Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Issaella]

I read that they want to fix some things. That's why I want to speak about this lip problem again.
The shape is sadly completly different and changes the whole expression of the face. I really hope that they can do something about it.

What bothers me most are the missing mouthcorners and the bulging upwards. Before it was just round and cute.
For me, the cute mouth was a very important point when it comes to face 2. At the moment this feature is missing.

I didn't want to engage with this, but it's been eating at me since the first benchmark. Before the first benchmark I was on the fence in terms of buying DT for a number of reasons. After the first benchmark I was firmly in "not buying". This is the primary reason why. My alt (who really became my main in EW I guess) uses the Face 2, wide mouth, "Cirina" customization and it just got absolutely butchered in the "graphics upgrade". Sorry for grabbing your post, but it was the nearest one covering the changes to femra face 2.

There is a laundry list of changes that I dislike; eyes are so yellow now that on any non-human skin-tones they look jaundiced, the eyelashes, the eye-liner darkness, the pupil size, the scales that look like burn scabs, but what they did to the mouth... just why? It looks absolutely nothing like it did pre-7.0. I loved the "fishy face", that's why I used it, now it just looks like a creepy porcelain doll. The dimples are gone, the width across the board is maybe 75% of what it was previously, the lips are permanently pursed and the bottom lip upturned, the lip color goes all the way to the edges. It just looks BAD. And just to rub salt in the wound apparently, some of the mouth changes they made to face 1 and 3 actually look more like the old face 2!

But what is possibly even worse, is how bad the emotes are. When she smiled on the benchmark on the chocobo I physically cringed. Evey smile emote now is "fake smile" with sharply upturned corners and no sideways spreading of the mouth. Like whoever did the rigging has never seen a real human smile before (it seems like this is the case across multiple other faces/races as well). It looks like the false-charm smile of a serial killer and it is difficult to convey how much I hate it.

No changes/adjustments were made in bench 2, nor in 7.0 so I have very little hope they will change anything in 7.1. Simply put, I've been playing 6+ years, I didn't buy DT, I've subbed once to keep my house on my other character, but I'm at the point if I don't see improvement in 7.1, I'm done until 8.0 or maybe even done period. As bad as DT's story seems to be, having to watch 20+ hours of cutscenes with the changes and the awful new facial rigging isn't something I'm willing to pay for. Regardless, my sub is done so that's all I'll say about it. Please fix this.

[Tsiron]

I actually noticed the messed up smiles on my female Au Ra (even though she's face 3 rather than 2), yeah, it's so off-putting! It made watching cutscenes kind of an ordeal put together with everything else off about her appearance...

[Cheapshot]

What's really interesting about these lips to me is that the new lips still keep the slight :} shape of the inner lip. They completely deleted this from my face 3 F Au Ra, and I've had people telling me it must be a result of the new mesh so I should just get used to it, because that's how the shape has to be for the new mesh to work.

Except here's some new Miqo'te lips that look more like my old Au ra lips that do just that! So no, it's absolutely not a limitation of the mesh, they just didn't have good quality control transferring the old faces onto the new mesh.

They adjusted the inner lip to add a lip gap back between the benchmark and 7.0. They didn’t reshape the whole mouth to be like the original tho, they just kinda moved the inner mouth up. I appreciate that they responded to feedback, but I wish it hadnt been such a quick fix. Their fix to the fangs was so much cleaner.

[Doopliss]

I consider adjusting facial features 10000% more important, but, I just wanted to say that several months later, I still hate the "intentional" way light interacts with a bunch of hairstyles now.

Tried going on an alt earlier and noticed, in Ul'dah, light still goes straight through her hair, adjusting the color enough to make it stand out awkwardly from her eyebrows (which are supposed to be her actual hair color). I also still miss being able to get nice rim lighting in GPOSE without grossly illuminating the hair... Overall just not something I care about being more "realistic" or not.

Also I know this opinion is potentially unpopular here but I genuinely, vastly dislike the change to Viera eye colors. The actual iris shade has been made way too bright while the upper-eye shading has become way too dark. It makes the contrast so stark and uncanny-feeling, and got rid of the gentle-yet-striking feeling they used to have with their more gradient shading...

[Allegor]

So I was toying with glamours and noticed something odd and took off my shirt and.... what....am I looking at? the lighting is so bad it looks like I'm wearing one of those "fake muscles" skinsuits. The textures between the head and the torso are different, the colors feel different, some parts look smeared like it was mildly photoshopped (I didn't). Overall the torso feels of "lower quality" than the head, for lack of a better term.

This is so bad I don't think I'm ever taking Red's shirt off ever again if this is how he looks in dim light. I know Roes are far from the most popular race but sometimes I genuinely wonder if they do quality control on them.




As for my Hrothy, one thing that's been bugging me is the beard is way too...greasy? compared to their hair/fur, at least on the 'Runar' face. Depending on how direct the light source is, it straight up glows white and looks more like a flat plastic jaw than facial hair.

[Heavenchild]

I didn't want to engage with this, but it's been eating at me since the first benchmark. Before the first benchmark I was on the fence in terms of buying DT for a number of reasons. After the first benchmark I was firmly in "not buying". This is the primary reason why. My alt (who really became my main in EW I guess) uses the Face 2, wide mouth, "Cirina" customization and it just got absolutely butchered in the "graphics upgrade". Sorry for grabbing your post, but it was the nearest one covering the changes to femra face 2.

