Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[MoonNoire]

Since my last post, we've had three more months of our eyelids being busted. Without looking up 7.2's release date, I think it's 13 months now? More than a year.
I didn't come back here to complain about the eyelids after 7.4 dropped because what's the point? The only shot we're gonna get at them fixing the eyelids is gonna be 8.0... which is what, 10 months away? So 23 whole ass months of them breaking an immersive character feature in an update and never bothering to fix it.

If they fix it in 8.0.

Fanfest is approaching and I have a hard time getting excited for the keynote because it's going to be a teaser trailer, Yoshida overpromising or outright lying to our faces for an hour and a half, and then selling us merch for the last 30 minutes.

Don't worry, we'll get our fixed eyelids, fixed faces, fixed everything alongside that 50% increase in content rewards Yoshida promised for 7.3 onwards...!

Those rewards are coming! Aaaaaany patch now...

[MayuAmakura]

I am going to give this a bump. I just cannot feel happy with my character atm the changes to Midlander females really shows and although some of the update is nice there is still a lot left to be desired.

I had a play around with other races and Viera have their noses always been that bad? they look so snout like and not nice at all. Miqo'te have become even more plastic looking and Midlander's have one face which is the best but everyone is using it lol so it feels like we have lost the other faces as they have been ruined.

I do love the Au ra but you really have to mess around and face one is bad and their eyes look bug like which is a shame. I use face 3 with the big horns as that face is really lovely but the horns need to be able to be swapped and they also messed the mouths up on them.

I had a play on a Highlander female they seem to have been improved as their skin looks a bit cleaner but they are so masculine it is a shame they stand the way they do and they look like they want to knock you out lol which I find a little off putting.

I just wish they would have a look at what they messed up as I really want my old face back on my Midlander >.<

Most will use Hyur face 5 and that's the one you see everywhere. The 2nd face that is popular is face 1 but unfortunately in DT face 1 got butchered so hard that made many quit or fantasia to something else. My Hyur has had face 1 the entire time and she looked way different in Endwalker. She didn't have eye bags that are quite noticeable, chinese eyes when smiling / emotes and so on.

Ever since DT came, my Hyur got massacred. I just couldn't recognize it anymore. The eyes shape has been changed so everytime she smiles (or any emote that involves smiling), her eyes shut down so much that it looks like chinese eyes or something. Then she had abnormal eye bags that are visible. Devs did "fix" this by reducing it a bit but eye bags are still visible and very frustrating. Specially since no other Hyur face has eye bags except face 1 ???

Even here on forums, zoom in entirely on my face and you can see that I have eyebags, meanwhile your face (5 I assume) doesn't have them or are slightly there but not visible.

This isn't just Hyur issue. Other races got massacred as well. The poor upscaling and AI usage is just nuts. Yet we see threads popping up "if devs ever use AI I quit", how ironic...

[MayuAmakura]

I would be one of those few people that would rather have no graphics update but that's because of personal taste. However, If there *has* to be a graphics update I would ideally like there be a way to opt out of certain changes and for my character's face to not change like it has (retain the old appearance).

I'm tired. My activity in the game is now tied to major patches, but it's been a month so let me repeat it again:

This is my WoL:


This is not my WoL:


This isn't an Au Ra to me, this is someone pretending to be an Au Ra.

And I'm glad you still post here faiarrow, your posts always say exactly what I'm thinking.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Just look at your char smiling now and before. Total difference and same is happening to Hyur race and probably others. I just don't understand how someone thought this was good.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Most will use Hyur face 5 and that's the one you see everywhere. The 2nd face that is popular is face 1 but unfortunately in DT face 1 got butchered so hard that made many quit or fantasia to something else. My Hyur has had face 1 the entire time and she looked way different in Endwalker. She didn't have eye bags that are quite noticeable, chinese eyes when smiling / emotes and so on.

Ever since DT came, my Hyur got massacred. I just couldn't recognize it anymore. The eyes shape has been changed so everytime she smiles (or any emote that involves smiling), her eyes shut down so much that it looks like chinese eyes or something. Then she had abnormal eye bags that are visible. Devs did "fix" this by reducing it a bit but eye bags are still visible and very frustrating. Specially since no other Hyur face has eye bags except face 1 ???

One of my original characters was a Midlander Hyur face 1. She was the character I started the game with! The very last time they did edits it looked like they tried to minimize the eye bags, but didn’t really succeed. And the eye shapes and mouth shapes were completely changed and never fixed. It’s just not the same person! Not to mention the massacre that was Highlander face 2… I had chosen Highlander face 2 because it resembled my Midlander the most, now it looks more similar to Roe facial structure.

I’ve since created a Midlander face 2 that I like, with the exception of her mouth… they just didn’t get the lip and mouth shapes right at all! Weirdly enough, the ones I’m using look almost normal from a side view of her face, but when you look at them straight on, it’s that variation of a Pizza Hut logo that so many seemed to get. Both my old Hyurs (Mid and Highlander) used to have nice pouty lips, with a lot more realistic texture than the so-called upgrade gave them.

I’m really hoping 8.0 does expand the character creator so I can get something at least closer to what I had… but they really need to work on these lips!

[Heavenchild]

After them being so silent, I guess it's over. They have no true plans to make it good again. Just ruined a lot of faces, and think it looks good. That's what I honestly feel about it. Sorry, I know it sounds rude.

