Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Doopliss]

I feel fairly certain they aren’t reading our feedback anymore, if they ever were reading the eng forum feedback. I reported a thread with racism and a slur in the OP and it’s still around the following day and over ten pages long. This forum is just abandoned and left as a troll playground. I’m just so frustrated because I want to stop subbing for a long time in protest but of course I finally won the housing lotto after trying to get a house for 5 years. Do I just give it up since I don’t want to play anymore with my face like this? Who knows how long it would take to win the lotto again on Balmung if they miraculously fix my face and I decide to come back??

They do still look here, they're just less active and way more silent about it vs. the JP moderators (who will always write a reason in the thread for their deletion of a comment). That thread you mentioned thankfully and finally got deleted, and even in this thread an insulting comment from one user simply calling another user insane is no longer anywhere to be seen.

I'm not certain what to suggest for your house, because I 100% can't blame you for wanting to vote with your wallet... However, I want to say that while all these individual changes are little things, together they add up a lot. It's annoying and aggravating because it's a several month wait, but I wouldn't expect to see major adjustments before 7.1 (although I think it's particularly insane that some clans are going to probably be running around with missing clan features for any amount of time).

Some folk on the JP thread were discussing how they did use the specific wording of "FFXIV's first graphic update", and I 100% wouldn't be surprised if they PR their way into any adjustments that come in a large patch as a "second graphic update", lol.
EDIT: Disregard this comment, somebody over on the JP forums linked an article where they go more in depth about why they called it that. Turns out they confirmed they have no current plans for a "second phase", but wanted to call it a first phase so as to not make players think this is the limit.

It's disheartening, but, again, they do have a history of fixing/updating things months later while being completely silent about it the whole way through. I don't know why they do that, and I wish they didn't, but they do. The Hrothgar missing ears incident comes to mind, which was another issue that seemed outside of their usual quality control. It took 4 months to get fixed while fans were left to rot with speculation on whether or not they were even listening.

They were also completely silent about a way simpler issue, like male Viera naming conventions, for 3-4 months--which was a completely unprecedented wait for that kind of update--while people were constantly asking for a simple acknowledgement on whether or not we were even getting them. They never acknowledged that; we just finally got the names one day.

Still, unlike those incidents, we did get any note of them confirming they'll continue to make adjustments, as small as it was. My hope is that they at least acknowledge it in the 7.1 live letter...

[Cheapshot]

It's disheartening, but, again, they do have a history of fixing/updating things months later while being completely silent about it the whole way through. I don't know why they do that, and I wish they didn't, but they do. The Hrothgar missing ears incident comes to mind, which was another issue that seemed outside of their usual quality control. It took 4 months to get fixed while fans were left to rot with speculation on whether or not they were even listening.

They were also completely silent about a way simpler issue, like male Viera naming conventions, for 3-4 months--which was a completely unprecedented wait for that kind of update--while people were constantly asking for a simple acknowledgement on whether or not we were even getting them. They never acknowledged that; we just finally got the names one day.

Still, unlike those incidents, we did get any note of them confirming they'll continue to make adjustments, as small as it was. My hope is that they at least acknowledge it in the 7.1 live letter...

I guess it’s that this situation is a little different in that unlike something missing or a bug, most of this is stuff they intentionally did. I don’t feel it lives up to their usual standard and it certainly let me down, but they might not see it that way? When it’s just a bug or something missing I can keep playing and not worry much about it because I figure it should get taken care of someday. It also doesn’t usually affect my enjoyment of the game overly much unlike the complete lack of desire to play I’m now experiencing. But since these were intentional decisions they made, and with them completely silent on this, there’s that anxious uncertainty. “Do they ever intend to fix/improve this? Am I waiting for something that will never happen?” I think that’s what makes this hit different.

The frustration of finally winning a house after trying at every opportunity since 2019, but it happened on, and I’m not kidding, the actual day I had planned to be my last day in the game until I had my character back again. Any day prior to having my spirits crushed by the changes in the benchmark and I would have been ecstatic to finally get my house. Now I can’t even enjoy it as I should. This game is too expensive for me, especially in Canada where my entry sub costs me 18$ a month. I was planning to vote with my wallet instead of paying for something I’m not enjoying anymore. But now I have to decide if I should keep forking over that money to keep hold of my house, waiting without any idea if more character adjustments are even being considered. I know I probably wont ever win the lotto again on my homeworld. I can’t believe it was on my last day. It almost feels like too much of a coincidence, farcical. Like what even??

[Doopliss]

[Snipped for post limit]

I understand where you're coming from and again I can't blame you at all. I'm really, really sorry for the situation this put you in. I only bring this up for the possibility of offering a little hope, because they do stuff like this all the time and, admittedly, a month isn't enough time for them to fix most things. Each adjustment between benchmarks was small and only on what select faces they could manage, after all.

In case it's difficult to remember, the Hrothgar missing ear thing was intentional. They laughed about it during the live letter and said something like "they're just hiding their ears under their hair!" like that made sense.

All in all, they probably think that little aggravating footnote is enough for now, and don't want to upset other players who are unbothered by the update by giving it a full announcement. Reading comprehension in FFXIV can be...wanting, and a lot of people tend to think "adjusting some shapes so they look more in-line with how the option appeared before" = "a call to downgrade the graphics". This is at least my guess from whatever bizarre pipeline and business perspective they have in this case, and considering some past events, like needing to dedicate basically two hours to explaining what a number squish in an MMO was so that players wouldn't misunderstand and get upset...

Again, though, I 100% understand where you're coming from. This is on a way larger and more disastrous scale than anything they've done before...but that is also the reason I believe they can't continue to ignore it forever. I hope people keep talking about it.

[Rueby]

I'm still upset over my character and decided "Well, I can just not look at her anymore, there's more to the game I guess" but now my eyes are constantly hurting, explosions that were bad became worse. Alot of areas have weird lighting, bright crystals, highly reflective floors, explosions, blinding light....I had issues with EW EX1 and EX2 for the scuffed visual clarity but it seems they're doubling down on this.

I want to play devil's advocate and say they're swarmed with issues but this is 100% on them. I hope our wishes for our characters and hopefully eye strain/mount tilt get resolved...

[GreenLeafy]

I saw people mentioning something about house lighting being fixed and figured I'd go and see how one of my favourite stained glass window corners looks and well...


Bonus pink hair at another part of the house.


Its been definitely an interesting experience to just accept that the game you've played for a decade for whatever reason just decided to get more buggy and messy than ever before but I guess that's just the product its decided to change into. Is it just for now? Couldn't say. Especially with how they've decided to throw all communication with their own playerbase to the wind and would rather just post engagement bait on their socials than address anything.

I want to play devil's advocate and say they're swarmed with issues but this is 100% on them. I hope our wishes for our characters and hopefully eye strain/mount tilt get resolved...

Honestly yeah , they stirred the shit pot themselves so they have only themselves to blame for this.

Seeing both NA and JP threads (with the JP ones having hundreds upon hundreds of upvotes of people just frustrated and upset at graphical issues and lack of communication) continuing even so long after Benchmark/EA/Official release , and any and all of that being ignored entirely truly sucks. But sure lets continue asking YoshiP and fans to ponder and argue over being horny for Bakool Ja Ja or the level of aggravating or nice Wuk Lamat is lol.

On a side note - kudos to all of you who put in the time and effort to make detailed bug reports , articulate your displeasure and overall really pull no stops on giving incredible ,concise and to the point feedback. Its terrible to see none of it get addressed or handwaved but am glad to see that I'm not the only one that just got driven insane by how incredibly mishandled and undercooked this update has been. You're the real ones.

[Moonfallen]

I'm still upset over my character and decided "Well, I can just not look at her anymore, there's more to the game I guess" but now my eyes are constantly hurting, explosions that were bad became worse. Alot of areas have weird lighting, bright crystals, highly reflective floors, explosions, blinding light....I had issues with EW EX1 and EX2 for the scuffed visual clarity but it seems they're doubling down on this.

I want to play devil's advocate and say they're swarmed with issues but this is 100% on them. I hope our wishes for our characters and hopefully eye strain/mount tilt get resolved...

I'm glad I'm not the only one on this. The visual clarity and blinding lights has made me unable to do extremes since Endsinger. I could barely get by Golbez normal and now in DT I am struggling even more to the point I have gone to my optometrist to see if there is anything wrong with my eyes or glasses (I even have brightness, gamma, and visuals turned down and limited for others). The eye strain is so bad after the graphics update that I am not playing as long as I used to. My eyes are fine and no other game gives me issues as much as XIV has been with the bright, flashy mechanics.

[Aria_Nocturna]

One of the Japanese forum moderators seems to have it out for me, so I'll leave my last post here instead.

On occasion, complaints over at the Japanese thread gain a huge amount of support (likes) within hours. These catch the attention of moderators, and then get censored with a generic "not contributing to the forums" excuse. I had hoped to leave one last post there before my subscription expired, but it got censored in this exact way. Tried to ask what was wrong with it, but even that got censored too.

Screenshots if interested:
https://imgur.com/a/ffxiv-graphics-update-Z6PuEhb

This game is too expensive for me, especially in Canada where my entry sub costs me 18$ a month. I was planning to vote with my wallet instead of paying for something I’m not enjoying anymore. But now I have to decide if I should keep forking over that money to keep hold of my house, waiting without any idea if more character adjustments are even being considered. I know I probably wont ever win the lotto again on my homeworld.

I too was conflicted about the house hostage thing, but my decision was to just let my subscription lapse anyway. If in 40-ish days, I still feel attached to my house (or an announcement is finally made about the botched character models), I could always visit just to reset the auto-demolition timer.

But what if I forget? Well, that would only mean I had already moved on. Also yes, the exchange rate here from Canada sucks.

I'm still upset over my character and decided "Well, I can just not look at her anymore, there's more to the game I guess"

Don't worry, lots of people on the Japanese thread feel the same. One comment in particular really resonated with me: "If I only look at his back, I can imagine he's still the character I knew".

As I said in my post (that got censored), I don't care whether they revert the character models for now, or give us an old/new setting, or truly reproduce our old faces with the new graphics. I just want my character back.

All in all, they probably think that little aggravating footnote is enough for now, and don't want to upset other players who are unbothered by the update by giving it a full announcement. Reading comprehension in FFXIV can be...wanting, and a lot of people tend to think "adjusting some shapes so they look more in-line with how the option appeared before" = "a call to downgrade the graphics".

Fully agree with the reading comprehension thing lol. Aside from hardware concerns, I highly doubt anyone is actually against the update as a whole.

I can't seem to find the footnote anywhere though, so would you mind telling me where it is? Sorry in advance if I don't reply afterward, as my subscription will likely have expired by then.

---

Anyways, best of luck to those of you who are sticking around.
May you one day regain your beautiful, non-glitchy characters.

[Rueby]

Don't worry, lots of people on the Japanese thread feel the same. One comment in particular really resonated with me: "If I only look at his back, I can imagine he's still the character I knew".

As I said in my post (that got censored), I don't care whether they revert the character models for now, or give us an old/new setting, or truly reproduce our old faces with the new graphics. I just want my character back.

I don't know why I teared up reading that. I feel it too, I can just pretend that the character I loved died in EW or something along with everyone I loved.

I'm sick of getting flashbanged, it only happens in THIS game. Someone on design is like 'make it as white as possible and make it flash'! Waw so cool can't see anything. My friend joked with me about how I might need to wear sunglasses and I'm not even sure that'll help.

It's disgusting that they're censoring people over there....I thought I could perhaps use a translator to post there about eyestrain/mount tilt but I'm losing hope. I don't think visual clarity or eyestrain free is like...a priority.

[Tarath]

I noticed this as well and created a bug report about it here if you'd like to add your excellent examples as further evidence.

Apologies for the late reply, was probably not the best idea to post all of that right before savage release.

I actually made a similar bug report during the second benchmark release. However I'll put my gifs into your report. If yours get declined, I'll repost them into mine.

If anyone else have already made reports of bugs I've mentioned, feel free to toss them at me and I'll post my images/gifs there. I don't have much free time to be looking through all the bug reports for the moment.

So well written, I really appreciate hearing from the perspective of a ♂ Au Ra player as I haven't seen many posts regarding them (at least ones that go into detail like this).

The sneer expression is one of the worst offenders, I can see that the same issue is on both ♀/♂. It doesn't seem as duck-like on ♂ Au Ra at the very least.

Looking at your ♀ Au Ra portraits, I get the impression of the lips looking more rougher. This has helped me to discover another factor where the "grotesque" feeling that I've been getting from ♀ Au Ra Face 1 is coming from.

I can see the face scales are warping like with ♀ Au Ra's, as you mentioned there's no doubt that this is an oversight considering how they fit on ♂ Au Ra. Really hope this gets fixed.

I agree with the hair texture losing detail, it happened with the hairstyle I use as well. It probably only affects the more "dynamic" hairstyles, the ones with a lot going on (which is plentiful for ♂ Au Ra).
It might be able to be resolved by darkening the hair in some very specific cases but with the limited colour palette and the changes to it there's only so much that could be done.

Also, I don't think the eyelash mention is a nitpick, my character's look feels totally lost with how they rotated and thinned them out and I can see the same on yours (though it might not bother you as much as me).

Appreciate the kind words.
Regarding the eyelashes I'm 100% with you there. It also bothers me how eye makeup in general isn't as bold as it used to be (my male Au Ra got lucky in that regard).

Your post has honestly inspired me to go and check for details I may have overlooked, but unfortunately I can't run the game at the moment.

I would advice that you save your sanity. The more bugs I encounter, the more disappointed I get with the direction of the game. And it can't be unseen once it's found. But if you do encounter anything I look forward in seeing your findings.

[Cheapshot]

Reading comprehension in FFXIV can be...wanting, and a lot of people tend to think "adjusting some shapes so they look more in-line with how the option appeared before" = "a call to downgrade the graphics".

Ugh yes, I’ve experienced a fair amount of pushback from people like that.