Reddit vs. the Forums in the Graphics War of '24

[CVXIV]

Snip.

I am someone who likes the visual update and thought that for the most part my character looked pretty good in the benchmark. Regarding the forums, it is pretty surprising that so many threads have been created about these issues people are having. I suppose I could understand a megathread and the threads about specific races but I don't use forums all that much so I wouldn't know how it typically goes.

The whole situation does feel overly dramatic and overblown to me, and I know it might seem mean to say as someone who does like what has been shown so far and I don't want to seem dismissive of the valid criticism being brought forward regarding the character creator.

There are issues with the benchmark that I am sure will be ironed out and fixed come Dawntrail, like any seams being shown or some of the textures being buggy like with male viera face 3's beauty mark that is just a line.

Though with some comparisons I have seen I really struggle to see a difference. To me, they look like the exact same character but with higher quality textures.

Another issue I've seen is with pale characters having bright hair so some of their features seem to blend in with their skin and idk it just seems like the solution is to adjust the colors.

I hope that SE takes a look at the threads being made and makes adjustments so that people can feel more at ease. I don't really enjoy that the benchmark is so close to the release date of the game, I feel like it should've been further back to allow more time for any issues to be addressed and potentially fixed in a reasonable timeframe.

[Roda]

I am someone who likes the visual update and thought that for the most part my character looked pretty good in the benchmark. Regarding the forums, it is pretty surprising that so many threads have been created about these issues people are having. I suppose I could understand a megathread and the threads about specific races but I don't use forums all that much so I wouldn't know how it typically goes.

As someone with a(n admittedly probably unhealthy) addiction to trainwrecks and dumpster fires, this is pretty par for the course for the (english) OF.
Creating a whole new thread for your own personal opinion, rather than joining an existing one, is kind of a part of the "culture" here (at least on GD). Screenshot dumps and group organizations are the rare exceptions.

The amount of options just exacerbates the issue. EVERY gender, EVERY race, EVERY clan, EVERY face, and even the different body parts and options within them apparently not only needs their own thread, but each individual person with their own opinion on their unique combination needs their own thread, not to mention the opinions on the technical changes, and of course the opinions on the ongoing discourse(we are here). Imo, it'd be cool if the mods were to undertake a cleanup operation and merge some threads to at LEAST be organized by race.


But yeah, just generally speaking, the graphical overhaul was very well done and most looks transferred over relatively well imo (tho full disclosure, my favorite looks have mostly came out of this unscathed so i'm biased). Like, there's a few issues that need to be ironed out of course (A few lips need to go through another round of polishing for example), but I think a large portion of the community has suddenly found themselves having to learn how to scrutinize a face in detail and are going through the learning process with that skill while also doing it with a subject matter that's deeply personal. You can definitely see this in the posts where the before and after are reasonably similar, the critique is usually to the tune of "My character is ruined/butchered/etc" with no extra details describing what actually changed and how it affects how they perceive the character, while the more "yeah that's definitely off" comparisons come with detailed breakdowns and discussions that contain like actual anatomical parts.