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.