Felt like I needed to add to the discussion about the faces.

I have played with my character for 10 years and never changed race or anything else on her appearance except for her hair. I was really excited about dawntrail at first until I saw the new faces. I have patiently waited to see if it would be fixed with the tweaks the programmers did after it dropped. But I have unfortunately noticed that my face is no longer my face.

There are several reasons for this but the major points for me right now is that her eyes are different and a bit milky. Not as bad as the characters that have lighter eyes but to me fully noticeable. Her face has a different shape, her scar is bigger and her mouth has also changed shape. On top of that the eyebrows makes her facial expressions totally different to what I am used to. I have therefor not been able to play dawntrail.

I just cannot look at her in cutscenes and see her as my friend for ten years and that to me is really sad. I know that you are doing your best to fix it and as I said before I have waited patiently for the issue to be resolved, but now that I heard that after this there won't be any major changes I must say I got worried hence the post.

To help with the differences and to show graphically how she looked before compared to now I have added screenshots of her. I hope that that will be of help to you in your work efforts.

How she looked before dawntrail.

https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...31c7c1874c.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...2540566ddc.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...f5ece796a7.jpg

How she looks now.

https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...38e25e99bd.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...cf2b32e6cf.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...169fe0148d.jpg

Different showcases of the eyebrows.

https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...adf33c661f.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...f6eb3f8a43.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...e330b5e61b.jpghttps://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...504361e01c.jpg

The entire graphics update did more harm than good, I feel... that's not to say that it didn't add some good points in broad ways, but the devil is in the details. Your character showcases them here, and I would say that certain bosses are much harder to see after the graphics update and some weren't great in the first place.

This game is old, and trying to fix the graphics is going to come with downsides. If you're just zoomed out, enjoying everything as visual fodder, it does its job well. When you hone in on all of the small discrepancies, or the way certain aoe's look now, I'd say its a net loss across the board.

all in all, I wish they hadn't done the update. Then again though, I still like and enjoy ffxi, which looks very old now that it's over 20 years old. To me graphics aren't why I play a game, so this update while exciting was always something I was skeptical of.

Personally, I have been more inhibited by the update... but, it is what it is, and i'll accept the downsides. I can't say i'm happy that it's just yet another concession that I need to make, though...

Don't get me wrong, I love FFXIV, I really do... but it is flawed beyond belief in many ways, and in an attempt to keep it modern more flaws will become problematic... that's sadly the nature of the beast, and an unhappy reality.

Sometimes, it's best to leave sleeping dogs where they lie, and the graphics update is a fine example of that.

Ï reported this on the bug forum and it was closed as "not enough information" even with big red circles pointing it out.

I doubt they will ever fix it.

I am not surprised... I am however slightly miffed... that's one of the reasons I finally made an account here on the forums. I've been playing since 1.0, long before the days of ARR and recently I'm starting to feel that decisions are being made about this game that don't reflect the lessons learned from 1.0, or even from prior expansions. I do still love this game, so my critiques come from a place of compassion, but I'm starting to get the feeling that the devs are kinda like lost ships in the night, unsure of what they are actually aiming to do with this graphical update (or just content and patches in general)...

I do hope I'm wrong about this, but it's starting to feel as though they are getting fed up and frustrated with their own game to the point that their own love for it is dying out. That's why resoundingly poor opinions from the player base that are generally accepted as poor aren't being heeded. Game development is quite difficult, and I wouldn't dare try to be a developer, but when the love isn't there, players *feel* it... I feel that was the greatest sin of dawntrail... a feeling of burnout that reflected in all aspects, not from us the players, but from the dev team trying to please us.

In terms of the graphical update, I think most of us can see where the problems are. I also think most of us have the game's best interest at heart when we criticize it... but, I also think the devs need to be less overworked and a couple of new ones need to come in with a fresh pair of eyes, and if that won't happen, we won't see the critical improvements that need to be made.

To be honest, the big graphics update Yoshi promised for Dawntrail never happened. Why sell a half-baked loaf of bread? We have face changes and a few shadows here, a few more lights there and we're done!
Let's remember the pictures Yoshi showed in the Live Letter, before Dawntrail. What we got doesn't match the pictures. They had more than 2 years to do their job and they failed.
I would never change just the faces of the characters, the body and hair have to be included. How hard can it be to create sliders for chest, stomach, legs and so on?
How hard can it be to create at least 2 new faces for each race? Better hair? All this overlap / clipping between equipment and hair could be fixed by stopping making armor with a huge, way too wide collar.
But it's much cheaper to just take what's already there and give it all a new color. At least we all now know the truth about why Yoshi didn't want to give us spoilers in the Dawntrail presentations,
because there was nothing to spoil for the little that was available. He knew for sure that at least 75% of the players wouldn't have bought this expansion if they had known beforehand that we were just stupid idiots running after Wuk Lamat.
My second character used to have a slight smile on her face, but after the update she looks like 20 years of depression. No matter what face I choose and what mouth. That's why I hardly play this character anymore.
We'll get the next patch in 4 weeks with little content. So overall we have to wait another 5.5 months for perhaps more or better content.
We get PvP changes ... but no new Maps, why keep the better and long lasting content for the second half of this already boring, bad Expansion?

There's a lot of people sharing the same feelings as you in this thread: Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

I suggest also posting something similar there as it's been a source of feedback reference for the development team. It's also the most concise thread for discussion on the face changes.

Not intended as a "mini-modding" reply, just as a pointer