Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Aniya_Estlihn]

Anyone with the basic capacity for critical thinking knew that the request to "allow people to revert to 6.58 faces" would go nowhere and that these threads would lead to universal changes to the 7.0 models with no extra options in sight, yet anytime that was brought up in here people were attacked for it. :/

Disappointing that we were given a free fantasia, encouraged to make changes and given more than enough time to try and adjust only to now have to worry that our characters that we've gotten used to will look different—again.

I get that people have been upset, but with this news, I really wish everyone would have left well enough alone, stayed quiet and attempted to adapt to the changes.
Now instead of some people being unhappy, the likelihood is that no one is going to be happy and the complaints will only be amplified.

Hopefully these changes will facilitate them to provide another free fantasia, as lip shape and the form of a smile can literally make or break the appearance of a character. I changed the mouth on a handful of my characters because the impression was altered by Dawntrail's updates.

I'm already upset by the story, so having to worry for two and a half months of whether or not my characters who I've grown to love the looks of again will look different for the second time in less than a year is putting even more of a damper on things.
The update to characters should have been one and done.

[Liamont]

Anyone with the basic capacity for critical thinking knew that the request to "allow people to revert to 6.58 faces" would go nowhere and that these threads would lead to universal changes to the 7.0 models with no extra options in sight, yet anytime that was brought up in here people were attacked for it. :/

Disappointing that we were given a free fantasia, encouraged to make changes and given more than enough time to try and adjust only to now have to worry that our characters that we've gotten used to will look different—again.

I get that people have been upset, but with this news, I really wish everyone would have left well enough alone, stayed quiet and attempted to adapt to the changes.
Now instead of some people being unhappy, the likelihood is that no one is going to be happy and the complaints will only be amplified.

Hopefully these changes will facilitate them to provide another free fantasia, as lip shape and the form of a smile can literally make or break the appearance of a character. I changed the mouth on a handful of my characters because the impression was altered by Dawntrail's updates.

I'm already upset by the story, so having to worry for two and a half months of whether or not my characters who I've grown to love the looks of again will look different for the second time in less than a year is putting even more of a damper on things.
The update to characters should have been one and done.

So what were you proposing those of us who did not like the changes to do? Just sit down and take it without submitting any feedback, which the devs themselves encouraged?

If they had just said, "We won't be changing anything, that's that," then none of us would have taken hours and hours taking screenshots and making detailed feedback submissions to the devs. Maybe we'd just rerolled another character, or just quit the game entirely.

While I also don't agree with how they're just changing the 7.0 features instead of making an option for both, I don't think you're being entirely fair to those who wanted to try and fight to get their sometimes decades old character back.

You know what would have solved this problem entirely? Not changing the player characters at all. The models were not ugly or outdated, I'm pretty sure most people would have been fine if they had just made higher resolution textures for armour and clothing so we don't have the situations like G'raha with pixel textures when zoomed in.

[eohippus]

I've been really quiet leading up to this update as it will be the deciding factor in if I keep paying my sub or not. They listed the issues as non-exhuastive, so I'm hoping things like "lip shapes being changed" "male lip shapes being made thinner" might actually be in a longer list of things that will be fixed, but I'm losing hope. Issues like skintones being completely washed out/made more gray by the lighting, and dark skin being too reflective, of course didn't merit mentioning per their standards but I really hope that's fixed as well. It was admittedly a bit stupid to pin so much of my optimism on "the update will fix things" but I'm happy they're at least trying. I'll try to get more bug reports in before my sub runs out I guess ):

[faiarrow]

I think it's very funny they hadn't acknowledged outright forgotten features (F4 ♀ Dunesfolk nose smudge option still missing; ♂ Duskwight having the incorrect face textures; Hellsguard nose ash being nigh invisible; ♀ Roegadyn and ♀ Au Ra having drastically different pupils--something that had to have been done by choice, rather than updating polygons; etc.), but pointed out the Viera nose mark being darker. I suppose it would be bad for development team morale though to publicly lay out that there were too many oversights or mistakes.

NGL I outright scoffed at that because yeah, same thought process.

