7.0 Graphic Update - Female Roegadyn Face 2 feedback

[Anarnee]

After a few days to get over how upset I was over how different my character looked in the 7.0 benchmark, I decided to gather my thoughts and put that energy to make a thread of things that I hope the devs will look at while fine-tuning the Graphics update.

I play on PS4, gamma is set to 50% by default, with the same setting on the benchmark this is the results I got.



To say I was devastated is an understatement. I have 40 characters, 37 of them are face 2 Roegadyn, and no matter how I changed the options, I could not get my character to look right. And no, looking at her in the trailer did not help. The colors were still washed out and looked bad, and a lot of the features of Female Roegadyn have changed a lot and completely changed the impression of the face.

I took the time again to try with the beta set to 25% game and 0% and it helped a lot for the colors though everything still looks like it has a yellow/green/grey hue to it.

Though the colors are almost correct, a lot of features still look wrong.

So I took the time to point out some things that I think change the face too much.



I'm sure most people are probably not seeing many differences, but I look at this face almost everyday and to me it uncanny in a bad way.



1 & 2. You can see that the upper lips shape has been drastically changed. This is mouth option 1. In the 7.0 benchmark the lip has lost a lot of shape and definition.

3. This is eye option 1. While in the current game the lashes have a gentle slope down, they now slope up. It's not just for this eye option either. Every single eye option has lashes that slope up. This gives the face a much sharper look than before. The only eye option for face 2 that slops down a little is eye option 4, and those eyes are smaller and rounder.

All of the noses on face 2 look too round, too bulbous. The noses on the other faces don't look at bad, so I'm confused as to why all of the nose options on face 2 were made to look so different. There are already threads that complain about how they've lightened our nose ash smudge, so I'll leave those here;

Benchmark Graphics Update - Hellsguard Roegadyn (Smudgegate 2024)

Benchmark Feedback for Hellsguard Roe: Bring Back The Smudge

For mouth 1 They don't look as drastically changed from the front, though the lack of lip shine makes them look thinner overall, the lack of shade in the corner also changes the impression of the lips. None of the other options fair any better.

I don't feel like the profile view looks too different, and from above looks great too... but I do not look at my characters from this angle very often...



And lastly, the cupids bow\philtrum.

This is much more noticeable on my darker skinned characters, but the philtrum ridge above the lips do not match up with the lip on any of the face options other than face 4. It looks bad in my opinion, it elongates the area between the nose and mouth and gives the impression of a chimpanzee muzzle.

I would like it if it matched the contour of the lip, I can't think of ever seeing a person where the cupids bow and lip were so mismatched.

I'd prefer none.

There is also already a thread with complaints about the change in our pupils so I'd like to point folks to that for feedback on that;

[Graphic Update Feedback] Female Roegadyn Eyes

That's all I have for now, I hope that the devs will consider these adjustments. I've been Roegadyn since 2013, I love my characters with all my heart and it's so heart-wrenching to look at them and to think that come Dawntrail I'll never get to enjoy the game with them.

Thanks for your consideration!

[faiarrow]

I brought it up in the nose thread but putting here too to add to discussion as a fellow face 2 enjoyer:

It's taken me a day to process because I'm still quite upset about this all, but compiled here with direct match-for-match comparison caps and my thoughs as to some of the changes. A little more in-depth than my prior mood of just 'well, goodbye to my character.'

For the record:
Yes I have run the benchmark. I am aware the CC lighting is not 'the same' as the dynamic in-engine lighting. I can't get comparable side-by-side caps of Sko outside of the CC. The only thing the benchmark actually running showed me was that her skin is a touch warmer and more like her in-game and PS5 CC colouration, and that my concerns regarding other things are still quite valid.





The pros:

• Texture update generally seems to be OK - there are issues with the way hair blends into the forehead made by floating sections on certain racial styles and the new lighting engine shading under them so it makes it blatant they're floating, but that can be ironed out.
• Racial gear texture update is great.
• Hair might be OK with tweaks, the clasp at the back on this style has clearly not been updated yet as it is very poorly textured and looks flat.

The cons:

• I can live without the permanent catch light. I don't think the black pupils works on f!roegadyn after almost 10 years of seeing them with the coloured/jewel effect. Impacts lighter eyes especially.
• Rhinarium/ash/smudge being made so light in the new skin is a problem; the lighting engine will not magically make it darker. Removal of prominent racial specific traits like this erases identity and makes it hard to believe the intended PLL statement that our characters will simply 'look better.'
• Lips certainly aren't fantastic - the new facial bones have adjusted how the lips sit and they seem to be quite a bit smaller?
• Tattoos and face paints still being 256px is pretty jarring. I suspect this will be fixed in time but it's really awful in the benchmark.
• Angle of the new lashes seems to be heavily impacting the visual of the already problematic new eyes, shades them intensely and even in scenes where there should be more brightness to the eyes it makes them very dark.

The problem of streamlining the workflow for the update so that all human-like characters are stemmed from hyuran models is really starting to show, even within the hyur themselves seeing a lot of disparity between midlanders and highlanders. I know roegadyn are not exactly a beastial race compared to the likes of viera, or au'ra, but we're losing a lot of the galkan origins from the XI roots of this race with so much smoothing out.

