Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Another live letter come and gone with more silence on this. It's incredibly frustrating.

It's just what I was expecting since 6.58. Probably enough people have stopped complaining by now and they take this moment of silence as an opportunity to sweep the issue under the rug. Fantasia? That was just a smokescreen.

Prove me wrong, SE. I wish...

[Iscah]

Again I was using alts to collect the seasonal outfit this week in the faith that I'll get to use them again, but it's just sad. Every single one of them. I hate the plasticky look of darker skin now and the shadows feel unnatural – I don't know how it's being calculated but it's like light is falling on the front of their face more strongly and then both sides are in shadow at once. I don't understand what's going on.

I really wonder if they got in a mess with responding to the first benchmark feedback where they were simultaneously telling us "the lighting issues are from the environment because we didn't update it" and "we're getting rid of the first benchmark's soft lighting on the characters because you asked for it" (despite that feedback being based on the lighting they told us wasn't right) and perhaps features that were designed to work with the soft lighting were not re-adjusted.

The radio silence on the matter is concerning after they made that post specifically saying they would work to fix things – up until now I've been willing to sit quiet and see what they produce from that promise, but as we get close to the promised date there is still no mention of it.

If I want to be very generous, I'll guess that maybe they hope they can slip it in quietly and the people who didn't notice/care about the first change won't care about this one either. But I'm certainly feeling more nervous the closer we get.

[EstelleCere]

Agreed as a fellow Face 2, I still really just... don't like looking at my character anymore the way I used to and it's genuinely upsetting. Like yeah it's just pixels, but they're pixels I got invested in!
Also, man, honestly, looking at the gif you quoted... legitimately everything looks better in the 6.xx version, even the lighting. It's really tragic that this "upgrade" feels like it's only had the opposite effect for a very significant and vocal part of the playerbase.

I remember posting in a few threads back when the benchmark came out, and as my main char is usually a face 2 au ra I have had since 2020 (I am just a miqo at the time of writing this lol) I still miss my old char's face. I genuinely think the lips getting changed to look back to how they used to would fix my gripes with it since everything else of the face looks more updated, but I doubt they will try to give back to the old lips (or face in general) they used to have.

I also have this same complaint with the lips for face 3 sun/moon female miqo. The lips now look like they have some weird creepy smile all the time, and not like how my miqo used to look. I am at a point where sometimes I don't even like looking at her in certain lighting because of how drastic the lip change feels, and she was my first ever char I made when I started the game back in 2019. It just sucks that they changed the chars after saying they would not change them drastically, because I know that me and many other people have gotten attached to our character over the years. I hope eventually they will fix it or make the lips at least look a little bit similar to the the ones before the DT update.

[Cherrizini]

I hope they fix viera's noses this patch. They promised we'd get it in 7.1 and no changes were made once 7.1 patch notes and patch dropped.

[Turnintino]

If I want to be very generous, I'll guess that maybe they hope they can slip it in quietly and the people who didn't notice/care about the first change won't care about this one either.

Based on the way they tried to publicly underplay the issue from the start, this is what I'm betting on. But I won't hold my breath.

[eohippus]

the more time goes on the more it really truly feels like the changes to mouth/lip shapes are the biggest sticking point for me, at least with my midlander. like he looks worse overall still to me than he did before but the mouth being different really throws it all off. I think this is also the case for thancred, who is one of the npcs who seems hardest hit by the update. really hope that this will shift again in 7.2 but at this point I'm just deeply disappointed.

[Daralii]

the more time goes on the more it really truly feels like the changes to mouth/lip shapes are the biggest sticking point for me, at least with my midlander. like he looks worse overall still to me than he did before but the mouth being different really throws it all off. I think this is also the case for thancred, who is one of the npcs who seems hardest hit by the update. really hope that this will shift again in 7.2 but at this point I'm just deeply disappointed.

Instead of fixing his current model's face in 7.1, they went back and copied the new face to his ARR and HW models. They're content to double down and wait for people to give up.

[Jaltaer]

I've commented on it before in this thread (multiple times at this point...) but I think the part that's most frustrating is they're completely ignoring what seems to be the majority of the complaints about the changes. Which is to say - the mouths. The last acknowledgement they made of the complaints about the updates they spent about 5 paragraphs explaining design decisions about eyelashes, and saying nothing about the fact that almost every character's mouth has been completely changed in shape, despite us being told that our character's wouldn't have any significant changes to the actual structure of their face.


The worst part? I don't even see what the point was of making those changes! Okay, mouths now have... something like 22 bones, but I'll be honest, I watched every cutscene in DT (for better or for worse), and if the purpose of these changes was to make emote more expressive... I sure as hell didn't see it, because every animation looked either the same, or downright worse. Smiles look creepy now, and a lot of the other mouth expressions just look like the character is straining or struggling to make said emote.
Oh but I guess maybe they can do more funny GMod style faces in Hildibrand now, I guess that was worth butchering everyone's faces for....

[SongOfTheWind]

No, the point of morphing everyone into one head and erasing unique distinctive racial features was for the devs to be able to give us more equal content, that’s what they explained during the fanfest. You know, like viera/hrothgar hats. Oh, wait..

[TheDustyOne]

I've commented on it before in this thread (multiple times at this point...) but I think the part that's most frustrating is they're completely ignoring what seems to be the majority of the complaints about the changes. Which is to say - the mouths. The last acknowledgement they made of the complaints about the updates they spent about 5 paragraphs explaining design decisions about eyelashes, and saying nothing about the fact that almost every character's mouth has been completely changed in shape, despite us being told that our character's wouldn't have any significant changes to the actual structure of their face.


The worst part? I don't even see what the point was of making those changes! Okay, mouths now have... something like 22 bones, but I'll be honest, I watched every cutscene in DT (for better or for worse), and if the purpose of these changes was to make emote more expressive... I sure as hell didn't see it, because every animation looked either the same, or downright worse. Smiles look creepy now, and a lot of the other mouth expressions just look like the character is straining or struggling to make said emote.
Oh but I guess maybe they can do more funny GMod style faces in Hildibrand now, I guess that was worth butchering everyone's faces for....

I can appreciate them wanting to add more face bones for better expressions, but the old expressions we had were more than serviceable, and the new faces had some uncanny expressions for a good long while. They're better now, but they're still not quite to how they were before the update.

They were better off adding cape bones or extra hair bones.