Quote Originally Posted by faiarrow View Post
It was insulting to hear in the PLL the special attention paid to things like rock textures and placement of rocks when they know that there is a large number of the playerbase upset with the character side of the updates.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Something about them focusing on the detail in the rock textures that non-artists are probably going to think little more than "oh, cool" about when our faces have literally lost definition got me a little riled up, lol. The textures for the normal map and the diffuse don't even line up on the lips for crying out loud.

There have certainly been some posts in the various feedback threads for tiny differences that I'm fairly sure are simply artifacts of a different lighting system (the complaints surrounding the corners of the mouth are a common culprit) and yes some of them do seem rather... nit-picky. Aaaand then there's femroe face 2, which literally looks unfinished, even ignoring the colour change for the pupils and nose smudge.

But on top of that, people are finding that there's holes between the head and the hair or beards, weird reactions to lighting where beards and eyelashes change colour in shadow when they shouldn't, chunks of hair where the texture density is completely wrong, glaring texture seams for hrothgar, lalafells missing their belly buttons...

I adore this game, I really do. I have over 700 days of playtime racked up on my main, I appreciate the work that goes into it even if I don't agree with every decision... but the graphical update, without a doubt in my mind, is not live game ready. The character side of the graphical update feels incredibly rushed and poorly tested. We are essentially the testers right now, and these feedback forums are our only way of communicating with the devs - if they're even listening.

I'm not expecting them to fix this before the release in 16 days because that's unrealistic as hell (and the poor artists deserve a break), but the least they could do is make another announcement and clearly state which pieces of feedback they intend to address and when. Even if it's just "it'll be something like 7.2 before we can impliment all the fixes, but this is what we've heard needs changing". Because, right now? It feels like a countdown to doomsday where our characters just get deleted and replaced with some alpha build that got slapped together before a lunchbreak and forgotten about. It feels like they're saying "eh, this is close enough".

The most frustrating part to me is. If only I had access to the files for this face - the sculpt, the model, the textures, etc etc - I could fix it in less than a day. That's what makes this feel like a massive slap in the face, like there's a huge we-don't-care sign plastered all over it. This is not "altered as little as possible".