7.5 Highlander Male Eye Bug (Visual/Graphical)

The 7.5 Update has changed highlander male eyes, and I do not think this is intentional. The limbal rings are gone from the eyes, and there seems to be grey sheen over the eyes, making the chosen eye color appear faded, de-saturated and pale, and making the whites of the eyes look grey. After chatting about this with many other players throughout the day, I've narrowed the problem down to highlander males only.

https://imgur.com/a/CAebxpa

https://imgur.com/a/WUYXXN1

Date & Time: 2026-04-28 3:30am PST
Frequency: Always, permanent.
World name: Excalibur
Character name: Calixticus Travassius
Retainer name: n/a
NPC name: All highlander Male NPC's (toured the world looking at them)
Monster name: n/a
Class/Level: All classes and levels
Party or solo: All
In-game time: All times
Area and coordinates: Entire world
Housing: All housing
Steps: n/a

This problem is affecting all highlander male players regardless of platform, system specs, and ISP. The problem is also reflected on all highlander male NPC's.

Please fix! Limbal ring is still there, but the color that it's supposed to be is missing. Thanks!

https://imgur.com/a/nmTPSxH

For the sake of thoroughness:

https://i.imgur.com/2VHppET.png
https://i.imgur.com/CG2vsip.jpeg

It looks to me as if the sclera texture is, for some reason, overlapping the iris texture just enough to obscure the darker edge of the iris, which along with the eye bump map being now misaligned with the iris, makes all us male Highlanders look like we're wearing contacts and have soft, fuzzy edges to our irises at a distance.


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For comparison with other races:

https://lds-img.finalfantasyxiv.com/...e358e085e8.png

As seen from picture above, only male highlanders are missing the limbal rings, meanwhile the rest of the races retain their limbal rings. Discrepancy is more obvious with darker eye colors.

Unique male Highlander NPC models showing this issue is consistent across Endwalker and Dawntrail models and is just basically happing across the board to ALL male Highlanders (it also happens to be VERY obvious what's wrong on the NPCs!):

https://i.imgur.com/AbGKM5S.png

The eye color is also faded. It is as if they are wearing clouded semi-transparent contact lenses that make the eyes look pale.

It worries me that this still isn't on the known issues list.

The recent patch did not include a fix for this problem.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dinamarques

The recent patch did not include a fix for this problem.

---

It wouldn't be. This isn't worthy of a hotfix, it's something that will be rolled into a proper patch. I assume it will be in 7.55 because it affects Hildibrand, but hope it'll be done sooner.