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

[mazravxiv]

I made an account on this forum just to talk about the impact of the new graphics. My multiple Viera looked soulless / depressed no matter what settings I tuned. Seeing them has crushed me.

Lashes – inconsistently lit and set. Light-haired characters have no matching lashes. I like that the lashes match but make them thicker + consistent, or give options to toggle on/off. The lashes are half-lit across the face, so I get half white on one side + black lashes on the other. Combined with dead eyes, this is particularly saddening.




Skin - Skin translucency is shot. In the trailer and CC, they look oversmoothed / poorly lit. They also have no jawline aside from a faint shadow a lot. As an artist, I know jawlines don't look like this in these lighting sources. It was immediately noticeable when the characters moved. I'm glad that folks have shown how other games have fixed this issue.

Eyes + Face Shape – the dead fish eye look took the life out of my characters. Either put false catchlights back in or make sure that lighting is rendered properly across locations+sources. This made me want to cry b/c the light in my WoL's eyes reminds me of his strength. Face3 + Face4 have gotten hit hard. My main is F3. I'm echoing what others have said: face is too round, over-smooth, lower lips are too flat, and no angular features are left.





Ears – The half-lop ears have the most trouble in + out of CC. You can see the glowstick look in the trailer's first few seconds. The bad transparenct is even more obvious when he's near the sun.



Please consider changing this. Male Viera were an unexpected birthday present for me w/ EW. I'm giving this feedback out of love b/c I want to stay. I know you're still making improvements, so I remain hopeful.

[Clover_Blake]

I would say that identity is more or less 70% of what fuels or arguments. Some characters look good, some might even say better, but they don't look like the players' characters. And that is extremely important, as Yoshi P himself said. Their stated philosophy for this change is to maintain the identity of the characters.

I wish I felt that way. If my characters looked different but still good or better than before, I'd be satisfied. My problem is that I feel the new textures and shapes are a huge downgrade and make the characters look much worse.

I could accept them being different. But them being worse is another level...

[PKBlueberry]

I just wish they would add actual blondes and oranges to all races. Elezen flat out don't have ginger hair and Hyur looks like some sort of copper while Miqote and Aura have very decent oranges. Ginger people exist and the fact this is hard to pull off on Hyur is especially weird considering they're the human race.

I love rocking the ginger hair so not having the option to ever use it as Elezen and Hyur deters me from ever playing one.

I'm really not sure why the color difference when selecting nearly the same color is so vastly different. Even if it were maybe a racial thing, dyes are definitely existent in the ff14 universe.

Game has been out for a decade, it's about time this was fixed with the rest of the overhaul.

[Mylandra]

I just noticed a problem with the face 1 midlander and the type 4 eyebrows, the left eyebrow is different from the right one.

[Loggos]

1) Literally NO ONE has the right to tell someone to "just get used to it". These are characters that we've spent watching through hundreds of hours of cutscenes and thousands of hours of gameplay and FF14 is one the most main-character-centric MMOs in history. The attachment people have to their characters is cosmic level. Yeah, I look at some of these pictures and think "that looks the same to me" but to their player that isn't the case, even some tiny adjustment is enough to throw it all off. In any case some of these differences are pretty radical and it's impossible to not see that if you have functioning eyes.

2) It's a lottery, some people got lucky, others did not

3) Some of these changes are egregious and completely UNNECESSARY. It isn't some trick of the lighting or whatnot, they've fundamentally altered some of the presets and/or not accounted for how some the settings work with the new engine (like light coloured hair). It also doesn't matter if they've updated the facial rig, it's resting state should resemble the original preset in all respects (chin, cheeks, mouth, nose, spacing, etc)

4) Fantasia won't solve these problems because of the limited character creator. This isn't Black Desert Online where I can tweezer out individual hairs and curl a lip end or meld multiple lip glosses or resize my cheek bones to rebuild each element. A face preset is a face preset and you're stuck.