I get that people have been upset, but with this news, I really wish everyone would have left well enough alone, stayed quiet and attempted to adapt to the changes.
Now instead of some people being unhappy, the likelihood is that no one is going to be happy and the complaints will only be amplified.

Well, all of us really wish the devs had left well enough alone too.

I and countless others completely lost our characters with no way to actively adjust the problems brought up in the current CC with fantasia.

If the developers had been genuinely transparent in their handling of the character update, instead of us getting fed a handful of tiny snippets of the default face of the first clan of each race and continual promises across multiple events about trying their hardest to keep the characters familiar and correct to the players, only to get horrifically surprised in the benchmark then there would be a significantly less of a mess for them to fix.

--

As for general thoughts:
I appreciate that they're doing ~things~ but because they refuse to actually acknowledge the outcry from people who are upset about the loss of racial traits (and other issues) it's hard to even grasp what they're actually looking at. "There is more aside from these but we are aiming to implement as many fixes as we can in Patch 7.1 for the items you have raised in your feedback that have been determined to be bugs" — great, so what are bugs, and what are human errors? Because 95% of the feedback given about genuine problems have been filed to Not A Bug.

Just rip off the bandaid and tell us what the heck is meant to actually be spec because I'm sure it's not just the eye highlighting system and the nostril shading system.

Because if this is what the art team considers spec for hellsguard femroe I'm outright quitting:


It's just a lot of PR hot air until we actually get to find out I guess.

[noumen0nn]

"As noted previously, these issues are a result of the improvements made to graphical and computational accuracy, which have resulted in smoother visuals and a clearer representation of what was intended by the original data."

Does anyone else feel like this is just an outright lie? These are not the same models that were present in Endwalker but upscaled with more polygons and better math; rather they are completely rebuilt from scratch. The issues are a result of them doing a shoddy job with the rebuild and getting the finer details wrong.

I really hope this is Yoshi P just being vague on purpose in order to not freak people out, or else this gives me very little hope.

[Len_]

It's funny how these bulletins are meant to give the appearance of transparency, communication and reassurance to players and then it's mostly PR and gaslighting. Like how they assured us we could "tweak" our characters with Fantasia originally. Now with this update you would get the impression there's only slight tweaks that need to be made and no egregious errors due to apparent rushed and poor quality and extreme lack of attention to detail. Like someone else said, I guess it would hurt some developers feelings to actually address what everyone knows and sees with their own eyes? Weird.

[poooman]

im just hoping they at the very LEAST fix the racial traits bc those are, like, the main reasons to pick a certain clan you like (moonkeeper fangs anyone? lmao) other than lore. but id say most people probably pick on appearance first and come up with character lore later.

also........ what do they MEAN about 'bone data' and the jaw model in relation to emotes..... when you edit the base model and/or shape keys, that shouldnt screw up your animations to an insane degree. (if modifying the base shape, however, it is entirely possible it could cause odd or unintentional changes in the shape keys, which they use for the different eye/lip/jaw/etc shape options)
as long as things stay rigged with the right bones in the right places it should honestly be fine. maybe they just mean the end result of a tweak could cause something like the jaw protruding or having a dent when posed because they were only accounting for the old shape? but this would kind of make no sense, wasnt one of the points of everyone using the same base mesh that it was for easier emote creation?
this point is just a real head scratcher to me. maybe someone with more experience than me has an idea. ive modeled/rigged/animated in 3d from scratch before, but not for any game purposes. my knowledge may be lacking, but i have a general grasp of how things tend to work, so apologies if i am off base here.

the comment on the smiling emote makes a little more sense, assuming the way they do emotes likely works similar to a shape key. if the smile is used as a base for another emote and blended together, tweaking it could cause other emotes to look a little off. i do not actually know how their emotes work, but based on whats been said i think this is a fair guess.

hoping for the best for everyone, i dont have much skin in this game (as i said before, my characters came out fine, but i have a bit of beef with things that are not model changes on them) but i think trying to find a 'middleground' here might just... cause more problems for both sides </3

also also at risk of sounding a little dumb wtf does "spec" mean in the context used in the announcement..? i dont think ive ever heard it used in this way LOL, cant tell if theyre saying those are intentional or what.

tacking this onto the end cus i realized some of my wording may come off a little rude/aggressive here, so just to clarify majority of this is said a in a genuine, almost lighthearted tone :sob: dont take me too seriously (my username/character might help in doing so), but the points im making are my real thoughts. this is just the easiest way for me to articulate them <3 take it easy everyone

[Khryseis_Astra]

So what were you proposing those of us who did not like the changes to do? Just sit down and take it without submitting any feedback, which the devs themselves encouraged?

