We need to compromise as a player base

[Mercelia]

1. Ask any digital artist and they'll tell you that everything is interdependent. If you improve the shading, then you have to re-rig the lights, because the old light rigs have been designed around the specific limitations and idiosyncrasies of the old shading. And color perception everywhere will be affected. That's just how it is. All the visual elements work together, you can't change one without affecting the others.

I'm not a video game artist but I work with them and I can't tell you how often they have looked at me in horror whenever I ask dumb programmer questions like "do you really need to be able to preview X and Y with the exact same time of day/weather used in the actual ingame event where it is used?"

(This is why, lacking any evidence that the character creation backdrops have been reworked, it is probably irrelevant to complain about the lighting there)

2. In general, a graphic update consists in adding more information to shapes and textures to define them better. The thing is, when that extra information was missing, people were filling in the blanks, and they were doing that subjectively. That bit you perceive as integral to your character's look may be perceived as an ugly artifact by someone else.

Therefore there is no objective way to fill in the missing information.

Making old and new versions coexist as an option is also impossible, see point 1: the lighting and weather have to match with the character shading.

So, in light of this, should they not have done this? Hell no. There's a million things that look wrong in 6.0 and I don't think the game should be held back by conservatism. And since it's all so subjective, it means you'll get used to it anyway.

TL;DR: you'll get over it.

Sorry, but I'll have to disagree with this. Yes, the lighting does affect a lot of the overall character, but as people already stated: Some WoLs do look completely different regardless of lighting, simultaneous contrast etc. They probably did have to fill in the blanks of the missing information, but you can do so without losing this much fidelity to the original character. As someone who had to repeatedly upscale different types of images or graphics, it is possible, especially if you take a step back and look at the overall perceived shapes. Imagine doing this for upscaling / modernising the same company logo and losing a big chunk of (brand) recognition – you can't just ignore that, you should go back to the drawing board and try again. You can't just zoom in and fill in the blanks without looking at it from a bit further away / different perspective – you won't be able to see those clearly visible differences in general perception otherwise. Although those changes may seem objective, there must be something to it with this many people pointing out that there is something off. I feel like it might be a bit unfair to dismiss those emotions / opinions on the changes just because they are not able to word / explain it. And yes, if SE doesn't change anything and we want to continue playing, we will have to tolerate it – it's not the same as "getting over it" though.

Here are some examples, I tried as best as I could to show what I mean with "filling in blanks" and thus losing fidelity when it could be rectified (yes, I'm aware it will take time and no, it's not an easy feat):














I'm sure, many of the dissatisfied players wouldn't mind waiting just to see those changes happen. Again, this doesn't mean that the graphic update shouldn't happen at all, most of the changes made do look amazing, where they did a great job with upscaling e.g. gear. But looking at it from an either black or white perspective and whether the update should or should not happen is not really constructive.

[aemon_azucar]

Unfortunately, we're going to have some amount of "tragedy of the commons" on this one and I don't think that can be avoided. Because every person who isn't happy with the results has every reason to get hopping mad about the change and demand a fix for their specific issue. From their perspective, it's one relatively small change, perhaps a day of work, something that almost certainly could be squeezed in before launch. But say 20% of the active fanbase is upset. That's hundreds of thousands of people. Even if we assume that 99% of those claims are redundant, that's still thousands of "just a day or two" changes to be made. Meaning, it'd take thousands of days to implement them all, and that's definitely never going to happen.

And yet, for every person who wants a change and doesn't get one, what happens? They'll be upset. They'll feel resentful--and why shouldn't they? "Someone else got their changes, but I didn't!"

Thus, many, many, many people walk away feeling they've been ignored or even actively snubbed, despite the dev team doing everything they can. As you say, it might even be enough to convince them to just never bother with future graphic updates that affect player characters, thus dooming the 80% of satisfied customers (plus however many folks got their complaints addressed) to never get any further benefits. Because even when the vast majority of people are happy, and the vast majority of upset players get a fix for what bothers them, that can still leave thousands or even tens of thousands of people angry and motivated.

Even when you have 99% satisfaction, 1% of ~1M is still ~10k. Out of ten thousand unhappy customers, it's quite likely that a handful will be angry enough and motivated enough to kick up a fuss...or worse.

[Fuyume]

Unfortunately, we're going to have some amount of "tragedy of the commons" on this one and I don't think that can be avoided. Because every person who isn't happy with the results has every reason to get hopping mad about the change and demand a fix for their specific issue. From their perspective, it's one relatively small change, perhaps a day of work, something that almost certainly could be squeezed in before launch. But say 20% of the active fanbase is upset. That's hundreds of thousands of people. Even if we assume that 99% of those claims are redundant, that's still thousands of "just a day or two" changes to be made. Meaning, it'd take thousands of days to implement them all, and that's definitely never going to happen.

And yet, for every person who wants a change and doesn't get one, what happens? They'll be upset. They'll feel resentful--and why shouldn't they? "Someone else got their changes, but I didn't!"

Thus, many, many, many people walk away feeling they've been ignored or even actively snubbed, despite the dev team doing everything they can. As you say, it might even be enough to convince them to just never bother with future graphic updates that affect player characters, thus dooming the 80% of satisfied customers (plus however many folks got their complaints addressed) to never get any further benefits. Because even when the vast majority of people are happy, and the vast majority of upset players get a fix for what bothers them, that can still leave thousands or even tens of thousands of people angry and motivated.

