Reddit vs. the Forums in the Graphics War of '24

[Doopliss]

I have an character that's an elezen that I loaded into the benchmark, and I wasn't mad at it. I thought she looked fine, and the textures were nice. Same for my fem highlander and fem middie alts, a few small differences but overall they kept their vibes and looked nice. And yet, I can't stand what they did to Face 4 Au Ra; it does not keep the spirit of the original face design and instead opted for making it look more like all the other au ra fem faces, rounded and cute and dimpled. So it's seriously a ymmv situation when it really shouldn't be.

As a general sentiment, I agree that a lot of language used is hyperbolic and exaggerated, and some races generally are 'close enough' that I can get over it.

Yet I genuinely cannot comprehend how people on NA don't think Face 4 fem Au Ra looks goddamn scuffed, lol. Everything on the face protrudes in a way that gives them a slight bee-sting effect. The cheek scale textures are literally warped with awkward, ugly round edges when they're supposed to be pointy like every other Auri facial scale.

Yeah, sure, they still look cute. The vast majority of models have beautiful features by default. It's very easy to make them look simply as cool or cute as possible, which is all the average person generally cares about. But even with that in mind, like, honestly...this one is just...worse looking?

The graphic update to characters is so minor, and still doesn't even quite match up to 1.0, so aside from the scale detail being nicer, I can absolutely see why it feels like a downgrade. I don't even play a fem Au Ra with Face 4 (Although I do think Face 2 is equally scuffed in the 'just sorta looks worse all around' way. The thousand-yalm stare on that face is incredibly uncanny now in all lighting).

Though, Fuyume, I've noticed you get dismissed a lot in particular, and I just wanted to say, if it helps you feel better, Face 4's differences are veerry well documented in the JP thread, and in general they appear to be in agreement with you. If you use Firefox and get a translator extension, it works well in allowing you to understand the main gist of what they're saying.

Anyway, nobody here has any objective sample sizes. There's no proof the "vast majority" is completely stoked for the update, nor is there proof for the opposite. I mean, Reddit has the group of people who thinks the benchmark's horrifying Lalafell dolphin mouth is cool and better and intentional actually, so take that as you will.

And again, there are very easy methods to look over the JP side of the forums and understand the gist of their feelings. You'll find posts that also have exaggerated (but more polite) sentiments about being uncomfortable with the changes to their characters and wanting them fixed regularly get 100+ upvotes or near it.

This isn't a "gotcha," but I don't think the attempt to use upvotes on Reddit or random Twitter screenshots as a proving point's exactly mature either.