I find the characters in this game really ugly/weird

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Well, when you purposefully make crappy snapshots like that, anything would look bad.

[HeyMcFly]

I agree with you on alot of points
The character creator is imo, outdated and lackluster and needs a QoL update- but that's why alot of players use mods. To fix what SquareEnix won't
The designers who would create hairstyles and characters need to go back and update our character creator.

Give us NPC hairstyles and allow players to make more interesting looking characters.

-Female Viera can choose thicker eyelashes
-New male Viera can choose freckles that are not bound to face paint
These features should be made available to the older races

Currently, Our Face paint only has one wearable option, it needs two or three (I want to have blush, freckles and eyeshadow)
Not every race can choose thick eyebrows, which they should be able to

At this point, I'd be happy just to get decent hairstyles. Even the contest hairstyles are really boring and do not appeal to me. The older hairstyles are not great either. Most of them look really similar to one another.
I'd like longer, wavy hair or curly hair and more unique and beautiful hairstyles. Distinguishable hairstyles that look great.

At this point, I just want Hilda's ponytail or Lyse's ponytail- I'd settle for those hairstyles and call it on trying to push for character creator updates
I'd post about requesting their hairstyles on other language forums but, I do not speak other languages and don't want to come off rude to the other communities on accident

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

Oh God did OP just use google translate? Japanese grammatical structure is so different to english. Even translating from english to german gets very messy, never mind an entirely unrelated language like japanese. Google translate is only good for very simple and short phrases, and even then it still gets it wrong.

EDIT: before anyone asks what I meant about translating english to german - english is a germanic language. It's from the same family of languages as german. Whereas japanese has zero relation to english aside from some borrowed words.

I don't know what he used, but his Japanese is riddled with grammatical mistakes, and his way to express himself is rude.
One of his replies got censored by the mods.

The fact remains, that this kind of posting makes the English speaking community look bad.

[Hysorn]

More or less, I think the female characters look about a thousand times better and more expressive, so no surprise that everyone and their mothers seem to either play female Miqo'te or Viera, but overall it's not all that bad, with enough work you can make males look decent too and they seem to demonstrate enough emotions, I don't really get the uncanny valley effect personally.

I still shudder whenever I remember the gorilla Humans, square hips Night Elves or fridge Draenei from WoW, FFXIV characters are a blessing in my eyes.

[TheMightyMollusk]

WoW has a very "American comic book" aesthetic, while FFXIV is more anime-styled. It's apples and oranges.

Also, y'know, WoW is almost 20 years old. And based on aesthetics from even older games.

[KizuyaKatogami]

It's fun that WoW players come here and say the chars look ugly/weird when every char in WoW look like... But, Yea, I like playing here, so I'm going to refrain from my wording. But seriously, even a human without a beard looks like someone with grave Harmynta and has a fore head large enough to land a 747 on it.
in the end, FF14 chars is a work of art in comparison to WoW.

At least WoW has updated its character creator and characters. What has 14 done in that regard exactly? Took 8 years to get a stubble to even be recognized. Never played WoW btw only 14 but i greatly dislike when people resort to the whole “WoW vs 14” argument. Both games have their ups and downs. 14 is starting to look greatly outdated compared to the upcoming mmo’s, and it’s character creator flat out sucks. Even the male viera i’m looking forward to really don’t look all that different to the females. Pure laziness on SE’s part.

[TheMightyMollusk]

At least WoW has updated its character creator and characters. What has 14 done in that regard exactly? Took 8 years to get a stubble to even be recognized.

WoW also took ten years to do it. Vanilla launched in 2004, updated character models came in 2014, with the launch of Warlords of Draenor (and didn't actually finish all of them in time for launch, a few came later in patches).

[KizuyaKatogami]

WoW also took ten years to do it. Vanilla launched in 2004, updated character models came in 2014, with the launch of Warlords of Draenor (and didn't actually finish all of them in time for launch, a few came later in patches).

Right, yet we still have races that can’t wear hats… it’s 2021.

[Tsiron]

I don't like WoW's art style and I wish they'd updated their designs back when they did their models, but you have to concede they actually had the guts to give players some unconventional races (... well, the males, at least) to choose from, Draenei, Worgen, Tauren, Trolls etc.

Honestly even FFXI's races got all of their (minimal) weirdness sanded off in the transition to FFXIV: Mithra used to have weird hair patterns, cat noses and etc., Elvaan were even lankier, Galka had tails, that kind of stuff. Makes me really curious how Au Ra would've looked had they been in that game?

[RitsukoSonoda]

I agree with you on alot of points
The character creator is imo, outdated and lackluster and needs a QoL update- but that's why alot of players use mods. To fix what SquareEnix won't
The designers who would create hairstyles and characters need to go back and update our character creator.

Give us NPC hairstyles and allow players to make more interesting looking characters.

-Female Viera can choose thicker eyelashes
-New male Viera can choose freckles that are not bound to face paint
These features should be made available to the older races

Currently, Our Face paint only has one wearable option, it needs two or three (I want to have blush, freckles and eyeshadow)
Not every race can choose thick eyebrows, which they should be able to

At this point, I'd be happy just to get decent hairstyles. Even the contest hairstyles are really boring and do not appeal to me. The older hairstyles are not great either. Most of them look really similar to one another.
I'd like longer, wavy hair or curly hair and more unique and beautiful hairstyles. Distinguishable hairstyles that look great.

At this point, I just want Hilda's ponytail or Lyse's ponytail- I'd settle for those hairstyles and call it on trying to push for character creator updates
I'd post about requesting their hairstyles on other language forums but, I do not speak other languages and don't want to come off rude to the other communities on accident

To be fair. they went from FFXI which basically just let you chose a total of 8 heads for each race/gender combo as it's entire character creator process at the time to what we have in FFXIV when the game launched. The issue with revamping the character creator in this title in regards to body shape options at least probably isn't the character editor itself but the actual item database of body slot gear items that exists that probably would need to be reformatted or altered to work with new slider options. New face editing options would be nice and likely less work to implement in theory at least but that kind of hinges on how code works in regards to facial expressions and animations. However if they were to at least add new facial options it would most likely cause a very noticeable spike in fantasia sales.

I've never been a huge fan of the character art style of WoW. I get it was derived from unit portraits and sprites from the warcraft games. The smaller portraits and sprites in those titles didn't really bother me because of the type of game it was. It didn't translate well to me into an MMO where everything is viewed much closer. I actually prefer the dated FFXI visuals over WoW even after it's enhancements a few years ago. However visual appeal is all subjective to individual tastes. I used to joke with ppl when that WoW movie came out that the reason there is no FFXIV movie is because a movie company couldn't make an FFXIV movie look better visually than the game like they could with WoW.