Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[LuciaMirain]

Can something be done about the lips on Male (Sea Wolf in particular) Roegadyn? They are strangely glossy after the Dawntrail changes. It looks like they all have lip gloss on and is especially noticeable on Face 1. It was not like this at all before Dawntrail and kind of ruins the way my old Roegadyn used to look.

YES PLEASE I HATE the gloss. Like I really hate it. I want matted lips. Lips dont SHINE IRL without any gloss added to them.

[Shnrnr]

I never thought I'd see the day, but my WoL is officially back from the dead:


Whatever they changed was subtle, but she finally has a personality again and no longer looks permanently stoned. So thanks to the devs for doing right by my Elezen. Hoping other folks get their WoLs back, too.

[RedLolly]

I tried to remake my old Elezen and it's. So, so, SO close that I feel she's finally translated to HD. They absolutely did *something*. It made me a little emotional, haha.

[Argantaelle]

I'm very glad for Elezen ladies

As for my face 4 mouth 2 Elezen, she is good enough, but I'd rather have her lower lip reduced and the permanent lip gloss removed (she had smaller lips in EW). But I can live with these changes, especially after SE corrected her mouth a little bit in 7.3.

[Kiara_Mela]

I've not seen anyone mention it yet, but Keeper of the Moon female face 3 used to have an area of freckles / redness across the upper cheeks and nose that I thought was really cute, and that's gone entirely with Dawntrail. The new face 3 has extremely "flat" skin with no texture or colour variation that tends to make it look like I'm wearing heavy makeup, especially combined with what they did to the eyes that made the mascara look significantly more pronounced (unclear how much this is the eyelashes vs the change to eye shape?). This has been by far the most significant change for me, in terms of how my character feels, and I really hope it can be fixed. I miss my cute freckles!


(face 3, jaw 3, eye 6, eyebrow 2, nose 3, mouth 3)

My face stripes are also pulled back a little and fade out on the end, which I dislike for reasons similar to disliking the attempt to reduce the cute fangs. I'm a cat, my cat features should be front and center, y'know? Like the freckles / skin texture variation, they add character.

All of the above contributes to a sense of my face being physically flatter -- I can't tell whether this is an actual geometry change or just there being a lot less shading and variation highlighting facial contours.

My face also feels rounder, but while there's been a small geometry change there, most of the effect there comes from the lighting no longer casting shadows on my jaw in the same way, making it look significantly rounder from the front. This seems like probably the same underlying issues as the face flatness thing.

I don't super love the eye shape changes or the lil mouth dimples, but plenty of others have gone into the issues there already.

Also you can't tell in the aetherial sea lighting above, but my hair colour used to have an orange tint to it under most lighting conditions, but is now chocolate brown. It doesn't seem possible to get closer than this to the colour I used to have, unfortunately.

On a positive note, the high resolution hair texture is really nice, it looks a lot better than the old one.

Looks like still no changes in 7.3 for me. I briefly got hopeful, since other people have been seeing some improvement, but I fear they might have decided this is just fine. I just wanna go back to having a (relatively) natural appearance, not one that's got heavy makeup baked in. Having makeup as an option makes sense, but it shouldn't be baked into your skin texture, and having it added to a face that wasn't heavy on it before sucks a lot.

[Ryuukishi]

There's a problem with my Midlander Hyur female's hair clipping in the temples that wasn't there before this latest patch.

After:


Before:

[lunartears]

From the lodestone post about mod usage:



I hope it includes the request for EW faces. In the mean time, it looks like it won't land you in too much trouble if you seek alternative means of fixing the problem cilent-side.

[Gaddes]

In the wake of all this mod discussion, it's particularly infuriating that there are absolutely mods that reinstate EW faces, but SE still remains deaf to all the complaints about face changes. They could get a lot of goodwill back by adding back the options they took away as additional options; maybe they could do that for 8.0, but honestly that's a long ass time to wait for something we should've already gotten back by now. I wouldn't be surprised to see folks give up and just opt for imperfect mods locally in their own games (in Yoshi-P's own "don't show don't tell" manner) that at least come closer to recapturing their WoL's faces than whatever we have now. But to be honest, I don't really want people to have to resort to that, because then SE would feel like they're absolved from actually addressing these issues.

[Sairaag]

Yeah, I'm worried because of the mod discussion. I worry that SE will eventually decide that we can just discreetly use local mods or get used to the new faces. They're clearly not happy to keep working on this.

But for me, watching the latest Cosmic Exploration cutscenes once again reminded me how much I'm not over the changes to my main character. His face was more tolerable in the MSQ because of the more detailed facial animations, but the CE scenes relied more on the incredibly tired default expression.

[Luluna]

Still struggling with my Midlander female and hate what they have done to face 1&2 I hope they just give us a better character creator with way more choice we have, including body shape and far more face options and makeup and hair styles. Not everyone wants to use mods even discreetly or is able like I am console so where does that leave players on consoles? I never have used mods and never needed to but I wish we had more choice.