posted by sintea

Well, there goes one of the main defining things between subraces.
https://i.postimg.cc/85bwDsww/wah.jpg

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I'm not sure if I'm in the minority in this, but I don't care. This is the thing I find kinda disappointing; yay for more hair and eye colours, yay for more skin colour options, but green Hyurs and pink Miqo'te just... it feels unsettling and out of place. I'd rather have more subraces/clans that offer those more extreme colours (green skin was a Roegaedyn thing, not Hyur). I feel like they should at least keep skin colour lore-bound.

While I feel called out here, I'm not going to form much of an opinion on this until I actually see it in the game.
I also don't think it's going to change much, so I'm still sticking to my own "solution" (that doesn't resolve some MSQ characters, unfortunately) but it could be nice for my WoL to look a little better to others.

https://i.ibb.co/cKN8ZW57/iikmko.png

Showing the Face 1 Au Ra with the even bigger pupils felt like a middle finger to me in specific, but all I can do is laugh about it instead of getting angry.

https://i.ibb.co/pBHWz2mT/iikmko.png

Hope we can make them smaller, but I'll hold my tongue. I also don't like the new skin tone options, I like my racial identities and neon green and pink characters look incredibly strange.

On another note, I felt so bitter watching the keynote as everything about this new expansion just feels like an insult to me in specific. I absolutely adore the setting and it looks to be focused on the Au Ra (!!!) but they did that to them in the graphics update... I have a hard time as is with the character we were introduced to in the DT post-MSQ. Adore the new logo art, at least.

Wish I could see the images in these recent posts, but the forum is blocking my VPN...

I'd be quite excited about them lifting the clan restrictions if there was something that showed me they were making good changes to the faces, because I've always wanted to do mixed heritage characters, like someone with seawolf complexion, but has the nose smudge that hellsguard has, or hellsguard complexion without the smudge.

BUT, all of the options will continue to mean nothing to me unless they do so much more about the shoddy lip shapes, eye shapes and weird plastic look to the skin.

I wanna be hopeful about "improved customization of eyes and lips" SO BAD and that it means I can fix mouth *shape*. So bad. I'm not letting myself cuz I got my hopes up every time I thought they would fix it before. But I want to. =[

The weird color skin tones are a... choice...

I have so many mixed feelings about the slated updates that I just don't even know how to effectively articulate.

Like a few others here, the amount of freedom they're giving us with the color picker in regards to skin tone specifically is incredibly jarring to me. I'm genuinely happy for more options and more freedom of expression, and I think Iscah's point about this opening up the possibility to make mixed-heritage characters is fair... but the examples given clearly go beyond that.

Now, they can't reasonably unopen Pandora's box here, so I'm not really whinging with the expectation that anything will come of it, but man, I am trying so hard to hang on to some semblance of immersion in this game and they are not making it easy lol.

That said, I'm cautiously optimistic about some of the other new customization options they've teased, since I think they could go a long way to -- idk, I'm not going to say "get us closer to what we lost", but at the very least, some of these things sound like they could give us the building blocks for something better than what we're currently stuck with.

I'm rewatching the keynote right now, and after listening to Mr. Yoshida say that

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So there is one thing that's been absolutely clear during my time with Final Fantasy XIV: it is how much all of you love your in-game avatars.

Again, how strong they are, how attractive they are, how appealing they are to both you and others—these all are very important to every warrior of light.

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I couldn't help but laugh. Considering SE policy regarding the character graphical update, it was quite funny to listen to.

Even though new customization options are always good, I'm afraid a new coat of paint won't help with resolving structural issues with the new faces people have been posting about since the beginning of DT. Well, we'll see how it goes.

i hope more eye/lip customization won't just mean makeup options... more customization is good, yes, but can they fix the messed up lip shapes on several races too?
i guess we will have to wait and see, but i didn't get the impression they acknowledged any of the issues people had since the graphical update.

I am unsure on where they are heading with this. I have played long enough to expect not much regarding customisation. I am happy we are getting more options but to be honest looking at it there was not much difference in the picture they showed. The neon emo crap I hate so that was doing nothing for me. The eye bags on midlander female face 1 where still there so that makes me think they are not or have not bothered to fix them.

We needed to hear that horns where able to be swapped for any face. I also feel the butt slider should be a option nothing mental or dodgy just please add some shape I am hoping they go and look at that and add it. The colour options will be nice but does it mean I can fix my mouth on face 2 midlander female? and get the lovely shape back.

I know Moon keepers have really cold colours for their skin and it is something I have struggled with when making a female moon cat so more choice might be nice.

More makeup is lovely we need long hair and also the ability to swap bangs out and add length to certain styles.

Not a fan of the skintone thing. Bit of a blow to Racial profiles(And obvious aesthetic crimes in general, yuck).
Maybe us Roe can get our pretty eyes back with the eye editor, tho'! *v*

It's a big ask but I am hoping for some asymmetry with the makeup/ facepaints update at some point.

I'd love to layer makeup to have a approximation of Raggers' eyepatch markings in-game!

Having the au'ra in the example picture with even more dilated eyes felt like a spit in the face... but here's to hoping it means we can shrink them too, so my au'ra can have her ORIGINAL pupils back.

As for the skin tone stuff... I'm mixed, on one hand my friend can have his fake-elf-hyur have more fantastical skin (he could not stand elezen) and I can tweak my characters to have juuuuust the right colors compared to how they are now, but on the other hand.... that green hyur...

No matter what, I hope that the current swatches/pallets/options stays as is, with the new color picker as a added wheel you can more accurately adjust, plus a way to type in hex codes/whatever they will use directly, I do not want to have a battle getting the color right whenever I swap between certain hair colors... and honestly just a way to save our own colors for later use. :P

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Originally Posted by Luluna

I am unsure on where they are heading with this. I have played long enough to expect not much regarding customisation. I am happy we are getting more options but to be honest looking at it there was not much difference in the picture they showed. The neon emo crap I hate so that was doing nothing for me. The eye bags on midlander female face 1 where still there so that makes me think they are not or have not bothered to fix them.

We needed to hear that horns where able to be swapped for any face. I also feel the butt slider should be a option nothing mental or dodgy just please add some shape I am hoping they go and look at that and add it. The colour options will be nice but does it mean I can fix my mouth on face 2 midlander female? and get the lovely shape back.

I know Moon keepers have really cold colours for their skin and it is something I have struggled with when making a female moon cat so more choice might be nice.

More makeup is lovely we need long hair and also the ability to swap bangs out and add length to certain styles.

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They won't fix eye bags nah. They would rather add shadows and makeup under eyes so you can mask your eyebags now! Perfect solution right!? But those shadows look extremely ugly to me based from these images.

I really look forward to the slated changes BUT the prospect of players turning their characters into neon green monstrosities with the skin tone does not fill me with joy. I actually think I will just block players for being hideous going forward since it removes them from my sight.

My dream for customization has always been that they simply unlock all the facial features that are currently tied to specific faces in each race. Let us use the eyes from face 1, mouth from 3, horns from 4, etc. I have never expected much from customization, but I feel like that alone would greatly improve the variety of faces we see.

For the skin tones, I feel like they could go the same route as above. Just unlock the palettes currently linked to each clan. SE no longer seems to care about the lore, so this would be a way to provide more options while also keeping characters looking fairly grounded. I know the days of things looking like they belong in-world are long gone, and I'm definitely guilty of wearing outfits that are out of place now and then, but I'm still not ready for all the brightly colored characters we'll probably be seeing. lol ><