If they had just said, "We won't be changing anything, that's that," then none of us would have taken hours and hours taking screenshots and making detailed feedback submissions to the devs. Maybe we'd just rerolled another character, or just quit the game entirely.

While I also don't agree with how they're just changing the 7.0 features instead of making an option for both, I don't think you're being entirely fair to those who wanted to try and fight to get their sometimes decades old character back.

This. I’ve had my characters for about 5 years now, and many others have been playing since 1.0 or 2.0. Since the original goal was to change the character appearance “as little as possible,” that should be the priority. That said, everything that will be changed was not listed, and they did say that some things would not change at all. I would expect more details as to exactly what falls into what category as we get closer to 7.1, possibly in one of the Live Letters.

Although they did say “in the future we will look into adding more character creation options, among other things. It will be a long-term undertaking, but we will continue in our efforts.” Now you can take that as hopium PR speech if you like, and I’d be interested to see if the Japanese has any more nuance that got lost in translation, but if their whole reason for the graphic update was to bring XIV up to par with more modern games, then surely they realize how many more options are out there in other games’ character creation. While I don’t think we’ll ever see sliders and such, just due to the way gear is fitted in this game, I think this has shown them that, at minimum, there needs to be more options in character creator.

Bringing up all these issues with the update might just be the spark they needed to finally prioritize adding more options, some of which people might like even better than the 7.0 changes. And if they do change something you liked? Start a new mega thread after 7.1 and post all about it like we did. We should be happy we have a dev team that cares so much about player feedback!

At any rate, it gives me hope for my alts, who I’ve been struggling to get started on DT because of this. The facial expressions during the use of emotes (specifically smiling) was something they put into the section about long-term fixes that probably won’t happen in 7.1. But if they can just fine-tune the eyes, nose, philtrum and mouth shapes a bit more, I can be patient.

[Cheapshot]

I am not filled with confidence by the statement. It feels a bit gaslightly. Like they’re trying to downplay the scale of the changes, while also giving strange excuses for some things. My eyelashes are completely different. Its not a matter of them “appearing thinner do to lighting” or “being angled in a wrong way.” They are fundamentally not the same eyelash even by a pixel. My nose and mouth are also completely different too.

They seem to have tried to intentionally feminize some F faces and masculinize some M faces to be more traditionally attractive and this update seems to be saying “no it was just math rounding errors or something…”

Im not confident I’m getting my face back from this.

[HawkeScream]

Anyone with the basic capacity for critical thinking knew that the request to "allow people to revert to 6.58 faces" would go nowhere and that these threads would lead to universal changes to the 7.0 models with no extra options in sight, yet anytime that was brought up in here people were attacked for it. :/

Disappointing that we were given a free fantasia, encouraged to make changes and given more than enough time to try and adjust only to now have to worry that our characters that we've gotten used to will look different—again.

I get that people have been upset, but with this news, I really wish everyone would have left well enough alone, stayed quiet and attempted to adapt to the changes.
Now instead of some people being unhappy, the likelihood is that no one is going to be happy and the complaints will only be amplified.

Hopefully these changes will facilitate them to provide another free fantasia, as lip shape and the form of a smile can literally make or break the appearance of a character. I changed the mouth on a handful of my characters because the impression was altered by Dawntrail's updates.

I'm already upset by the story, so having to worry for two and a half months of whether or not my characters who I've grown to love the looks of again will look different for the second time in less than a year is putting even more of a damper on things.
The update to characters should have been one and done.

I have spent all of Dawntrail trying to adapt to the changes and so has everyone else who is still playing and still unhappy with their character changes though? The last like eight or nine pages of this thread is full of people responding to someone who asked how everyone is feeling 2 months later. Well enough isn't well enough, and the devs asked for the feedback. So no, no one should be staying quiet.