Large images: Image 1 - Image 2

[Anarnee]

I brought it up in the nose thread but putting here too to add to discussion as a fellow face 2 enjoyer:[/url]

Thanks so much! I thought your analysis of the stuff was great. Was really sad they didn't take the feedback about the pupils in your thread into consideration either. It doesn't feel like a femroe only problem either, dark part of the eyes seem to be darker all around.

[faiarrow]

Thanks so much! I thought your analysis of the stuff was great. Was really sad they didn't take the feedback about the pupils in your thread into consideration either. It doesn't feel like a femroe only problem either, dark part of the eyes seem to be darker all around.

PLL 79's femroe preview looked to have a less severely blackened pupil so for a while I had hope...

The pearification of most face 2 noses as well is pretty egreigous. It's just disappointing given there really was a lot of hype about how characters will keep their intended feeling while just looking better in multiple PLLs and JP interviews with 4gamer and the likes from Yoshida. Really makes me wonder if someone screwed the pooch and put in older updated assets? Especially given the lips issue wasn't present in PLL 79 and even PLL 80's comparisons on numerous face types across all races.

[Anarnee]

PLL 79's femroe preview looked to have a less severely blackened pupil so for a while I had hope...

The pearification of most face 2 noses as well is pretty egreigous. It's just disappointing given there really was a lot of hype about how characters will keep their intended feeling while just looking better in multiple PLLs and JP interviews with 4gamer and the likes from Yoshida. Really makes me wonder if someone screwed the pooch and put in older updated assets? Especially given the lips issue wasn't present in PLL 79 and even PLL 80's comparisons on numerous face types across all races.

Yeah, looking at some pictures I've seen of the other faces, the nose doesn't seem as badly rounded and bulbous on the other faces, it looks like face 2 is more shiny on the sides, where the others still look nice and sharp.

Yeah, that would be the best case scenario, even my Lalafell who barely had any lips just has none now. I hope we've just got a bunch of the WIP assets.

[faiarrow]

PLL 79's femroe preview looked to have a less severely blackened pupil so for a while I had hope...

Had to wait until I was finished work for the day to pull out my cap from PLL 79, but this was the last update we saw for femroe prior to the benchmark and PLL 80, and it made me think they had taken onboard the criticism about the black pupils on femroe as the darkest section of the pupil in this isn't even as black as the lashline and lashes. I have swatched them on the cap in the image.



This feels a lot closer to what they meant with regards to keeping character integrety. There also isn't the lip issue here in this preview, which again makes me wonder if the benchmark was released with older assets. PLL 79 was six months ago, it's a little concerning if the newer assets shown there aren't present in the benchmark which is meant to not only allow people to test their specs but get their first look at the new graphics first-hand.

[Anarnee]

Just have to say that I have done all of DT MSQ, I have given the new model more than a chance to convince me. The new face 2 is badly done, I can't believe that someone thought it was good enough to put in game. It changes the impression so much and what's worst is the nose bulges strangely now when my characters' expression changes. It's incredibly disappointing that our concerns were not only not addressed in the benchmark, but also not fixed by the time the expansion was dropped. It BAFFLES me the amount of care and love that was put into some models, like Krile and the twins, while our player models feel unfinished and rushed. None of our racial traits were respected, some things were removed, and face shapes are different. The skin looks like it's made out of wax compared to some of the characters.

A free fantasia is frankly not good enough to fix this.

I hope that the devs will still take our feedback into consideration during the .x patches at some point.

[Enforcing]

There are points where it feels Close Enough to my character, that for a moment, I'll feel like it's just. Fine(TM). But then I'll have a moment where the facial expression looks completely off, and it looks like a different character with a different vibe altogether.

The contours of the lips, though, are what are killing me the most. I hate the way the lip shape tapers off to the very corners of the mouth now, where it used to taper off beforehand. It results in her lips looking wrong, and wider than they're supposed to be, and like she has more lipstick on overall. And it throws so many of her expressions off from what I'd been used to. Even if a lot of it is... relatively close to what I had before, that part keeps taking me out of the moment, and it's not like I can just change lips to something more suitable, because they all do that now.

[adinaastra]

I agree with a lot of this thread my femroe's lips are just a completely different shape now like they've been stretched out and it looks bad to me. I'm also noticing her skin is weirdly mottled now when it didn't used to be. My face 2 femroe is a really light seawolf grey skin tone and she straight up has mottled yellow splotches near her chin and red on her cheeks that make it look like she's breaking out. She was just grey before so I don't know what they did to her skin to make it look so weird.

[zipkin]

I wanted to post to lend my support here. I don't have a Face 2 Femroe myself, but I spend a lot of time hanging out with some. These small-ish details add up to a significant difference in appearance, and it is noticeable enough that I find it jarring on characters who aren't even mine. My friends don't look like themselves anymore, and the Fantasia won't fix it because the previous facial features are not there to change 'back' to. So so so much character integrity was lost with this 'update', despite promises that "Overall appearance of player characters will be altered as little as possible", and the response to feedback has been sorely lacking.