Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[CuteBucket]

ngl I am not even LOOKING at the cutscenes at this point in attempting to finish a playthrough. I already know it's gonna be upsetting no matter which alt I try. Just reading the text (which, ouch, wtf did they do to the FONT anyways??) and trying to ignore anything but the back of my character's head (which still looks mostly right at least, just NO FACE, no eyes, and for Twelvesake no looking at any of the SCALES) to just... get through it :/

remember when we used to put so much time into gpose? Anyone? :c

On the rare occasion these days I open up my Gpose/screenshot folder, I see a list of years. Inside each year, a file for a month. Inside each of those, screenshot after screenshot, trying different angles and lighting and poses, full of my memories of this game.

The last file is June 2024.

[Winyumi]

Here's hoping we aren't forgotten and that 7.2 brings a lot more fixes. /pray

[Heavenchild]

Today I wanted to reuse one of my Dunesfolk designs and I was really shocked again.
Please let me show you.

First how she looked before the update.





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And this is how she looks now:






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Of course there are still same things. But her overall look is completly different.
She used to look like a little cute pinky cheerful lady.
Now its..., a chubby face without any real expression, a sad mouth and washed out eyes. :C

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Please SE, make Dunesfolk great again. They suffer so much from the changes. But make it optional regarding to the people who like this dead look. I pray.

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All 4 again for better comparability:

[Khryseis_Astra]

Of course there are still same things. But her overall look is completly different.
She used to look like a little cute pinky cheerful lady.
Now its..., a chubby face without any real expression, a sad mouth and washed out eyes. :C

I use a much darker eye color, but that was one of the things I noticed immediately… it wasn’t like that in the first benchmark, but in the second, all the eyes had that dull cataract look to them, and it’s really noticeable with the lighter eye colors. And of course, the missing half of the upper lip on most races is even more noticeable when Lala mouths are already tiny to begin with!

Overall my Lala is still the best of my characters after the update, but they could still fix a few things!

Anxious to see if they mention anything in the next Live Letter, because they had said there were certain edits that would take them more time, so they wouldn’t be done until 7.2. Curious to see exactly what still remains to be fixed since they didn’t put out an exhaustive list, and whether or not those fixes are actually coming in 7.2 or will be pushed back again.

[glitteringcosmos]

Of course there are still same things. But her overall look is completly different.
She used to look like a little cute pinky cheerful lady.
Now its..., a chubby face without any real expression, a sad mouth and washed out eyes. :C

Man, I feel for you friend. She's still cute, but that's not the same character at ALL. It's especially noticeably in the mouth

Seeing the special site go live with nary a whisper of further updates, I really don't have any hope. Like Khry said above me, they'd mentioned they had more edits planned, but given how badly they've flubbed this entire thing I'd rather they just axe the whole thing and put the graphics back to 6.55 levels and save their shiny new graphics for the next mmo they release. I know that that is never going to happen, but... this is just so disheartening. I still gpose regularly, but it's just not the same. It's lost all character.

[glitteringcosmos]

I miss you, sunshine boy...

[lunartears]

Time for my monthly post about missing my WoL's original look. I miss the old facial expressions.

[Yeol]

I think I've used fantasia 5 times after the graphics update. Each time I notice something I don't like. It's mostly the colours for me.

[Argantaelle]

Today I wanted to reuse one of my Dunesfolk designs and I was really shocked again.

Your comparison screenshots clearly demonstrate the problem with base mesh unification over all races (maybe except for male Hrothgars). Lalafell faces now look as if someone took a Hyur, put one hand on the top of their head and the other on the chin, and pressed hard. Thus, the facial contours became heavier (the most prominent part of the cheeks moved down; it used to be much higher). The nose is very different; instead of a small and cute button, it turned into a misshapen and elongated Hyuran nose (you can almost see a nose bridge). Yeah, and the removal of hard-painted eye highlights made the eyes look dead. And even if the Lalafellin mouth is tiny, SE still managed to almost delete the upper lip (as they did with many other races).

I'm sorry for your loss.

P.S. The more I look at comparison portraits, the more I admire how good SE artists used to be. It's true the textures were blurry and the amount of polygons was not that high, but the artistic vision used to be so much better. Even though the amount of face features was limited, you could create characters with different personalities. Now most of the faces are kind of the same.

[glitteringcosmos]

Your comparison screenshots clearly demonstrate the problem with base mesh unification over all races.
P.S. The more I look at comparison portraits, the more I admire how good SE artists used to be. It's true the textures were blurry and the amount of polygons was not that high, but the artistic vision used to be so much better. Even though the amount of face features was limited, you could create characters with different personalities. Now most of the faces are kind of the same.

This!!! This is the problem exactly!!! They're trying to streamline the process to make things easier for themselves down the line, which I can understand, but not at the cost of character design. In unifying all the character base meshes, everything ends up being the same across the board, and we've been screaming at the top of our lungs for years how much we hate the watering down. It was bad when it was job design simplifying gameplay down to essentially all jobs in the same role playing the exact same way with different set dressings, and it's bad still now with character models. It really sucks because I'm sure the artists deserved the promotions they got moving on to other projects, but if this is the result of the "new blood" artists/developers, I'm sorry if this makes me sound like a crotchety old person, but get rid of them and bring back the old guard. I'm 100% behind the longer development cycle—the devs are people, too—but there needs to be something beneficial that comes from it, and so far we're not seeing that.

Instead of wasting all this time and money and energy on a frankly abysmal rollout of the graphical "update", which the vast majority of players hate, they could have invested that into improving other aspects of the game that are also sorely lacking; the story was bad, the English voice direction was bad (all of the NA cast had horrible direction, not just the memey lines, because we had some incredible talent this expac so it's not because the cast was bad), the content rollout schedule is bad, job balance and adjustments are bad... I could go on. It seems like so much of DT's woes stem from the fact that so much was wasted on this horrible graphical update and they're just doubling down on trying to fix it instead of cutting their losses and investing in something more worth the time. Just give up on this stupid update and give us back our characters, Square >:C