[ Graphical Update Feedback ] Examples of Darker Skinned Characters/Darker Lighting

[Lunaxia]

Looking through this thread, it makes me sad that we don't see much in the way of variety in skin tone and appearance in the MSQ cast. There are some really beautiful characters here.

[crystallineAbyss]

Looking through this thread, it makes me sad that we don't see much in the way of variety in skin tone and appearance in the MSQ cast. There are some really beautiful characters here.

This has honestly been something that people have been talking about for a long time. A lot of people joke around about their non-white wols being the diversity hires of the Scions, but it's exhausting - especially when you pair that with how the existing darker skinned characters are treated in the story (the answer is Not Well, seeing as there are at least 3 black men referred to as The Bull, which is based in some really racist/dehumanizing stuff). It's disheartening to think, too, that your character would never even be a consideration for a design just on the basis of not being pale (but especially not being white or east asian). It was nice seeing Thavnair, but why was it so white? All the darker npcs didn't have speaking roles and you can't even select them. The ones that do speak are white, and even Ahewann was paper white. And that's not even getting into the Twelve who - if they're supposed to be a cumulation of the faiths of all people - are all white with European features sans Nald'thal - the god of Ala Mhigo is white? The only dark ones are monsters like Zodiark. And that says something to players, especially to players of color who are frequently told that the divine is white and european but the fell is dark and suspiciously afrocentric and takes a lot of cues from tribal caricatures (see: Zodiark's mask, or the Nibirun of the Dead Ends (antagonistic in Omicron quests) and look up Ligbi horn masks). It's...a lot deeper, but the most visible issue is definitely the distribution. Because if the CC was truly random, why is everything so white when there are so many other options?

Will they do anything for palms? The palms of the hands and soles of the feet of anyone with mid to dark skin in real life are always lighter, a fact which is not replicated in game. Considering that they will be doing the above for the tips of elezen ears, can they fix how the palms and soles look for any darker skin in the game?

I'd also like to reiterate what an earlier post said: please do tests on darker skin tones, including all non-human skin tones! The 2B outfit and Gaia's outfit both faced problems with the sheer on darker skin tones and non-human skin tones when initially added.

Yes! Exactly! Like I didn't even get the Gaia set because of the disaster with the tights!! And PLEASE let us have depigmentation for our palms!!! TToTT it looks so weird without it! And also do it appropriately (which is a gradient at the edge of the depigmentation, not a harsh line/hard transition).

Also Y'shtola should get her melanin back, because her becoming white like that was behond egregious. She became important to msq, and then she was suddenly super pale? Put it back!!!

[eternalmagic]

I really, really hope this can be a bit of a wake up call for the devs that this needs fixing. I'm still looking forward to this graphics update, and I appreciate all the hard work and sheer effort going into it (the FF panel on the technical aspects was great), but honestly they should use this opportunity to make sure character lighting in general and in cutscenes is fixed. Especially seeing just how egregious some of the screenshots put into this thread have been; I am so sorry to everyone that you've had to fight the character lighting like this for so long.

Something that got brought up kind of early on in this thread was the idea that the devs can't put in artificial light sources in every cutscene, as this game isn't like a single-player AAA experience. While I agree to an extent, I can't help but think about games that are still able to pull it off, and make every character look good.

I recently started playing Baldur's Gate 3 in my downtime, and seeing characters with dark or "fantasy" skin tones like Wyll or Karlach look really nice, even in the nighttime scenes at the camp, just drives the point home. They are able to handle skin as pale as Astarion's, and they can handle Wyll and Karlach and Lae'zel in the exact same scene and they all look very good!

I know that's comparing apples to oranges a bit, since BG3 is a single player game primarily. When I was thinking over BG3's handling of varying skin tones, I figured that the devs at Larian probably do use multiple extra light sources in cutscenes to help make things look as good as they do--and I figured it might be difficult for CBU3 to handle. After all, we don't really know how these things happen behind the scenes, and it might not be feasible.

But then, I remembered that the XIV devs have used multiple light sources in cutscenes before, as far back as ARR.



This is used for dramatic effect in this instance, but what's to keep them from doing this to add some additional lighting in a cutscene? Not only that, but the devs will change the time of day in cutscenes to fit the mood!

At this point, the dev team should be able to do something to fix these issues with character lighting. It may have to be generic since it's true they can't exactly account for everything in their lighting for all possible combinations, but that's still something they can handle, surely?

As was said before:

I shouldn't have to use my graphic card's shaders, and/or Gpose, and/or a lot of post-process work on my screenshots, to see my characters at all, let alone decently lit.

Just please give us some examples to put our minds at ease...