Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[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

[yesnt]

I am late to the party! Because I did not really want to alter my character, I gave it a lot of time to let it sink. Since the graphics update, Hyur with light eyes look like they are going to murder you in your sleep. The eyes are so uncanny, it's not okay. Unfortunately, when I try to go ONE shade darker... it's not light blue anymore. The color palette does not offer enough options for a satisfying customization. This could be easily solved by letting us pick our own RGB.

Another thing I do not understand is: why is the texture still low resolution? They managed to update the AuRa horns (which is great), but a lot of other faces still suffer from poor skin textures. It's a blurry, patchy mess.

[Hatsuoki]

-snip-

If you swapped the images and told me the old ones were post-graphics update, I would have believed you. The new one looks like she's from a different, older game.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

It's interesting how there's such a difference in perception over the new and old eyes. Your description is exactly how I would describe the old eyes. The new ones are a night and day improvement and look vastly more "alive" in my opinion.

It makes sense that their appearance would vary depending on the lighting conditions but I haven't encountered a situation where they look bad in my view. Is there a specific zone or location you're thinking of that I can check out?

I'm doing the new event quest and remembered about this, since it just gave me a perfect example:

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

And I'm posting these separately since it's not specific to eyes, but in the christmas event and new year event the lighting on character's faces in cutscenes was also a mess:

[Heavenchild]

I also wonder why midlanders still look like they have skin irritations or dirt on their cheeks. SE WHY? Why they are forced to look so unpolished?

It's possible to conceal the redness it a little bit with a skin-colored blush, but the dirty/unhealthy looking stains stay.



(*edit:
The picture was taken in editor mode. Unfortunately almost every of my characters looks significantly worse in game.)

[Circonflexe]

So after these long months in DT - after a long time of waiting and hoping - after many attempts to maybe like my characters again at some point, I'm now speaking out here too. Especially because it is written too often that the silent majority would like the update.

In my case, the exact opposite is true. Before DT, I played FFXIV every day, farmed a lot of glam, set up houses, filled folders upon folders with screenshots of my characters and spent a lot of time in GPose.

All of that simply ended with the update and that also led to me becoming part of the "silent majority" - not because I think the update is great and pretty, but because I absolutely don't have a good time dealing with my FFXIV account in detail anymore.

I don't take screenshots anymore - in fact, I have made several backups of my old pictures because there can't be any new pictures of my lost characters - and that's around 20 characters in total, all of which (some more, some less) look significantly worse than before in my eyes. None of them appeal to me in the same way as before the update and I don't often admire other players characters either these days. I could write even more about the state of lighting in buildings - especially player-houses, but sadly I have resigned myself to it.

My main character may not have been as badly affected as others, but it affected everyone without exception - the question is actually just whether you like it, the question is not if it has happened. Should it have happened - whether you like it or not? In my opinion, no, because it's not fair to have the "winners" and the "losers" of the update fighting over this issue when none of us could have contributed to it or prevented it.

Of course, I'm glad that players who really like the update are reporting here - but I can't relate to that and, to be honest, at the end of the day, I don't get anything out of it if other people still like their characters and at the same time it completely takes the fun out of the game for me. So I apologize if the update that was nice for those people will be fixed after all at some point, but if it were up to me, I could have lived very well (probably better) without DT.

And that's despite the fact that I'm one of those who didn't think the story was that bad and actually enjoyed the quests - but that just can't make up for the worsened style in the long run for me.

I won't be posting screenshots to compare exactly which millimeter of a character's face I can't stand anymore - Square will know best what exactly was botched, and I don't see it as my job to analyze their work in more detail. Most of it has long been described in detail in other posts here, although I feel that far too little has been said about male characters, who were not treated any better than their female counterparts - especially for Hyur, but no less for others.