Thoughts moving forward for FFXIV into Dawntrail and beyond: Character Creation

Final Fantasy 14 has come a long way, from the tumultuous times of 1.0, to its revival in a Realm Reborn, and to the massive player-count boom we experienced during Shadowbringers. Along the way we have had numerous updates for QoL, and player experience. The main story is now (mostly) playable solo all the way to current content allowing even players who prefer single-player experiences to experience Eorzea and the wider regions of the world with us, the UI constantly gets great QoL improvements that make it look and feel better for the average user, and with Dawntrail the improvements to textures and lighting mean the world will look better than it ever has and we are getting dual dye channels which has been an desire of the community for eons.


That leaves the question, where does our home fail to stand out compared to the other MMOs in the space that would ostensibly prove to be Final Fantasy XIV's competition? My argument is that it is in one of the most critical areas for engaging with new players, the creation of our Warriors of Light. There are nearly more MMOs than there are stars, and some more recent titles are basically 3d model makers with a game attached (looking at you BDO) so to keep this conversation concise and fair I will focus primarily on WoW and GW2 as they are two of the larger games in the space in a similar(ish) age to FF.

With GW2, while its graphics definitely suffer the wear of time given its age, its character creator has always been pretty amazing. With a variety of hair and facial options and sliders to allow intricate customization of a players character. The ability to edit horn types for charr and customize their exact length via a slider, or Humans and Norn having various unique facial hair options, its character creator blitzs FF and WoW especially when considering it is a buy-to-play freetrial MMO with no subscription. (Though its monetization via cash shop is VERY aggressive)

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ack before Shadowlands, WoW had the far worse character customization tools. WoW's largest drawback use to be that many of your facial features were tied directly to which face you picked. You wanted to use face 3? Well you had purple eyes and a certain nose, and maybe a piece of jewelry. But with Shadowlands, they overhauled their character creator which removed these limitations and allowed, at least in terms of World of Warcraft, unprecedented player customization of their Champion and added tons of new options for customization and personalization of your character (varying by race because some races like Human got waaaay more love than others in the update). With each races customiztion features and culture being able to be better represented with dwarvish and troll body tattoos for different clans, or different rotting for undead characters, to new horns and hair accesories for Tauren.

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Having said that, WoW's character creator is still very limited as compared to FF, while they have SIGNIFICANTLY more prebaked face sculpts and tons of race specific options for extra features they lack the height/nose/mouth customization we have in FFXIV. But these vast variety of face options with drastically different appearances along with racial accessories allows for tons of visually distinct characters where at some points in FF if you meet a character in a side quest you have to ask yourself at times "Wait, have I met you before?"

Having gone over where others match or exceed us with here in FF, the question becomes what can Creative Business Unit III do moving forward to keep up in the space? While spaghetti code and technical debt will likely always be a problem for the rest of FFXIV's life, the real answer of course is more options and freedom within the confines of the FF character creator. More beard options not locked to facial options for males of the races, customization for horns for Au Ra players, body tattoos/markings would be a great system and allow more representation of tribal miqote culture or the different clans of Hellsguards that live around the volcanoes, ect. Moving forward into Dawntrail's patches and expansions beyond I think this is a serious consideration that needs to be looked at by the team, especially when experiencing our Warrior of Light and traveling the world with them is key to the experience of Final Fantasy XIV and while the development time and cost would likely be high to retool issues in the code to allow for it, it is a step the game will need before long. What are your thoughts?