Moon Miqo'te Face 4 feedback

[Cheapshot]

[7/04/2024]I made a very big too much effort post detailing all my observations about what changed between Endwalker and Dawntrail.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6514992

[4/19/2024]I’ve seen the statement released today addressing planned changes to the benchmark. The things discussed in this thread should still be relevant going forward so please continue sharing your concerns about moon face 4.

[6/03/2024]The updated benchmark has just dropped today and I've gone in and made a summary of all the changes I noticed. Click here to jump to that post and check it out! Some of this OP is now out of date.

Let me preface this by saying I love this game and I appreciate the tireless work of the developers. It's the only MMO I've stuck with, and I've played it for years. I love the world that's been created, and I love my character and this is why I care so much about this. None of my feedback is from a place of malice. I want to be playing this game still in another 10 years. I also want to preface by saying these concerns are primarily mesh and texture changes. I have done my best to eliminate lighting as the cause of differing appearance. I've also edited this post to upload a new graphic with more direct comparisons that will hopefully be more clear. I want to illustrate the differences better so that my concerns are not passed over as lighting differences.

[7/15/2024]I’m replacing the outdated benchmark comparisons with the newer, updated comparison images I made now that 7.0 is live. Just embedding my post from further in the thread for convenience

Reposting this from the Dawntrail character graphics update megathread, just to follow up in here.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6513666

This took me a few days to put together. I want to be super super super clear, this isn't some big long post saying that I demand all this stuff be restored. That would be absurd. I don't expect that. I probably don't even want that. I'll make an effort at the end to detail a small wish list of suggestions that I think would help restore the original feel of the face.

This is just me doing my best to document everything that changed with my characters face in a useful and organized manner. My hope is it can be used as a general reference for people who don't fully know what changed about their Miqo'te Face 4 characters. With any luck maybe by the developers as well. I was a professional illustrator for years and I also have a 30 gig FFXIV screenshot folder of my character so obviously my eye is going to notice changes that others wont. Please understand that I KNOW this is a lot. Just try not to jump down my throat about it without reading my intentions.








Hopefully these images scale.

So with all that documented and out of the way, I'll make a shortlist of suggestions down below. I feel much less attachment to the game now that my character of years looks so uncanny to me. I don't like how doll-like and unfocused she looks now, or how my tomboy look was made more delicate.



A few things I think seem like problems that need to be fixed rather than intentional design:
- Solve the current "cloudy" greyness issue of the eyes, and make sure eye shine isn't dulled by shadows
- Remove the gloss from the lips when "none" is selected under lip colour as it was before and remove or reduce the incorrectly shaped drawn on lip shadow
- Tone down the shadows cast by the upper eyelids

And here is the list of what I would love to be changed specific to my characters features that might bring back her original feel better:
-Raise the corners of the eyes back up and switch back to the old lashes
-Restore all curves the nose used to have
-Rework the mouth shape and texture to be more similar to the original. Remove mouth corner indents.
-Reduce the shine on the nose to just the nose tip instead of the whole bridge

I would also love if things like eyelashes could be made a selection because I much prefer the look of the older lashes, but I know many like the new ones better. I don't like all the changes that made my character look more feminine, since when I chose this face it was my intention to have a character that was more of a tom-boy. The character creator could use substantial improvements in general.

Anyways, thanks for your time. Sorry this is so much. I just wanted to take my negative feelings about the update and be constructive with them instead.

I just wanted to update this thread with something I put together to better express my deires for my character. It’s one thing to point out in detail everything that’s changed, which I’ve absolutely done. But in the absence of clear guidance on what I would like to see done about it, it’s probably not as useful. I also think it’s important to convey my sincere hopes for what changes I’d like to see.

Here is a gif showing my face in 6.x, Dawntrail, and then a version where I edited the dawntrail appearance to reflect what I had hoped my character would look like in the graphical update.

[2024-04-07]I'm also going to edit this OP to include what seems to be more technical problems. Thank you to those in the thread who have helped discover these issues.

[snip. Previous bugs listed here were resolved. I’ll update this with some of the new ones introduced when I have time.]

[Cheapshot]

My personal opinion


Look at how cute and spunky I looked! I want to fight to protect this precious face!

My primary concern is the replacement or removal of face details that made Face 4 very unique. Things like the wispy brows, sparse and thin eyelashes, prominent fangs or the small gap between the lips gave this face very distinct and unique charm. It was a less conventionally pretty face previously that gave players like me the option to have for example a tomboy like character. I was a bit heartbroken when I loaded my character in the benchmark and saw the changes to her facial features. It was explained that the philosophy was to preserve the feel of every face. Make sure no warrior felt like their WoL was a different person suddenly. I don't feel that goal was met in my warriors case. Most of what I considered to be features that made this face feel unique were changed in a way that makes them more homogeneous or conventionally feminine. I feel the charm is lost and the allure that convinced me to pick this appearance originally is gone now. It's honestly been an emotional experience for me.

The reason I like this face is because it allows for a less "dolled up" or conventionally pretty character. This face has been the refuge of tomboys or feisty heroes. There are plenty of pretty faces to choose from, and this one I picked because I preferred less makeup, less feminine. I don't think we should be moving toward making every Miqo'te have the same look and feel. Overall I feel the changes have made the face look less interesting. More feminine for no reason, as well as less natural. There's less personality, or at least not the same personality. I don't feel like these changes are an improvement. Many of them seem to be in the service of making the features more feminine or more generic instead of just higher quality. The little gap between the lips, the wispy darker brows, the button nose and the thin more natural eyelashes really make her whole appearance shine. Without those, I just don't feel like she's the same character.