Completely agree.

Plus, we have not only invested lots of time into them, it's also a lot of money. Being forced to change our avatar, our anchor of identification, that we have paid for for years, can be quite upsetting. This is not the same as class changes. This is "me" (or my OC, etc.) and making "me" look different beyond what is necessary to upgrade the graphics has no positive or balancing impact on the game (necessary lighting changes vs. completely changing the shapes of facial features for no discernible reason).
But it will leave me without the "product", i.e. the personification I carefully crafted over the years, that I've paid for.
I understand some changes have to happen. I have not seen any convincing reason why actively remodelling the facial features we've grown to love into something different has to happen though.


If you now add to this that in the future I will also have to pay quite a lot of money to play this new avatar, that I did not choose and that was forced onto me to replace what I had actually originally chosen, it feels quite bad.
I will play Dawntrail, though I'll remain annoyed that a part of what I pay is for an avatar that doesn't represent me anymore and that I quite frankly don't really want. Other people might vote with their wallet and not feel like wanting to pay for this new avatar at all.

[Catwho]

I've been reviewing some of the complaints and messing around in the character creator on my beefy beefy system running at maximum. Here's my thoughts on some of the issues noted in this thread:

• Lip shininess is still there. because the lighting changed, it's not always on. Rotate your character around, and you'll see it flickers on and off depending on the light reflection.
• They never promised hair mesh improvements. Hair texture has higher resolution and better handles lighting reflections. Truly BLACK black hair is usually shiny, but in some of the more textured styles, it really should not be depicted as glossy, and the way the "shaved" hair dyes the scalp looks kind of bad too, so there's a lot of validity to these complaints I think.
• Skin texture has gone back to the way it was envisioned in 1.0 weirdly enough except we finally all have computers that can handle it.
• Some of the other issues about face paints and such not being updated - that kind of thing CAN hopefully be fixed by launch. QA should be working on that sort of stuff right now.

[Luluna]

I also noticed when I put my characters in Gridania in the guild they looked just more or less the same only better colours and more polished. It does seem to be a lot of lighting changes thing idk.

I made a cat girl and she was lovely her hair and eyes looked really nice in the benchmark. I am unsure on some of my Hyur features but with no benchmark for PS5 I will have to wait and I will be spending the beginning of the expac remaking my character

[potatsdevourer]

Tried scrutinizing my female Highlander on benchmark. Pretty sure eyes are not supposed to have that bump, right?

[Loggos]

I've already posted this in another thread but I do think this is a point worth making. I'm sorry for repeating it:

I really wish they'd gone the reverse ARR route. When they changed the graphics from 1.0 to ARR the quality dropped of course but the identity of the characters stayed largely intact.

I had hoped the graphical update would have meant increasing the quality while keeping the core facial features/identity.

Realistically, I am aware they probably can't just straight-up go back to 1.0 character graphics. This may very well not be possible from a technical standpoint.
And in many other aspects the current benchmark is probably much better, esp. when it comes to the portrayal of nature/the environment and the modelling of certain physical properties such as light, translucence, depth etc. etc.

But I think the example shows how amping up the fidelity without losing character identity and uniqueness could look like.

https://youtu.be/p64H66IurrY?t=72

I know the video quality is rather bad but I'm under the impression that this miqo'te face looks pretty much identical to its corresponding ARR+ counterpart (or at least preserves its key personality).
Its quality is just considerably better.

Also, a little bonus:
https://youtu.be/ksuoipNWKWs?t=338
https://youtu.be/oD45euKWO1U?t=151
https://youtu.be/oD45euKWO1U?t=182

Again, I know, a direct comparison with 1.0 is not completely fair and I don't actually demand we go back, as much as I praise (some! of) its character graphics. But if this character presentation was possible in 2011, then I would have hoped we could have at least gotten something similar/that comes close in 2024.

[kingskye]

this is still under development, lol