I agree with all of the points faiarrow has made RE: face 2 for femroes - the difference in pupil colour and the lightened smudge feel like erasure of racial traits.

I think I can get used to the colour differences even if I'm not impressed with them, but the part that really bothers me is the painted-on brow shadow.

It's not particularly easy to capture in a still, but if you go into the benchmark and choose face 2, then rotate the lighting around and watch the shadow of the brow, you can see the light pass over it as if nothing is there - it isn't acting like a shadow at all, rather more like a tattoo. The bridge is completely smooth, no definition or crease.

I grabbed one of my favourite cutscene screenshots from the current game and tried to get a similar angle/lighting in the CC to compare - the bridge of the nose looks completely different without the crease.



(Full size if you want to zoom in to look closer)

The painted on shadow is a decent approximation of the shape from some angles and lighting... such as the close up in the benchmark cutscene. But from others the illusion completely falls apart. Next to the realism of the new skin textures and hair... it looks so... wrong to me. There needs to be at least some definition on the normal map there, or the shape is completely lost, and to me it's a definiting characteristic of the face.

This may seem like nothing to others, but the stern brow is what drew me to face 2 in the first place and I think because I work in 3D modelling so I can pick out the difference a little more keenly than some would.

I'm praying it's just an issue of a missing normal map or something else that would make it unintentional rather than the dev team actively trying to smooth out the face.