Benchmark 1.1 Feelback - Male Miqo'te Face 4

[SkyWolf25]

original benchmark

The benchmark mouth shows an upward tilt in the lips that make it look like he's perpetually smirking smugly. This is a big change in the feel of the character, one I'd like to be reverted, and also confusing for emotion portrayal in cutscenes.
It looks like a mix of lip change and the shadow contours around the edges of the mouth.
The change in the slant of the eyebrows add to this.

The eyes look off as well; it looks like either the face width was widened or the eye width was shortened, making the eyes look smaller, and the angular look was softened too much.
Honestly, my character looks like a completely different person... ;o;

original
benchmark

From the way the eyes looked in the original, it looks like the eyeliner got changed too much when that was a big part of how the eyes looked.

Lastly, the gap between the neck and the hair is even worse than before...

[Epiales]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. I actually preferred the first Benchmark's version of face 4 for male Miqo'te. The eye and the smile feel really off, and I'm really scared it's too late for them to do anything about that. :/
The whole vibe just feels off now, and unfortunately the way the character comes across passively is really important.


I can't add much more because the original poster really covered it all, but while I'm very happy to have my teeth back, everything else has felt worse about it. At least in the first one it was still a similar feel, similar resting face, similar angular feel.
Here's from the first benchmark for reference. I'd honestly prefer to go back :/


Forgive my terrible pictures. Have other Face 4 enjoyers been feeling the same?

[soramola]

Yeah me too.
I loved the normal 'serious' face with the sharp eyes and the thick eyebrows. Now he looks smug and well.. yeah... just a completely different vibe.

I know its a bit stupid, but everyone enjoys other aspects of the game the most so please dont hate me with the following opinion xD. But one of my joys was thinking my character is rather cool looking. If this new face is really endgame then that would kill a lot of my joy of playing..

I know in the first benchmark he had a slight smirk also, and if im honest i didn't quite like it then too. But it was not aaas bad of a feeling as this.

Old:

New:

[Cerbolt]

Yeah there's definitely something not quite right with the face. I can almost stand the weird :3 mouth but those eyes are just so wrong.

[Jassie]

The vibe is definitely different than in Endwalker. It kinda feels like the face has gone through a beauty filter and looks more feminine now. I'm mostly bothered by the eyes and the eyebrows, I wish they could make the eyebrows as thick and dark as they were in Endwalker. The permanent smirk is also a bit weird.

[Epiales]

I think we all use the same eyes and eyebrows too, maybe they could fix just those- lol

[glitteringcosmos]

The eyes and the eyebrows being completely different, the tattoos being lighter, the additional height at the dorsal bump on ALL of the noses, the forced >:3 emote instead of a neutral face that they didn't change on any of the other face options, the loss of the glowiness especially noticeable in Seeker eyes...everything about face 4 is different. It's not bad--objectively the changes make the characters look much better. But they look different, which is fundamentally the problem. They don't look like the same characters anymore. Yoship swore up and down they were doing everything they could to preserve the original look of the characters, but they failed in that regard spectacularly. I almost wish they would delay Dawntrail so that they can fix it--or at least delay the rollout of the graphical changes, but at this stage I don't think they can. I've tried tweaking every setting that I could in the benchmark to make my boy look more like my boy but I just can't get it right, and it makes him look like his evil, uncanny twin. I hate this so much--I was so hype for Dawntrail until benchmark 1.0 came out, and then I held out hope for benchmark 1.1 and was ultimately let down. It's so upsetting. I'm waiting to see what Friday's live letter will bring, but I highly doubt I'm going to be playing at launch because of this. I'll come back with more updated side-by-sides later, but I've a post in the JP forums with a comparison shot.

[glitteringcosmos]

I promised I'd return with pictures so here we are. Right-click and open image in new tab for larger images, I'm not sure why the forum continues to shrink them.

Comparisons between benchmarks (purposely not using the new lighting in benchmark 1.1 so that i have better comparable shots). These are all the exact same settings:





And then these are ones with settings I've tweaked to try and better match the original.

Just color settings tweaked (hair, eyes, lips, tattoos, eyeshadow):





Colors and nose tweaked (the current nose in benchmark has a bigger dorsal bump at the bridge, so the different nose is straighter to match the original):





Colors and eyebrows tweaked (current eyebrows in benchmark are thinner and in turn look sharper, so the different eyebrows I've tried to match the roundness of the original):





Overall, I've come close to matching the original version of my character, but no matter what settings in what combinations I pick, I'm not 100% happy with them. The more I look at it the more upset I get. Like I said, I'll wait and see what they show us at the live letter tomorrow, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Lunaru_F]

I didn't see there was already a more recent thread so I'll drop this comparison gif here as well because I notice some people are blind to the changes, so a back and forth comparison would better help those see the differences.

[soramola]

god if they dont change this to look more like the old expression im gonna cry o|-<