https://i.imgur.com/MNVARTG.png
left is newbench and right is EW
frankly im tired of the disaster that cats have largely been through all this so no effort for a better comparison
face 1 mooncat, mouth 4 got completely destroyed, mouth 4 is now just like any other mouth, long wide normie, the only small mouth REMOVED from cats, not to mention the narrowing of the nose to lip ridges are so narrow, the already tragically none existent eyebrows are even more non existent now, might as pull a highlander and look like super saiyan 3, the scars are crazy long now, culminating in my main character looking like they got hit with the derp bat.. repeatedly
theres also countless other issues going on with cats but ill focus on face 1 for here, all in all with how long the graphics update was planned, with the level of "unintended" issues, complete changes to some features and faces, it really feels to me like something either went seriously wrong or is still going wrong and they have had to try and do all this in very little time, not from the time that a graphics update was announced like i would hope
this isnt an attack at the devs, im sure they are working themselves to the bone and shouldnt be unappreciated and rarely are issues caused by devs themselves, i just hope all this can get fixed even if its after the launch
this has all very much shown me that ffxiv is in desperate need of a character creator update to add more faces and features to increase customization (like adding back mouth 4, or changing it back and adding the current mouth as a mouth 5 for example) (and for other races faces like male viera having very dirty nose or less dirty, face4 female miqo having a mouth gap or not, viera having larger or smaller pupils yes pupils not iris) as all these changes between the benchmarks and before end up just being discarded assets and effort, which is quite sad, when all those "changed" features could be their very own options giving more creative freedom to have more unique characters