Character creator complaints boil down to customization replacements, no new options

[Naple]

The creator and character model system is held up by elmer's glue so it would take a monumental effort to add features to it. SE would be better off starting from scratch to build a robust feature rich model system at this point.

[Moqi]

The goal was effectively to increase polygons/mesh and texture quality, but the result has unfortunately been redesign instead.

This. What do added makeup and change in lip shape/hair highlight have to do with that?

[ValG]

To still have the old options with the new ones, we should have:

• 7-9 mouth and nose options for each face.
• 2 or more cheek options, separate from jaw or doubled jaw options.
• 2 lipstick shape/type options in addition to the dark/light/none.
• Additional eye options on the ones that got significantly reworked like some male Miqo'te faces.
• Matte/shine slider for lipstick.
• 2 levels of eyebrow thickness options and Highlander male eyebrows. Or 3 levels so we don't have to use that stupid face paint.
• 2 levels of eyelash size options. Ideally you should be able to toggle long/short and thick/thin so you can have short and thin, short and thick, long and thin, long and thick.
• Eyebags intensity and/or an age slider.
• Freckles slider separate from face paint.
• Clan mark options.
• Why not take this opportunity to separate Au Ra horn options from the face option?

Would be great if we could get at least some of these during Dawntrail.

[Hejligan]

tbh I also feel too that there's an expectation by the player base, which isn't based on what the devs intended, of going "I can import my character and they will look exactly the same But Better", with no changes on their part. And I say that I don't think the devs intended that at all because they're giving us the free fantasia, because they anticipated that people would have to make changes to more closely match (or make different!) their character to their original look.

I am sorry, but that is just not true:

"The goal is to improve the overall look you know and love, rather than to change things to meet a certain threshold. Players have been playing for 10 years, so they want to prioritize and take care to avoid situations where people don’t feel their character looks theirs."

Yoshida says the final version will be of higher quality, but they really did take care to make sure that your impressions of the characters wouldn’t change. The hair texture, eyes, and skin were ones they paid particular attention to."

Also, even if Square Enix didn't say that: having a such an incredibly character-centric MMO like FFXIV where players identities are more based on their characters than I have ever seen in any other game ever, means that it is a very bad decision to deliberately and directly change, not just improve (which of course implies some change) the look of characters.

[Puddor]

The creator and character model system is held up by elmer's glue so it would take a monumental effort to add features to it. SE would be better off starting from scratch to build a robust feature rich model system at this point.

If we were still in 2016/Pre SHB where FFXIV was 'successful' but not 'mainstream' I'd understand but we're at 30 million players. FFXIV makes megabucks and should have the budget to reflect. No problem is unsolvable and if there's any time to overhaul CC it's now because of how frustrated a lot of players are going to be.

I'm in a similar boat with the jaw I've used since HW having been smoothed out and looking completely different (miqo M4) and the problem is that all other jaws are longer than that one; there's nothing I can change to. If they're going to make changes like that we need more options.

[Rehayem]

The limited customization is really a bad thing, and I agree it should've been updated along with 7.0 graphics. Looking at the older MMORPGs, it's clear YoshiP looked at WoW and said "yeah let's have that", but forgot to look at other games. TERA had also a somewhat limited customization options, but had multiple choices (like faces). Aion always had great customization options and that one's from 2008, and it went with graphical updates like twice in its lifespan. Archeage was top notch as well. Both ARR and Archeage released the same year, in 2013, and differences are pretty vast.

Custom engine is a good thing in some areas (like Black Desert), but so far it's stuck in 2010 era. I guess copium is all we gonna get for maybe 8.0 or 9.0.

[Oshirigami]

I don't really buy this, given yoship was quoted saying that they didn't want to veer too far off of the characters that some people have been playing for 10 years now. Little tweaks from a fantasia is very different than feeling like your character's facial structure has been altered in a significant way.

I remember him specifically saying something during the live letter like

We are improving the eyes... for those that like the old eyes, the option for them will remain

But there is no no hint of that in the benchmark character creator, or any other mention of it since then.

The free fantasia is nice, but many people feel they can't create something that looks how their character should look like anymore and those people are unhappy either way.
For my character, all the options I choose created the most boyish look. That no longer seems to be possible. Face4 has really bimboish eyelashes now, the mouths look strange, and chubby cheeks are gone.

[Hexie]

Posting in support for freckles being separate from face paint. Or it'd be nice to at least have 2 face paint slots. I don't get to use face paints or any of the eyeshadow options because I wanted my character to have freckles.

[Catwho]

some elaboration here before I stop prattling, my context is that I work in tech and I have. never. seen a straight import work out of the box. I currently live in Upgrade Hell right now at work because we have an ancient system that we can't just press a big ol import button for and have it turn out working. If I have to import a model into blender I must tell it which way is up, otherwise the model will be upside down or turned inside out. You can't just stick a Skyrim mod into a script for Special Edition and have it come out working like before (RIP wearable lanterns). Your Python 2 code has to be changed to work in Python 3. And so on. Every upgrade process in anything is holding your breath and hope it doesn't break things too much, so it was kind of strange to me to see people immediately do a before and after like "this sucks!" out of the gate without attempting to alter it.

Yeah, same. We have to hold the hand of our clients whenever they do a version upgrade for this exact reason. We can only auto-magic so much of it - some of the new settings we can make a reasonable guess at, but when we're ripping out tables from the old data model to make them work in the updated data model, sometimes we are going to need you the client to be the one to decide what they want the new stuff to actually do.

(Current argument this morning was whether we needed a flag on some Inventory items to show they couldn't be ordered on Product Reorders. Because some business units can reorder them, but others can't. So where do we put that flag? On the product? On the unit? On product categories? Big fat mess. We're ripping out the current flag from product categories and putt it on the PAR levels right now. We'll see...)

[smashBG]

I'm hoping that SE's art team got all the lighting and environment work (which does look genuinely fantastic) done first and saved the updates to character creation for last so that they could take player feedback into account, but who knows. Dawntrail is barely two months out; that's not a lot of time and the fact that so many of the changes seemed to be artistic rather than technical leaves me uneasy as to how much will actually be adjusted before 7.0. My mooncat lucked out and (fangs aside) more or less had an across-the-board glow up, but my face 4 femra was less fortunate and looks... not bad, but definitely different. Like I'm seeing an artist's rendition by someone who understood the general direction, but not the specific aesthetic that face goes for. To repeat what others have said, it would be fine on its own but it's not a replacement for what we already have.