Even when you have 99% satisfaction, 1% of ~1M is still ~10k. Out of ten thousand unhappy customers, it's quite likely that a handful will be angry enough and motivated enough to kick up a fuss...or worse.

I get this if it's something like "I don't like the new lighting" or whatnot, there's not much that can be done without starting completely over. But what about faces that were totally changed? I fail to see what necessary upgrade it tied to give face four au ra dimples, a pouty lip, and a rounded chubby face when they had none of those things before. Why should every player of face 4 au ra be sacrificed on the altar of progress when they could have just not changed the lip and face shape. I've seen people make the existing faces high poly before without changing their shape, it is in fact possible.

[Zaniel]

Please keep posting technical and jarring issues you are finding that need to be addressed. However, lets keep in mind that upgrading the graphics is a net benefit to the game and if some changes alter the looks somewhat and are subjective we will have to compromise to make sure this game can go into the future along with us. I'm sure we'll find something we like with the phantasia and especially if they revamp the character creator in the future.

So the message I'm trying to convey is lets not make the devs regret their decision to attempt this and decide to never do it again. As players, we need to keep pointing out issues but be supportive of this direction to change the game for the better.

I want to reiterate that despite issues, this is a graphical update we want to happen, and of course we would like ongoing improvements and refinements because it's not perfect.

So thank you devs for doing this, and please pay attention to our feedback, regardless, know that upgrading the graphics to the game was the correct decision and of course its going to be a bumpy road, but outside the forums where we come to complain a lot of people are really excited and can't wait until dawntrail, so lets keep improving the character models and rest assured we are more excited than scared about the future.

I'm willing to compromise if a change is unavoidable due to technical changes that are just part and parcel of an engine change, say for example the way shadows might play on muscles or translucency of skin, assuming it looks right (not a wax doll, not like my character has a rare tropical disease) I can accept that. I'm not willing to compromise where the fundamental architecture of the shape of the character has been altered when it isn't necessary (cheekbones gone, eyelashes 5x as thick as they used to be, eye spacing or size altered).

[Nebty]

The thing I'm most worried about is existing facial expressions being objectively altered for the worse because their new facial rigging ain't all there.



I'm not sure how anybody could see this as an improvement. They pinched up the sides of the mouth for no reason, and that affects every single facial expression in the game.

[cutestfox]

In this case, conservatism would be preventing the game from taking a step back
how could this ever be considered a "graphical upgrade"

[Zaniel]

In this case, conservatism would be preventing the game from taking a step back
how could this ever be considered a "graphical upgrade"

This is a weird one, I can't speak to different lighting or movement etc obviously but as presented in those two pictures the Dawntrail one is objectively worse graphically, regardless of what one might think of style or precise character elements. It has no depth and just looks like a store-front mannequin with a face painted on the front, dunno wth is going on there.

[Evergrey]

This is a weird one, I can't speak to different lighting or movement etc obviously but as presented in those two pictures the Dawntrail one is objectively worse graphically

I agree with that.
It feels to me that there are things missing in the Benchmark, like how the light and shadows work.
At least in CC.
I'm sure that if the light and shadows looked the same it would help improve with the overall visual of the new updates.

[Taliriah]

In this case, conservatism would be preventing the game from taking a step back
how could this ever be considered a "graphical upgrade"

I don't trust screenshots from the character creator. Here's a technical explanation of why I think this happens: there's two ways to illuminate a surface, direct lighting and indirect lighting (all the parts not hit directly by a light source). The later is very expensive and complex to simulate and in the olden days it was very crudely approximated by what was called "ambient lighting", an omnipresent, constant amount of light applied to anything not directly hit by a light source.

Now when it comes to skin, it is translucent, so part of the light that hits the skin gets inside, bounces around and comes back out some distance away. This is called sub surface scattering and is what gives skin a softer lighting than hard surfaces. It is part of the indirect lighting that affects skin (the other part is light bouncing around the environment aka global illumination). Modern games, including dawntrail, approximate the effect of sub surface scattering. But it means that it does a part of the job that ambient lighting did before, so the later has to be toned down.

And I don't think the necessary tweaks have been done in the character creator background scenes (yet), because they look unchanged in general compared to the live game.

[Kindred008]

I don't trust screenshots from the character creator. Here's a technical explanation of why I think this happens: there's two ways to illuminate a surface, direct lighting and indirect lighting (all the parts not hit directly by a light source). The later is very expensive and complex to simulate and in the olden days it was very crudely approximated by what was called "ambient lighting", an omnipresent, constant amount of light applied to anything not directly hit by a light source.

Now when it comes to skin, it is translucent, so part of the light that hits the skin gets inside, bounces around and comes back out some distance away. This is called sub surface scattering and is what gives skin a softer lighting than hard surfaces. It is part of the indirect lighting that affects skin (the other part is light bouncing around the environment aka global illumination). Modern games, including dawntrail, approximate the effect of sub surface scattering. But it means that it does a part of the job that ambient lighting did before, so the later has to be toned down.

And I don't think the necessary tweaks have been done in the character creator background scenes (yet), because they look unchanged in general compared to the live game.

I'm going to be honest. As a player, I don't care why the characters look so different. All I care about is that they do look different and not how they did before.

It's up to the developers of the game to work within the limitations to update the graphics while keeping characters identities.

Maybe that is really hard to do. Maybe it's really easy to do. That's not our problem as players.