Character graphical changes are NOT in an acceptable state, please make it optional

[Anzaman]

As I said, it's impossible to please everyone.

Well, people are here to provide feedback and their opinions about the planned update, given that today was the first opportunity to see how our characters would look like with the possible update.

And pretty sure their intention was to keep characters as similar as possible, which kinda goes against the idea of changing character shapes and overall feeling of them.

[hiedra]

Question, without any sort of drama or arguments attached; I'm simply curious.

How many people plan to quit over these changes?

I doubt that many will quit. It'll be an adjustment. I played 1.0 and it was weird coming over to ARR and seeing how different everything looked. But you get used to it.

I do have some beef with the way my character looks because I feel they took away a lot of his distinct features to make him more "beautiful." But it's not worth quitting over. I read somewhere that they'll give free fantasia's so I'll use that to make adjustments to my character and to improve upon what I now have. It'll take a while to get used to. But ultimately it's not that big of a deal. Outside of taking screenshots I don't spend that much time looking at his face. It's just weird having this massive change after so many years of using the same character model.

[TheDruidOcelot]

Question, without any sort of drama or arguments attached; I'm simply curious.

How many people plan to quit over these changes?

well i havent pre-ordered Dawntrail, and at this point, i don't know if i will, unless square enix makes some kind of noise about fixing making my characters look like ENTIRELY different people. so. a conditional 1, with the caveat being "if the dawntrail msq ends up being an absurdly racist repeat of the blue mage quests, the quitting won't even be quietly disappointed, it will be loudly appalled"

[Rudje]

I doubt that many will quit. It'll be an adjustment. I played 1.0 and it was weird coming over to ARR and seeing how different everything looked. But you get used to it.

I do have some beef with the way my character looks because I feel they took away a lot of his distinct features to make him more "beautiful." But it's not worth quitting over. I read somewhere that they'll give free fantasia's so I'll use that to make adjustments to my character and to improve upon what I now have. It'll take a while to get used to. But ultimately it's not that big of a deal. Outside of taking screenshots I don't spend that much time looking at his face. It's just weird having this massive change after so many years of using the same character model.

I mean, a lot of these changes cannot be fixed with fantas. Au Ra are especially impacted as horns and faces are still linked, but most races have limited enough options that changing one detail means there's no recovery if you're trying to match--not to mention how you can't go darker if you're already on the darkest color options. I don't blame anyone for quitting.

I just don't know why they bothered making these changes instead of just upscaling.

[Tethan]

Question, without any sort of drama or arguments attached; I'm simply curious.

How many people plan to quit over these changes?

I came back to the game when I was very sick for Endwalker, because finally, after so many years since Fran appeared in Stormblood, I could play a male viera. I couldn't play much of Endwalker due to illness, but finally getting better, I come back to this, to my character soon being ruined. I only got one expansion to enjoy this character I have waited for for years. Even just a matter of principle, this is extremely disrespectful to the player base, making unilateral changes to characters without reason or any means to opt out. On top of issues with partyfinder after DC travel was added that was NOT been addressed, DT not having any great hooks in terms of story or gameplay content, it becomes rather hard to justify continuing to pay for this game, Squeenix's cash cow.

[Titor]

Yeah, I'm not going to be able to reconcile with the character I have had for 10 years now being aged up by 20+ years in what was supposedly just a "touch up". Literally all my male midlanders look like completely different people, their facial features are altered to the point of almost looking like highlanders.

What I have always liked about FFXIV is that their male humans do not look like your standard western game 30+ white guy, so having that change imposed upon my character feels a bit like a gut punch frankly!

I feel the same about my midlander. He looks like he aged a lot.

[CidHeiral]

Well, people are here to provide feedback and their opinions about the planned update, given that today was the first opportunity to see how our characters would look like with the possible update.

Which is why I explicitly encouraged everyone to do so in the original post.

And pretty sure their intention was to keep characters as similar as possible, which kinda goes against the idea of changing character shapes and overall feeling of them.

That is entirely subjective, and the reason they can't please everyone no matter what they do.

My point was leave feedback, but realize it's never going to be exactly your previous character or exactly what you want. At some point you're just going to have to deal with it, or in your case have a meltdown and quit apparently.

[Barzha]

i've mentioned it before, i'll mention it again. if it actually took them 2 years to make everyone look like smoothed over potatoes, then they shouldn't have bothered boasting about how "we don't want your characters to look like different people" and then take a pneumatic sander to the models removing things like m! elezen cheekbones, keeper miqo fangs, eyebrows on anyone with a hair color lighter than DARK BROWN, made a huge mess of dark skinned characters with an absurdly grey undertone, made everyone's skin look like the waxy texture of an embalmed corpse, killed the lighting from the eyes of races that had bright, nigh glowing eyes (miqote).

it looks like they used blender's smoothing tool after using an ai to increase polygon count.

the only things that actually look redone are clothing/armor textures. the actual bodies look SO MUCH WORSE. like a bad ai upscale.

This. This is the thing that bothers me the most. My character(sea wolf femroe) came out looking decent, but so many of my friends have just had their cheekbones deleted. All these arbitrary changes are just... has it not occurred to anyone at Square Enix that some people might want those options? why take that away from people who clearly like the feature, instead of making it available in higher quality? I really don't like this direction of removing desired customization options and calling it an improvement.

[Anzaman]

My point was leave feedback, but realize it's never going to be exactly your previous character or exactly what you want. At some point you're just going to have to deal with it, or in your case have a meltdown and quit apparently.

Well, the WoW graphical changes wasn't the primary reason why I quit - was just another negative on top of the games problems back then, but I'm sure you saw how awful eg. the headpiece looked on the human there.

I'm just wondering why they felt like needing to re-design characters to begin with. Good chunk would've been happy with more detailed characters, higher texture quality. Or was there some group hoping that developers would go and make eyes or mouths different shape all of sudden?

[the-kuponut]

Some mentally fragile people will probably quit over this update as well. As I said, it's impossible to please everyone.

Mentally fragile? This is a product, not a charity. Why should they stay if they don't like it? And why would they be mentally fragile for quitting if this is a deal breaker for them?

The player character is the center of the story, which a lot of people play for. People quitting over the change are not mentally fragile, it's a normal reaction to stop paying subscription when you're not satisfied with a product, what is weird is someone acting like players voicing their issues and disliking how their characters look are being dramatic or unreasonable if they quit.