We need to compromise as a player base

[Taliriah]

In this case, conservatism would be preventing the game from taking a step back
how could this ever be considered a "graphical upgrade"

I don't trust screenshots from the character creator. Here's a technical explanation of why I think this happens: there's two ways to illuminate a surface, direct lighting and indirect lighting (all the parts not hit directly by a light source). The later is very expensive and complex to simulate and in the olden days it was very crudely approximated by what was called "ambient lighting", an omnipresent, constant amount of light applied to anything not directly hit by a light source.

Now when it comes to skin, it is translucent, so part of the light that hits the skin gets inside, bounces around and comes back out some distance away. This is called sub surface scattering and is what gives skin a softer lighting than hard surfaces. It is part of the indirect lighting that affects skin (the other part is light bouncing around the environment aka global illumination). Modern games, including dawntrail, approximate the effect of sub surface scattering. But it means that it does a part of the job that ambient lighting did before, so the later has to be toned down.

And I don't think the necessary tweaks have been done in the character creator background scenes (yet), because they look unchanged in general compared to the live game.

[Kindred008]

I don't trust screenshots from the character creator. Here's a technical explanation of why I think this happens: there's two ways to illuminate a surface, direct lighting and indirect lighting (all the parts not hit directly by a light source). The later is very expensive and complex to simulate and in the olden days it was very crudely approximated by what was called "ambient lighting", an omnipresent, constant amount of light applied to anything not directly hit by a light source.

Now when it comes to skin, it is translucent, so part of the light that hits the skin gets inside, bounces around and comes back out some distance away. This is called sub surface scattering and is what gives skin a softer lighting than hard surfaces. It is part of the indirect lighting that affects skin (the other part is light bouncing around the environment aka global illumination). Modern games, including dawntrail, approximate the effect of sub surface scattering. But it means that it does a part of the job that ambient lighting did before, so the later has to be toned down.

And I don't think the necessary tweaks have been done in the character creator background scenes (yet), because they look unchanged in general compared to the live game.

I'm going to be honest. As a player, I don't care why the characters look so different. All I care about is that they do look different and not how they did before.

It's up to the developers of the game to work within the limitations to update the graphics while keeping characters identities.

Maybe that is really hard to do. Maybe it's really easy to do. That's not our problem as players.