I've been overall very pleased with the graphics changes, even if many of them are quite subtle. But one unexpected and (hopefully) non-intended oddity came up, that I very, very much hope gets fixed before release.

Tattoos and facepaint, for both male and female hrothgar, are now doing this strange ghosting, getting one, two, or rarely even three extra layers floating just above the skin/fur, creating a blurring effect in most images of the face unless looking pretty much perpendicular to the pattern surface. The effect is most pronounced with bright colored patterns against dark fur, but it's present with all combinations of fur and tattoo/facepaint color, albeit varying in impact between different patterns. Sharp angles seem to have the most dramatic effect...aka the male hrothgar face 4 tattoos, see here:



My screenshots from my original run of the benchmark included the effect, so I tried turning all settings except screen resolution to the minimum, and that had no meaningful effect. The extra layers and blur were still there, just lower-quality, making it look overall even blurrier than before.

I can only assume that this is some kind of accidental knock-on effect from the improved fur textures or the like, because after testing, I can say it's hrothar-only. I really hope that this is not intended behavior, as this effect is both extremely unrealistic and deeply distracting, which would have a pretty serious negative effect on most cutscenes featuring the WoL. I'm sure that, by comparison to a lot of the other stuff, this is pretty small popotoes, but hopefully it's also small enough that, if we few hrothgar (and our soon-to-be sisters!) talk it up, Square will address it sooner rather than later!