There is a laundry list of changes that I dislike; eyes are so yellow now that on any non-human skin-tones they look jaundiced, the eyelashes, the eye-liner darkness, the pupil size, the scales that look like burn scabs, but what they did to the mouth... just why? It looks absolutely nothing like it did pre-7.0. I loved the "fishy face", that's why I used it, now it just looks like a creepy porcelain doll. The dimples are gone, the width across the board is maybe 75% of what it was previously, the lips are permanently pursed and the bottom lip upturned, the lip color goes all the way to the edges. It just looks BAD. And just to rub salt in the wound apparently, some of the mouth changes they made to face 1 and 3 actually look more like the old face 2!

But what is possibly even worse, is how bad the emotes are. When she smiled on the benchmark on the chocobo I physically cringed. Evey smile emote now is "fake smile" with sharply upturned corners and no sideways spreading of the mouth. Like whoever did the rigging has never seen a real human smile before (it seems like this is the case across multiple other faces/races as well). It looks like the false-charm smile of a serial killer and it is difficult to convey how much I hate it.

No changes/adjustments were made in bench 2, nor in 7.0 so I have very little hope they will change anything in 7.1. Simply put, I've been playing 6+ years, I didn't buy DT, I've subbed once to keep my house on my other character, but I'm at the point if I don't see improvement in 7.1, I'm done until 8.0 or maybe even done period. As bad as DT's story seems to be, having to watch 20+ hours of cutscenes with the changes and the awful new facial rigging isn't something I'm willing to pay for. Regardless, my sub is done so that's all I'll say about it. Please fix this.

I still hope that they fix the mouth. It looked so much better before. :c

[Cheapshot]

So I was toying with glamours and noticed something odd and took off my shirt and.... what....am I looking at? the lighting is so bad it looks like I'm wearing one of those "fake muscles" skinsuits. The textures between the head and the torso are different, the colors feel different, some parts look smeared like it was mildly photoshopped (I didn't). Overall the torso feels of "lower quality" than the head, for lack of a better term.

This is so bad I don't think I'm ever taking Red's shirt off ever again if this is how he looks in dim light. I know Roes are far from the most popular race but sometimes I genuinely wonder if they do quality control on them.

Yo what the heck? You look like a melted chocolate bunny. Thats really bad.

[Hatsuoki]

I just noticed that sometimes the sharp shadows only appear in gpose. The first picture was taken outside of gpose, and the second immediately after entering gpose without changing any lighting settings. It's not the angle of the head because I can watch him idle and the sharp shadow never shows up outside gpose but is always visible in gpose. This harsh lighting is making it really difficult to plan out angles because I can't tell when it's going to be bad unless I go into gpose over and over (and even then, it's hard to avoid).

[Moonfallen]

So I was toying with glamours and noticed something odd and took off my shirt and.... what....am I looking at? the lighting is so bad it looks like I'm wearing one of those "fake muscles" skinsuits. The textures between the head and the torso are different, the colors feel different, some parts look smeared like it was mildly photoshopped (I didn't). Overall the torso feels of "lower quality" than the head, for lack of a better term.

This is so bad I don't think I'm ever taking Red's shirt off ever again if this is how he looks in dim light. I know Roes are far from the most popular race but sometimes I genuinely wonder if they do quality control on them.

What is not talked about enough is that since they remodeled the head, hands, and feet is that there is a noticeable difference that you can see. The body is that of the old model and has not been reworked as far as I know and have read/heard. The colours now are shades different than they were in EW for EVERYONE and overall which is another HUGE issue. My friend ended up fantaing her character because you could see a noticeable difference and seam where the head/neck, hands and feet connect to the body because they are not the same shade in colouring as before nor are they the same quality (new model vs old). My character's face is the same way. Her face is a completely different skin tone than the rest of her body and it looks like I'm either wearing a lot of makeup, or someone else's face as a mask because the face has been smoothed out like your body looks like here. Darker and lighter skin tones look horrendous in the new lighting like we are varying shades of clay or playdough. They definitely half-assed a lot of things and I think they tried to do way too much in way too little amount of time and refuse to admit fault. Not only is the graphics update rushed with bugs and issues, but so was the story and expansion overall. Ultimately they took on way too much in tasks and should have prioritized quality control over huge amounts of varying content.

[Turnintino]

Only the normal (aka "bump") and diffuse maps have been updated on the bodies; the body models themselves (including hands and feet) haven't been touched (and probably won't be any time soon because of how gear works, as much as I'd personally like to see them updated). Regardless, it's those texture maps that are creating seam issues. Theoretically, that should make this an easier fix, but there were absolutely seam issues before (not all as egregious as some I've seen in DT, but nonethless) that they never bothered to fix in any capacity.

For example, on my catboy, I thought the neck seam was more noticeable before the update. Conversely, I think my dark-skinned (I bring that up because I think it may be a factor) male Duskwight's neck seam is much more noticeable now (on my fem Duskwight, it's more on par with my catboy's seams, for whatever reason). In certain lighting, you can see it very clearly.