Quote Originally Posted by Cyrtip View Post
Could just be the particular face I use and scrutinized the most had no lingering problems pre 7.0, what with it being a 3.0 addition race and not a 2.0 race, but I had no problems with the old face models.
As an end user, facial animations looked so much better with the fewer bones the devs had to work with pre 7.0. Sure, 7.0 models might be a technical upgrade and better to animate in future because of additional bones, but the animations we have right here in the now are definitely worse than what we had in the past. I don't want to have to look forwards to a fix, for something that worked just fine three months ago. We've updated but backwards haha...
I've heard about the cross race gear explanation too, I think in LA Fan Fest they talked about auto-adapting headgear to fit different races. If its true that the face models were remade to cut development costs, quality be damned, then that's just saddening to hear.
I know that in one of the Fanfests, Yoshi-P took great pains to point out some of the issues lalafell had that they were correcting, and I know, playing a Highlander, there were issues there also, issues I've been very pleased to be rid of now. I can just imagine that he was playing his main and just being irked at the things he saw that couldn't be fixed...until now. Faces added after 2.0 probably didn't have those same issues. At least, I never saw the same kind of problems on my au ra alt that has the same face as yours judging by the horns.

And yea I can see people being unhappy with the current animations. Some of them need correcting as they didn't quite translate (I know some expressions cause a weird twitching on the eyebrows that absolutely should not be there).

I really, seriously disagree that it was "quality be damned", as I can see a great deal of care has gone into making the faces as close as possible while still maintaining the same feel. I know quite a lot of people disagree with that, but the faces do, in my eyes, still have the same aesthetics while being an upgrade. Faces either designed by or inspired by Tetsuya Nomura's work still look unmistakably like Tetsuya Nomura's work. I do think there's some work left yet--some faces have some crazy tall foreheads and there's some weirdness here and there, but no, the quality was not to be damned. If it was quality be damned, they wouldn't have gone through the effort correcting things from the first benchmark (and maybe second, though at least on my Highlander's face, if there was such a pass it was so minor as to be unnoticeable).