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

[HeyMcFly]

Adding my support as well- I love my blue miqo'te but the lighting, specifically in darker areas or heavily shaded You don't see her features unlike a pale skinned character
+1 Show us dark skinned and blue/grey skinned examples in the new lighting and please make necessary adjustments so all skin tones don't suffer from "favourable" lighting issues

[Ki00]

I really second this since I struggle with my different lighting situations in cutscenes as well. I mainly play my Duskwight characters which is already hard to see but worst case is my viera with the darkest skin tone. He simply disappears in many scenes even with the character lighting on max.
Examples from the inside ship cutscene at the beginning of Endwalker & in Ultima Thule

[WuzabowFuFu]

Glad to see someone bringing this up on the official forums!! Seeing as the next expansion takes place in a setting with many dark-skinned characters, I really hope they address this. If not for the sake of players whose toons have dark skin, then just as a general QoL improvement. Can you imagine going through Dawntrail cutscenes and every NPC who is a shade too dark can hardly be seen?

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

Seeing as the next expansion takes place in a setting with many dark-skinned characters
[...]
Can you imagine going through Dawntrail cutscenes and every NPC who is a shade too dark can hardly be seen?

I don't want to kill your hype, but so far we've only seen one NPC from the next expansion's setting in-game (6.5 MSQ) and from the little we've seen they were as white as can be... The CGI trailer shows a little variation in skintones (I see a black character at 2:16 and there's the Hyur girl at 2:22, another black one behind Thancred's arm), but personally I'm not holding my breath until we see in-game screenshots and videos with populated areas.

Radz-at-Han was a step in the right direction, but it still has a lot of light skinned characters, despite being inspired by a region of the world that is also predominantly populated by people with darker skin. I just had a look around and realized that most of the NPCs you are asked to talk to (cutscenes, vendors, etc) are part of what should be a minority. Interesting coincidence :^)

[Ziri_O]

These aren't my pics from Ultima Thule because I couldn't find those but you can imagine just from these how many times I had to play "Find The Bunny" in every screen. Including cutscenes. Other places that hold great distain in my heart: The HORRIBLE LIGHTING in Azys Lla, which also commits crimes against my bun. When you have to wait just for the right time of day to pray your character will look good in cutscenes...

[crystallineAbyss]

I agree with this, and we also need example of female xaela too.

Seriously, because I'm stuck in the camp of both dark skin and dark scales. I mentioned it in my earlier post but most people have the issue of disappearing, but there's also the issue of extreme washing out and it effects xaela more noticeably for some reason. But I'm not at all confident since they seem to think that auri players are white, blonde and raen.

[more_donuts]

Agreed with all of this. Since the materials are getting overhauled, there's no reason not to address how inconsistently and weirdly different skintones react to lighting. I've got a character with medium-tone skin and one with very dark skin; some areas wash them both out, others make my Viera disappear.

Daytime in the Peaks shows both of them pretty well...



...but nighttime in Ul'dah somehow washes them both out:




And the Crystarium does... this...




In other words: we ask that the devs please test the new character materials and shaders under many combinations of skintone and environment-- and then when lighting new areas, to take that into account as well. It's probably inevitable that there will be a few times and places that certain characters won't look good, but when it's always the same (dark skinned) characters and it happens in quite a large number of times and places, that's really not great. The 7.0 overhaul is a very good opportunity to fix this, so I really hope that it's taken as such.

[Mahdokht]

This is a great observation and I completely agree! I hope the devs listen because this is a really important topic.

[AnakhaSilver]

I also feel they should test scene like those of Shadowbringers on dark-skinned characters.

Wanna know what my dark-skinned character looks like in those scenes you're supposed to see glowing skin?



It's supposed to look glowy. Instead, it looks like she's just light-skinned with a weird texture. I KNOW this looks different for light-skinned characters. So they obviously didn't test this on dark-skinned.

[SarriaKadijah]

Please!! When playing thru Stormblood the scene with Raubahn in the Royal Gardens was really sad, you couldn't see either of us at all :/ it would go so far towards assuaging the worries of people who play dark-skinned characters, who have already had to deal with numerous issues that don't impact paler characters, to at least show previews of the new lighting. And, while you're at it, the lip glare for darker-skinned characters in environments with limited lighting (not diffuse lighting) is really obnoxious, so I hope the lighting changes fix that too.

Is *that* what it is? I'd noticed that my girl's lips looked really weird in some lighting but not others. It's made me consider changing the lip color more than once, but then I'd look again and it wasn't so weird. I keep forgetting about it so I never pinned down the cause, but that would be nice to have that fixed too.