Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[lunartears]

Fanfest in Las Vegas 2023 (Yoshida's translator):

[1:46:00]
Of course, Final Fantasy 14 is a game that has been going on for 10 years and we have a lot of players who know and love the game as it is.

[14:46:17]
So, we're really putting a lot of priority on not changing the image you have of your own character in your head. We want to make sure your characters still look the way you enjoy them now.

[1:46:43]
So we are really taking care to make sure that you don't see your updated character and think "Uh, that's not what I thought it would look like at all!"

[Jaltaer]

Giving Todd Howard a run for his money with those lies in hindsight...

[LuciaMirain]

Fanfest in Las Vegas 2023 (Yoshida's translator):

Yeah I dont think they kept that promise at all. I still cant really look at my previous viera without getting an uncanny valley feeling.

[Winyumi]

I just want to thank everyone for staying strong and making our concerns heard in preserving the true look of our characters. There are definitely still issues that need fixing, and it's important that the dev team is reminded that we, the players and paying customers, still care deeply about the game.

[CCheshire]

Giving Todd Howard a run for his money with those lies in hindsight...

Depends. I appreciate his work on FFXIV and his trying his best to work with the SE company to make the game fun. But I feel like he will 100% say it's not possible or working on it to be polite in interviews since it's not like a JPN company to straight up say: we don't want to do this at all.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Fanfest in Las Vegas 2023 (Yoshida's translator):

Oh hoely moly lol.

Yeah uhh… I don’t think people interpret some basic glow ups as ‘enforced plastic surgery’ lol. Between all the screw ups they create in benchmarks, to its official release, & essentially now… how they think a lot characters ‘looks the way they are’ is beyond me.

[Argantaelle]

What I suspect is the dev has very (very) few people or even one person doing these character graphic fixes which is why it took forever to release each baby number fixes.
It’s been over a year and there are so little fixes done, many got brushed off as specs.
Simple and obvious stuffs like Viera black nose, textures still broken etc. still got ignored.
I really don’t know what they’re doing all this time.

Sorry for the late response; I kind of lost all hope and visit this sub very rarely.

Yes, it was my impression as well. The changes are so minuscule, as if Mr Yoshida could afford only one person to do the work. I guess the cost of all our tears, disappointment and literally a decade of devotion matters to him less than a few people's monthly salaries or a hired outsource team.

P.S. I wonder how it is possible that a Chinese team "translated" FFXIV character features so flawlessly that they are essentially the same with the same expression (that, as Mr Yoshida said, was impossible to recreate) and why FFXIV PC failed so miserably.

[Argantaelle]

I have some spare time, so I decided to check male smiles to see if there have been any improvements since my last post made about 4 months ago (before 7.2).

Unfortunately, if the changes have been made, I'm unable to see them. Midlanders (faces 4, 5, 6), Highlanders (faces 1, 3), Elezens (face 2 and, to a lesser extent, 1), Roegadyns (faces 1, 4), and Au Ra (all faces) still have their creepy U-shaped smiles and look uncanny when talking with the smile on their face.

As if the base jaw bones (which all races started to share after the polygon unification and implementation of the shared wireframe) had an initial flaw which was corrected for some races, and other (less lucky) faces have not been touched since the 1st benchmark.

A few examples are below. Remember, it's the first Au Ra face, which is the most popular, and theoretically, it should have received the most attention from SE artists. The other, least popular Au Ra faces' smiles are much, much worse.

1.

2.

3.

The same pattern, the same flaw, persists across all races.

1.

2.

3.

P.S. As before, the all the facial parts are 1, no facial features, the emote is "simper", lip movement 2.

[Argantaelle]

It's time to see how FFXIV girls are going!

Midlanders.
Midlander girls turned out to be luckier than Midlander men. All smiles are good enough (sometimes the lower lip is too protruded, similar to male lips, but it doesn't spoil the impression much).


Highlanders.
Unfortunately, faces 3 and 4 got the same half-baked default base mouths with the same U-shaped smile.

Face 3.

1.

2.

Face 4.

1.

2.

Elezens.
Elezen girls are more or less ok. The 2nd face lip movement looks a little bit suspicious, though. It is sad that the slightly curved shape where the lips touch got replaced with the arrow-straight line for the 3rd and 4th face mouths.


Miqote.
Catgirls are the most popular race/gender combination of all in FFXIV. Their lip movement when smiling and talking is better than many other race/gender combos.

Except for the 3rd face. The smile looks familiar, right?

Roegadyn girls are ok.
The 3rd and 4th face mouth corners are pulled a little bit too high when smiling, but they are good enough.

Face 3.

Face 4.

Au Ra.
Another very popular race/gender combination. One could have thought that SE had put lots of effort into their appearance. Unfortunately, they too can't escape the U-shaped curse.

The 1st face is ok.

The 2nd (Cirina's) face. They changed the mouth shape, and this is the result:

The 3d face. Once again, the same U-shape, but an little bit toned down.

1.

2.

The 4th face got the same unified mouths, but maybe because of the size of the lips, their lip movement looks more or less normal.

Viera.
Why is it always the 3rd face?

Conclusion.
In general, girls look better and seem to have received more care than boys. None of the girls' smiles reached the same level of creepiness as some unfortunate male race/face combinations (maybe except for the poor 4th face Highlander girls). But still, work has to be done to make some smiles less uncanny, more natural and pleasant to look at.

[Argantaelle]

Warning! Spoilers for Arcadion Tier 2 ahead! (Actually, it's just some NPC screenshots without story reveals, so they are probably safe to see.)


A. Sugar Riot

Once again I'd like to say that I'm very disappointed with how SE handled Lalafell noses. After the graphical update, their heavily stylised triangle buttons turned into misshapen Hyuran noses with a distinctive nasal dorsum.

Sugar Riot:

Sugar Riot, recreated in EW benchmark:

As you can see, there aren't any nasal bridges, just a small and cute button. That nose type looked more stylised and helped to create an impression that Lalalells aren't just short humans but a unique race.


B. Brute Bomber.
The infamous Highlander face 3, which boasts the most hideous smile of all Highlander faces. I was curious how SE handled his animations. They went the clever way, showing his close-ups from different camera angles, which helped to reduce the flaws of the unified wireframe.

1. This is good.

2. This is also good. The face is stylised, and not in a bad way ("sneer" emote).

3. When I saw him in the shock state...

...I coulnd't help but dig out this DT NPC screenshot:

It looks like SE did some adjustments to Highlander face 3 eyebrow position during certain emotes, but it's still not good enough, imo. Unfortunately, the 3rd face is quite unique in this regard; other Highlander faces look more tame when grieving.

4. For the sake of comparison, this is how BB could have looked before the graphical update. The smile and laugh were so good compared to what Highlander players have now.

1. Smile

2. Laugh

C. Once again, it's a smile.

1.

2. I can't help but think that these two pictures are similar. Maybe it's the eyes. Maybe it's unified polygons and face bones.

D. Amh Garanjy, face 3

I do enjoy when an NPC's face looks like an undercooked pancake.

This is what her face geometry used to be: