Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[azaleai]

This absolutely hits home and hurts. I'm so sorry. I know it's not much but you're not alone in how that feels at all.

I couldn't help but feel so seen in your post.
Everything you wrote accurately describes how I've been feeling.

You're not alone, I resonate with this so much...

I don't want to say I'm glad you are all suffering like I am, but it's certainly comforting to know I'm not alone, haha. I've never spoken to you personally faiarrow but I won't lie, I feel a considerable sense of kinship with you just through the interactions we've had here - It's reassuring to hear from someone else as vocal as I am about the issues with our face, at least I know I'm not crazy.

Honestly at this point I have one foot out the door; I'm fully prepared for this announcement to either be hot-air-corpo-speak "we'll keep this in mind for the future" or to just make minor tweaks to the more popular races/faces and not touch any of the glaring issues with femroe face 2 or the frankly creepy facial animations... I would be very, very happy to be wrong, but I'm certainly not going to hold my breath.

RE: the topic of eyes. I do agree that Astronis' eyes look better after the update, but I think that's more of an edge case. Most faces have had the eye shape tweaked, upper eyelashes lowered and the heavy shadow over the eye added, as well as the eye tracking/animation being altered leading to portraits seeming to look in a different direction and the upper eyelid lowering a lot more than it used to when the character looks downwards. All of this together combines to make the look far more tired, dopey or sultry than they used to. The updated eye shaders concerning the catchlights are better, but at most angles they're hidden by the heavy shadow or the deeper set eyes (which also afect how the eye colour comes across). For people who are used to their character's eyes looking alert and open, they now look dim and unfocused.

From a technical and realism standpoint they do look better, but from an expression and impression standpoint they're wildly different. And that's what a lot of the criticism here boils down to - the new stuff doesn't necessarily look bad, but it looks vastly different and we were told they wanted to keep the same look and feel which, to be blunt, they failed to do. I think it all depends on which angle you're taking - as someone who's more interested in the expression than the realism, I'm leaning more towards disliking the update, personally, but I do understand where the people who prefer it are coming from.