[KihyiFelhede]

This is my WoL:


This is not my WoL:

Honestly I think this is a really good example of where the update exactly went wrong. The new model looks great, it's not wonky or pixelated or anything like that. It is technically competent, though in-game there are some issues with bones. However, they look like completely different customization options with the same faceplate and cosmetics. The entire face shape is rounder, the nose and lip sculpts are different shapes, the eye texture seems to be a matter of opinion on whether its better or worse but there is a notable difference regardless of whether you like it or not, arguably the emotion animation has changed as well but that could just be an optical illusion from the drastic difference in face. If you gave the two models different cosmetics they could stand next to each other and generally not be clocked for looking similar. AFAIK with the exception of the miqo'te brows that had bugged bones/mapping the squenix policy has been to remain completely silent on tweaks from an artistic perspective. This is also a big mistake if you ask me. Even just acknowledgement of dissatisfaction goes a long long way, because when they don't (as they are now) it's more than reasonable to assume they don't have any plans to address it.

[orcane]

Most will use Hyur face 5 and that's the one you see everywhere. The 2nd face that is popular is face 1 but unfortunately in DT face 1 got butchered so hard that made many quit or fantasia to something else. My Hyur has had face 1 the entire time and she looked way different in Endwalker. She didn't have eye bags that are quite noticeable, chinese eyes when smiling / emotes and so on.

Ever since DT came, my Hyur got massacred. I just couldn't recognize it anymore. The eyes shape has been changed so everytime she smiles (or any emote that involves smiling), her eyes shut down so much that it looks like chinese eyes or something. Then she had abnormal eye bags that are visible. Devs did "fix" this by reducing it a bit but eye bags are still visible and very frustrating. Specially since no other Hyur face has eye bags except face 1 ???

Even here on forums, zoom in entirely on my face and you can see that I have eyebags, meanwhile your face (5 I assume) doesn't have them or are slightly there but not visible.

This isn't just Hyur issue. Other races got massacred as well. The poor upscaling and AI usage is just nuts. Yet we see threads popping up "if devs ever use AI I quit", how ironic...

I feel you (and the people you quoted/those who have the same issue). My main has been a face 1 midlady since ARR early access, I barely ever changed anything but my height. The DT launch was devastating - I was already afraid after I didn't recognize my character anymore in the DT benchmark, but I was running that on a different computer and was hoping my settings were wrong or that devs would fix this by the time they'd launch the expansion. No.

Since 7.0 I've been hiding the atrocious "update" to my face behind visors and masks, and later behind giant facewear/sunglasses. This is someone completely different and yet everyone praised the devs for their "glowups" and gushed about the increased fidelity, texture resolution, bone structure etc. Orcane 7.0 looks completely wrong compared to Orcane 2.0-6.58, unless you're face blind. I can almost convince myself it's alright in very dark environments, but as soon as the new lighting engine brings out the giant eye bags, bulbous nose, awful eye makeup, weirdly puffy cheeks and other tiny and not so tiny incongruences, I'm done.

I also play a face 2 midlander who got hit by DT a bit less. She's close enough to the Endwalker look so it doesn't bother me, and I don't see why they didn't manage the same with face 1. Although I'm sure if I were to look at the videos I captured at the end of EW of all my alts, they would all look off now, even after almost two years of "tweaks" (actually I just did this and now I'm sad )

[faiarrow]

100%! The way the update was promised to us by the developers was basically what you're saying: the same characters, but with higher fidelity, while 'preserving the overall look that you know.' If they'd done this from the get-go, threads like this likely wouldn't have gotten as big as they have because of dissatisfaction within the community. The downgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 was handled with far more grace and communication.


(Feb PLL, 2022)


(Fanfest 2023)

At the start they were somewhat receptive to feedback for the first previews we got, but then the benchmark happened which was the first chance a lot of us had to see the actual updates outside of their "ideal lighting" shots they showed in PLLs and the backpedaling into doubling down into no longer telling us what they're adjusting now is just disheartening.

I've been fighting for femroe eyes to be restored since October 2023 because that was the first time we got to see a hellsguard in the new engine and it just... destroyed me realising that my character would be disappearing entirely with the changes to come only to have those fears 100% realised circa benchmark into DT base.

Yoshida often talks about how he's "planning for the next 10 years of XIV" and it makes it very hard for me to consider a place for my character, my participation in that world, if it's done with her bizarro doppelgänger. It's worse knowing that the supposed character creator update with the sprinkles PR babble that he's given so far about it being in development amounts to feeling like 8.0 is the true make or break on whatever they're going to double down on, because as a community I don't think we genuinely can even trust anything out of his mouth at all.

Casual reminder with both another PLL and FanFest coming up in the next two weeks that the dev team can, do, and will lie per the above.

Until we get to try any supposed updates to the character creator ourselves:
Don't believe their PR.

I'm not even sorry to be so blunt about it anymore. I'm tired, and I miss my character and having any actual spark for this game and world. I'm tired of being ransomed with a subscription for feedback they have not said to stop giving with this being the only supposedly acknowledged place for it going by the JP side of the situation.


This is still not acceptable in any capacity.

[lunartears]

I haven't played this game in 4 months, I'm really glad that everyone is still talking about the state of things.
I'm looking forward to hearing nothing about the situation improving at Fanfest!
Please give me back the original Au Ra...

[IndraSyngiwyb]

I fell in love with her as she was. This plastic doll that is pretending to be her will never be the character I loved for all these years.