I feel that more effort should be made to preserve the features that made this face feel unique, and I hope this desire resonates with the developers.

Thank you for your time and hard work.

[cutestfox]

I couldn't wait for Dawntrail but now I'm dreading it. I don't want to say goodbye to the WoL that I spent years with.

100% with you on that. the character hasn't been preserved at all
it's not lighting, the models have straight up changed for the worse

https://i.imgur.com/HQIhQdg.png
https://i.imgur.com/9fmiqur.png

[AluneTempest]

I agreed that the face changes too much, but i love the new look of moon miqo face 4.
The problem itself is that the character creator is really bad and outdated, we should have more options to customize and more color palettes to change and maybe keep something close to the old look.

[Cheapshot]

I agreed that the face changes too much, but i love the new look of moon miqo face 4.
The problem itself is that the character creator is really bad and outdated, we should have more options to customize and more color palettes to change and maybe keep something close to the old look.

It would have been very nice to get more facial feature options instead of having the existing ones changed so much. I agree that the creator itself needed updating, and personally I think it needs that more than the characters visual updates. I dont like the new eyelashes and brows they gave me but I have no options. I don't like the new mouth shape but there isn't another mouth that looks more like what I had. I don't like the lighter colour of the brows but we don't have control of our brow colouring to darken them again. It's so unfortunate.

[AluneTempest]

It would have been very nice to get more facial feature options instead of having the existing ones changed so much. I agree that the creator itself needed updating, and personally I think it needs that more than the characters visual updates. I dont like the new eyelashes and brows they gave me but I have no options. I don't like the new mouth shape but there isn't another mouth that looks more like what I had. I don't like the lighter colour of the brows but we don't have control of our brow colouring to darken them again. It's so unfortunate.

yeah, the character creator need a complete rework, we need more options and this way we can have a look that we like.
this is my miqo for comparison.
https://imgur.com/a/2gmyKHI
she looks like a whole different character, i love the new look but you can clearly see the difference bettween the two.

[Gokki]

I can chime in too. I've been a Moon Miqo Face4 Voice11 the entire time, and as soon as i saw the character in the benchmark i knew it wasn't the same. After careful observations with the exact same Saved Preset i can make the following conclusion about my specific character:

• She looks older, more mature.
• The lips/mouth definitely changed. The "complaining" screenshots in the album clearly shows how the lower lips changed, the mouth is wider,
• Jaw/teeth structure changed, affecting the mouth/lips.
• Canines are halved in length
• Eye lines changed

All of these result in instantly noticeable changes to how i perceive my character. Notably - some of the emotes change their expression. A "yes" goes from "mhm, sure thing ^_^" to a "uhu, sure :-]". My first impressions immeditely made me notice how the eyes/eyeliner changed, and the lips got a lip-balm despite having none. I got realy weirded out in the final explosive shot of the Benchmark how WIDE and BIG the mouth of my character opened up.

Here's the album: https://imgur.com/a/HMuDacc

EDIT: The changes are a great and positive improvement. I love the new graphics and i hope more things are updated to look modern and great. And i know it's very difficult to get things exactly right across all character permutations. I can speak only for my own character of course.

[celestiyall]

I've been struggling a lot with my face 4 cat, too. For me having grey skin, the forced red tones in certain lighting conditions have been really bad, the eyelashes turned my cats sharp eyes into downturned cutesy eyes, and I miss my fangs and the lil gap between the lips. I've been anguishing over trying to find ways to fix it within the confines of the character creator as it is now so I don't feel terrible every time I load the benchmark. I really hope they take the couple of threads that have popped up now into consideration because I feel like Keepers got an especially short end of the stick in a lot of these graphical "updates".

[celestiyall]

I can chime in too. I've been a Moon Miqo Face4 Voice11 the entire time, and as soon as i saw the character in the benchmark i knew it wasn't the same. After careful observations with the exact same Saved Preset i can make the following conclusion about my specific character:

• She looks older, more mature.
• The lips/mouth definitely changed.
• Jaw/teeth structure changed, affecting the mouth/lips.
• Canines are halved in length
• Eye lines changed

All of these result in instantly noticeable changes to how i perceive my character. Notably - some of the emotes change their expression. A "yes" goes from "mhm, sure thing ^_^" to a "uhu, sure :-]".

Here's an album: https://imgur.com/a/HMuDacc

Oh my gosh, I hadn't even thought to check how the expressions in the emotes had been preserved. That's really bad! A lot of the charm my WoL had was in the grumpiness of certain expressions!

[HeyMcFly]

I am on the opposite end- I love how my mooncat looks in the benchmark!
While yes, there need to be improvements made (which was addressed on the website); much of the changes, aside from the obvious altering of certain features (like miqo face #4 lips & fangs), look different due to polygon clean up and pixel clean up.

Skin shine and translucency needs to be toned down in everyday light(that's what is causing the rubbery skin effect), while still keeping the realistic look the dev team wanted to go for-
-shading needs to be darker and there needs to be some contouring on every face to some degree because even though pixels and polygons were cleaned up, alot of features were just erased and not replaced with any improvement

Things I do like:
I can't see the under part of her eyelid
I like the new sculpt of the teeth
I do like the soft pink in her nose
I love that I don't have to use gloss with lipstick
I like the pinkish hue in her nose smudge

Things I don't like:
Mouth gap is gone
Eyebrows have been lightened across the board
Fangs have been dulled
Smudge seems to have been lightened a little
Eyelashes need to be softened abit to not look fake
Eye dot/light is gone so her eyes are abit void of personality


Here is a side-by-side of my Miqo