Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Velvina]

Me, praying really damn hard for this, as a former hellsguard femroe. It's so damn hard to have any hope now that they'll listen to us and our upset at being made more hyuran-esque with the rounding out they've done that drops the more beastial-ursine-(galka)-like traits of the last decade.

(Smallest % played race across all regions, I know I'm not the only one feeling incredibly defeated that any feedback we give will result in nothing because of that... the most consistent plea across roe players from the JP feedback thread has been 'we're the smallest playerbase but we deserve just as much care'.)

Heavy agree. It's like, there's so much attention to detail put into literally everything else. Enemy designs, emotes, glams, environmental design, etc. Why not the base appearance of the characters we sink so much time into, too?

[Velvina]

Same… you can really see where some faces on some races got lots of TLC and others did not.

I hesitate to post gposes, since I know I can’t control the exactness of the pose and angle like I can in the portrait maker. But I think this shot really shows the difference between EW (left) and DT (right). Maybe they could be cousins, but they’re not the same person.

Goodness. Yeah. This is drastic. Like both characters look great, but those are completely different face options.

[CuteBucket]

W O W

Her head is an entirely different shape. Like wtf? It's things like this that make me look at this "update" and think they didn't even try. That's just flat out an entirely different person on the right.

[Sui-Kune]

While I'm appreciative of the graphical update as a whole, I hope to see proper quality control made across all races and genders, not just the most popular options.

Me, praying really damn hard for this, as a former hellsguard femroe. It's so damn hard to have any hope now that they'll listen to us and our upset at being made more hyuran-esque with the rounding out they've done that drops the more beastial-ursine-(galka)-like traits of the last decade.

(Smallest % played race across all regions, I know I'm not the only one feeling incredibly defeated that any feedback we give will result in nothing because of that... the most consistent plea across roe players from the JP feedback thread has been 'we're the smallest playerbase but we deserve just as much care'.)

I concur.

It's so asinine. Why even have different races at all when they all become smoothed over and flattened into Hyur and Big Hyur and Hyur Lite? The lalafell facial mesh as it is now is also such a huge canary-in-the-coal-mine as to the Hyurification of every race due to the autoscaling shared mesh system they touted during one of the Fanfests. Essentially, in an effort to save time and resources, they just made a bigger mess and cost-sink in needing to fix it all (and damn well they NEED to fix it, and again not prioritize by most popular and played race, but please treat every race equally and with the same care.)

It's the same pitfall you see in CEOs wanting generative AI in everything, despite everyone down the pipeline screaming out that it doesn't even improve productivity. (And that's not even going into the environmental and ethical [mass plagiarism/theft] issues.) While it remains to be seen if any generative AI was used here, there are tools for upscaling that do work beautifully and aren't ethically unsound, but regardless, whatever used here for the character models ain't it.

I miss horribly how old roegadyn were, even as a viera player. It's legitimately soured so much of the good will I had for the dev team, or at least whoever decided this was the plan, followed through with it, didn't do any QA (or somehow the QA got lost along the pipeline), and released it in benchmark 1.0 and again on and on. It's the same consensus for every hellsguard critique I've seen, for what they want: jeweled/colored pupils again, ash nose marking darkened to what it was, normal map for face 2 fixed so the eyebrows aren't just painted on, and for all roe, noses flat and rectangular rather than the teardrop hyurification.

[Iscah]

Why even have different races at all when they all become smoothed over and flattened into Hyur and Big Hyur and Hyur Lite? The lalafell facial mesh as it is now is also such a huge canary-in-the-coal-mine as to the Hyurification of every race due to the autoscaling shared mesh system they touted during one of the Fanfests.

Can I please emphasise that it is not simply "Hyurification", it is specific-human-face-ification. My Hyur might still be a Hyur but she is not the same Hyur I had before.

Her eyes are a different shape, eyelashes swoop outwards instead of upwards, nose is completely different, cheeks less rounded and chin less pointed.

They might not be fancy race-specific traits but they're the normal things we use to tell one human face from another, and they are not adding up to the same person as before.

[Khryseis_Astra]

W O W

Her head is an entirely different shape. Like wtf? It's things like this that make me look at this "update" and think they didn't even try. That's just flat out an entirely different person on the right.

I know right? And like Velvina said, she doesn’t look bad, but she’s not my girl. And this shot definitely shows so many of the issues I’m having. Now that you mention it, her head does look longer in EW and more compact in DT, and I’m sure that could have a lot to do with things not looking or fitting right, especially with all the shape changes.

EW: Eyebrows higher and darker, eyes open full, eyeshadow applied to the correct part of the lid… lips full and pouty, bridge of nose has a curve up to the brow. She looks bright, inquisitive and friendly.
DT: Eyebrows lower and lighter, shape changed, eyeshadow changed, eyes look narrowed, bridge of nose is a straight thick line, lips reduced and reshaped. She looks perpetually bored, annoyed or pissed off, even when you try to use an emote with a smile.

[eohippus]

Can I please emphasise that it is not simply "Hyurification", it is specific-human-face-ification. My Hyur might still be a Hyur but she is not the same Hyur I had before.

Her eyes are a different shape, eyelashes swoop outwards instead of upwards, nose is completely different, cheeks less rounded and chin less pointed.

They might not be fancy race-specific traits but they're the normal things we use to tell one human face from another, and they are not adding up to the same person as before.

seconding this! I know male midlanders across the board seem to have been made "more masculine" (i.e. smaller eyes, thinner lips, etc) in a way that totally nerfed individual unique features. I think the best example of this "woah, this doesn't look like the same person at all" phenomenon for people who don't play as hyur is definitely Thancred's updated model ):

[Mr_Gucky]

To be honest, I'm glad that our feedback was responded to at all. The statement may be a little vague, but at least the main points that were mentioned most often here, such as the shape of the lips or the corners of the mouth, have been addressed. So we should be happy that our beloved characters might have a chance after all, even if it's only damage control in the end.

[Jaltaer]

I'm pretty disappointed in the announcement, tbh. I'd argue more than a good half of the complaints in this thread are specifically in regards to how many races' mouth options have been completely changed and/or remodeled, but the post barely mentions it and just focuses mostly jawlines and smiling animations... barely anything addressing how many characters have completely different mouth shapes from when they were made pre-DT, generally to their detriment, beyond "yeah we noticed you complaining about this". Instead we get like 6 paragraphs about... eyelashes?

[Turnintino]

Instead we get like 6 paragraphs about... eyelashes?

Right lol. And I'm not going to say the eyelashes don't matter -- they contribute to the overall impression of the eye shape, etc. -- but even on the Japanese side of the discussion, they're not a major talking point, relatively speaking. I think they singled it out solely because it was the one thing they had a clear-cut technical explanation for that also underplayed their bigger mistakes.