[ Graphical Update Feedback ] Examples of Darker Skinned Characters/Darker Lighting

[Eriyu]

Some armor sets end up being unintentionally hilarious if you play a dark-skinned Duskwight like me. I have found out that the skin tone I picked out basically matches the Slate Gray dye. The Hailstorm armor set looks ridiculous because 90% of the fabric is invisible.

Mine's not very dark, but I've always thought of this as a positive LOL. I can create some pretty neat illusions with greys that match my WoL's skin, like the Omicron Trousers.

[Rudje]

Full support; my main is (as you can see) a ghost but the majority of my alts have much darker skin and the visibility for them in cutscenes is really bad. Seeing what the reworks look like with very dark skin would be a load off my mind.

[Turtledeluxe]

bh 100% is not ideal there generally speaking but for Ultima Thule, it looks accurate to me.

The cutscene image looks bad though. Its not the worst but I think they should toy with a cutscene slider.

I'm also viewing the images on an OLED at full brightness though not sure if that makes a difference.

[AdvennaAvis]

This is something I've been thinking about a lot too when seeing all the stuff about the graphical update. Love my character, and normally I adjust the lighting as much as I can to keep my character pretty visible, but in cutscenes I definitely she gets a bit washed out depending on the weather, time of day, etc. (Ultima Thule especially)

Character lighting 0


Character Lighting at 100


Cutscene comparison in UT


Other examples from other areas (and when I was Viera briefly)




I'm very curious to see the updates as we get closer to the next expansion, but this is definitely something I'm most interested in.

[Niwurr]

Yeah I'll echo all that's being said so far. My WoL and most of my alts are medium-dark skinned and all of them are cold-toned too (grey/blue) And we have no clue what those tones will look like!

Even in relatively "well lit" scenarios the balance is already tough to find for those with cold undertones.

(see here, my alt and my bestie when we got hitched, the shirts are almost getting washed out, but our skins are barely lit lol)

Aside from just being a dark blob I really wonder how the cool skintones will be told to adjust to the SSS being integrated in the shaders. I particularly wonder how the backface scattering will look on like... they blueish grey duskwight ears?

^ That is what I'm referring to
Like obviously for "normal" tones it'll skew reddish, so will grey-blue ears skew pink? or just... lighter grey/blue? (which imo would look quite awkward)

[NaiaLalita]

I would also love for the devs to show off more of the variety of skin tones that the game offers. Darker skin tones definitely have the greatest visibility concerns, but I've also (as a green sea wolf) complained for years about how a lot of environments have lighting that is only designed with white/light-skinned characters in mind. Seeing some skin tone variety in the update previews would be a solid indicator that the graphics update is accounting for this feedback!

[Vesplume]

I play a few dark-skinned characters and am only cautiously optimistic about the graphical update. There's been a lot of talk of how the shadows are being improved but not so much about the lighting in the graphic update. It's great that the different races offer such a variety of skin tones to choose from, but we really shouldn't be having major cutscenes where main characters are so difficult to see. It's not just WoLs either - Erichthonios is a very expressive character but is difficult to see for most of the Pandaemonium raids due to how dark his surroundings are. I keep hoping one of the discussions of the graphical update will include an updated screenshot from that storyline, since he's an obvious candidate for trying to balance darker lighting with darker skintones.

I fully support OP.

[crystallineAbyss]

I was actually just about to make a thread on this! I'm extremely concerned about the lighting since I haven't seen any characters anywhere near my player character's original skintone, so I doubt we'll see what she has right now. I swear I only saw her because of the limbal rings in places like Ultima Thule, it was comical. I have more of an issue with how xaela are lit specifically, because this happens regardless of race - as I've got a lot of alts with similar skintones and I've run them through the same cutscenes - but Xaela are....weird? And get washed out really egregiously? Most dark skinned Xaela I know have fantasia'd darker at least once, if not twice because of it.


I tried to find a screen with the actual color I chose, but it's not even represented in these - it's supposed to be a warm and darker tan. It could get surprisingly dark in some areas, but getting to Shadowbringers was the final straw for me and had me fantasia because what is that TToTT I could hardly focus on the intro because my poor girl was washed right to white.

I fanta'd darker, but even then...

It's still a wild variable. I'm on a third fantasia for skintone adjustment and the second darkest you can be for femra, since the darkest is desaturated and tinted green for some reason (but also they need to get over their colorist nonsense of women being lighter on average and men being darker on average - we should have the exact same pallets). But even with this, I find my character still looking like she has her old skintone from when I first made her and not her current one. It's especially bad in places like the First and Gridania (god even the lighting is racist), but the Dravanian areas and surprisingly Shirogane and Gyr Abania aren't too bad. It's just such a shame, because it's such an egregious lighting problem it takes me out of the moment more often than not. And with them almost borderline refusing to show off darker characters, I'm worried this is going to get worse.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

Oh my god the lighting examples in Ultima Thule are so bad I can feel the pain from this side of the screen...

Aside from just being a dark blob I really wonder how the cool skintones will be told to adjust to the SSS being integrated in the shaders. I particularly wonder how the backface scattering will look on like... they blueish grey duskwight ears?

^ That is what I'm referring to
Like obviously for "normal" tones it'll skew reddish, so will grey-blue ears skew pink? or just... lighter grey/blue? (which imo would look quite awkward)

I've been wondering about this too! I think even beyond what SE or their engine is capable of, with the new gamedev trends of using "realistic lighting" like Subsurface Scattering and PBR (Physically based rendering) there's a real problem of testing how everything looks on white skin, and then just applying a brown color to the material, expecting dark skin to reflect light in exactly the same way...

I wouldn't be surprised if all skintones would just turn translucent pink/orange when set against a light like in this screenshot :I

Adding a short video and an article that talk about this problem in more detail.

[SoraMiii]

The devs are clearly putting a lot of work into this update, so it would be good to get some assurance that they're not forgetting about darker skin tones in their testing. It is a bit worrying that the dev panel deep dive did not feature any darker skin tones, even though all the player races have a variety of darker tones to choose from.

I'm glad that they at least showcased "less human" skin tones like green but we definitely need more previews before this update goes live.