The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Rudje]

I do think that a graphical upgrade was needed, contrary to popular belief, I'm sure. But what we got is questionable at best.

First of all, people consistently struggle to see the difference between old and new, they get it mixed up. For characters, old often looks better to people. It is easy to convince an outsider that old is new and vice versa. A graphical upgrade of this caliber should be an obvious improvement. I think it is hard to justify the increased system requirements for such little gain.

For the environment I felt more "wow" seeing this game with a reshade that with the upgrade. The old graphics struggle with desaturated colors and low contrast, the new improves on that, but compared to simply using nvidia shader settings, the hit to performance isn't worth it.

Characters are more high resolution across the board, but at the cost of their integrity, and honestly nothing about it looks impressive from an artistic point. I'm very disappointed, I don't think this is up to par for Square Enix or Final Fantasy quality at all. It appears rushed and poorly planned.

I also fear the worst is yet to come if these issues are not addressed before launch (and I doubt they will).

This, functionally, is also how I feel. The environmental upgrades are purely upgrades, the closest I had to doubt over them was some small pang of loss at biodiversity in the plants (less height/color variance, mostly), which is a small detail and one that might not hold fruit in the game proper across more areas. The character changes are baffling, with most being sidegrades or even outright downgrades depending on the face. Some of the changes are even worse than certain earlier previews, which looked just fine to outright great with a couple of pain points that were already being pointed out even then but were not changed to accommodate the feedback. And even with the benchmark releasing early enough that some assets are obviously unfinished, I still dread the thought of what it would take to actually change them with this little time, or the final state of release.

It's especially baffling given that some of the worst-impacted faces are some of the newest. Those should have required the least reworking!

[Araxes]

No, the update was and is still needed. The Problem is that the update is to small to notice on many occasions since it still has to run on PS4 and XBOX Series S. There are to many restrictions for a REAL update on the Graphics.

[Limecat]

Actually, I just realized the new most amusing thing. Someone is going to keep a copy of the pre-DT game data, and use it to make mods to revert the characters to their old versions.

[Gyson]

I feel the overall improvement in visuals is too minor to warrant all the frustration the update has caused players. Perhaps the focus should have been solely on improving the visuals for the game's environments and not the character's faces, which were already fine.

[Nebelheim]

I would rather have the graphics update rather then keep the low quality/muddy textures and aging ps3 graphics that have been showing there age since at least stormblood. There are so many times in cutscenes where characters/gear/environments show so much ps3 quality pixelation that even the slightest texture update is worth having.

[VerdeLuck]

It's genuinely confusing why they redid so many elements of the faces and characters. We aren't getting any new features or new types of gear out of this that we didn't before, so I fail to see why there were so many changes instead of just punching up the textures and models to a higher poly count and resolution size.
Why did they have to remodel the viera face? Bake entirely new shadows into the texture, mess with eye and pupil sizes, mess with the face topology, remodel noses, etc? They said they were going to keep characters looking the same and then redid and redesigned a bunch of elements entirely.

[Tethan]

It's genuinely confusing why they redid so many elements of the faces and characters. We aren't getting any new features or new types of gear out of this that we didn't before, so I fail to see why there were so many changes instead of just punching up the textures and models to a higher poly count and resolution size.
Why did they have to remodel the viera face? Bake entirely new shadows into the texture, mess with eye and pupil sizes, mess with the face topology, remodel noses, etc? They said they were going to keep characters looking the same and then redid and redesigned a bunch of elements entirely.

As I understand it, it was necessary to unify the face topology to implement the new face rigs/animation system. Meaning that all faces, hyur, lala, roe, viera etc, have the same face structure, ie. the amount and placement of polygons. That, however, doesn't explain the lack of care in recreating all features, as some were preserved exquisitely and some were changed drastically, seemingly at random.

[Stechun]

It’s confusing that anyone seems to think the differences of character features are intentional or something, they had to remake the models and textures for over 60 unique character faces, it seems reasonable that there’d be inconsistencies since they obviously can’t give special attention to every single face.

And it sounds like they want people to give feedback now so issues and major inconsistencies can be fixed for expansion launch, saying this entire endeavor with overhauling the games graphics wasn’t worth doing just because there’s a small demographic of people who both downloaded the benchmark, and actually logged into the forums to complain about how their “perfect” reshaded female Au ra looks worse in the benchmark feels sensationalistic.

[Rudje]

It’s confusing that anyone seems to think the differences of character features are intentional or something, they had to remake the models and textures for over 60 unique character faces, it seems reasonable that there’d be inconsistencies since they obviously can’t give special attention to every single face.

And it sounds like they want people to give feedback now so issues and major inconsistencies can be fixed for expansion launch, saying this entire endeavor with overhauling the games graphics wasn’t worth doing just because there’s a small demographic of people who both downloaded the benchmark, and actually logged into the forums to complain about how their “perfect” reshaded female Au ra looks worse in the benchmark feels sensationalistic.

I play fully vanilla, and so do a lot of people pointing out changes. Making rude assumptions about why people are unhappy with a visibly rushed benchmark only two months before release is petty and completely unnecessary.

[Tethan]

It’s confusing that anyone seems to think the differences of character features are intentional or something, they had to remake the models and textures for over 60 unique character faces, it seems reasonable that there’d be inconsistencies since they obviously can’t give special attention to every single face.

And it sounds like they want people to give feedback now so issues and major inconsistencies can be fixed for expansion launch, saying this entire endeavor with overhauling the games graphics wasn’t worth doing just because there’s a small demographic of people who both downloaded the benchmark, and actually logged into the forums to complain about how their “perfect” reshaded female Au ra looks worse in the benchmark feels sensationalistic.

I won't comment on it being intentional or not, but when doing re-topology on a 3D models it is entirely possible to preserve its shape down to even small details. Even in the event that features need to be remodeled from scratch, in any 3D software you can overlap with the old model to use for reference and recreate anything with basically millimeter precision.

Paying attention to every single face is their job. If they didn't have enough time to do it properly, they should have delayed the implementation of the update.