Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Turnintino]

I haven't taken comparison shots yet, but I can tell at a glance that neither of my biggest concerns about male Miqo'te's 'face 4' have been changed, for better or worse. My main issues being the shape of the nose and upper lip sculpts (not the textures, in this case, though they have their problems).

Not necessarily surprised, since this isn't the most popular catboy face (though probably second most), but still disappointed. And I suppose there's no guarantee that my issues will be addressed at all, since critiques of this face tend to focus more on the eyes and bump maps (which I do agree should be adjusted, but they're lower on my list).

Still, very happy to see the dark circles removed from male Duskwights' diffuse maps, and the other positive changes y'all have shared. I hope they keep coming.

[CuteBucket]

Checking out my female au ra (face 3) as she's the one I've had the most issues with.

Photos taken in Gpose indoors in a studio. I tried to replicate the lighting as exactly as I could, though the temperature may be slightly different. 7.0 pictures were also taken before any changes they made to indoor lighting.




So...I'm not seeing much change. Not really surprised, I didn't have my hopes up at all, but yeesh.

Here's her old model next to the new ones for good measure. There has been a very slight improvement, but she still looks very different from her old self.


Pros:
- Her eye color is much closer to what it used to be now. This came with the downside of messing up every Au Ra with darker limbal rings though. The old graphics didn't struggle with light and dark limbal rings...so why does this one?
- Her eyes are maaaaybe a little bit smaller. This is good, they made her eyes noticeably larger than her old model which made her look too young and baby faced to me.
- The way light falls on the face seems a bit better. Less eyebags and harsh nose shadows. Not sure how much of that is 7.1 or the indoor lighting changes they did.

Cons:
- Pupil size is still WAY too big.
- Scales still look dirty.
- Eyes are still too rounded.
- Eye makeup is still much lighter than it used to be.
- Lips are still completely wrong and off-model compared to the old face. You cannot tell me this flat, deflated lips are "spec." I've seen other races and NPCs that still have something similar to her old lip shape. It is absolutely doable in the new graphics engine. PLEASE give us back the adorable :} lips instead of these flat :| lips.

I've already taken matters into my own hands and am in talks with a 3D modeler to fix face 3 myself, because I've been in the forums since the launch of the first Benchmark PLEADING the team to fix my favorite Au Ra face, I literally joined the forums just to give feedback on the benchmark because the changes were so egregiously bad, and we're still here. I broke down sobbing when 7.0 came out and I saw that was really what I had to look at now. It's clear to me that Square Enix does not care about these character models nearly as much as I and many other players do, so I guess it's up to us in the community to fix it and do their work for them.

[Taranok]

The changes on face 4 au ra are a bit more noticeable.





6.58 on left, Benchmark 1.0 on right.





7.1

Of note we can see that the lips are fixed and don't have as harsh a shadow in the corners. However, the cheek/jaw shape was massively tweaked. Cheeks are puffier, jaw is wider, the angle between cheek and jaw is substantially different than it was in 6.58. This combined with the more emotive faces makes Au Ra look substantially puffier with extremely small facial features relative to the wide faces.

While a lot was done to fix some of the glaring issues with things like the lips, the face itself is still overall ruined.

Thanks for not even addressing the biggest part of the complaints.

[faiarrow]

Out of curiosity, seeing the lighting affecting the limbal rings in such a way, I wonder if the new lighting parametres for the limbal rings is tied directly to the ancient eyes which I believe got fixed in this patch? I haven't had a chance to investigate it myself but it might be a possible lead.

[Liamont]

Reading through all of this and also the JP thread, there's a few things that has been really bothering me about this whole endeavor.

1. Why are they going back and updating ARR zones when, arguably, the most important priority they should have right now is the characters? Since that is one of the biggest things that draw people in and keep people playing in FFXIV at least? As far as I know, very few people were complaining about the ARR zones?

2. In addition, don't they have the original old models? Surely it is not that difficult to put them side by side, or even overlay them to see the exact differences between the two? If we as customers can make GIFs overlaying two screenshots to point out some rather blatant differences between models, surely it would be easier for them—with the source material—to spot the difference?

It is frankly rather baffling to me that the customers are being called on to tell the management what needs to be changed. I don't understand, shouldn't their dev team be more attuned to minute details and have an eye for exactness compared to the customer? Why does it feel like many changes are done sloppily, or as if they can't see the difference at all? It should not be on the customer to be able to spot the differences that, while "minute", also change the entire feel and recognizability of a face.

3. It honestly is starting to feel more and more to me that they wanted to change things for the sake of changing them, because they themselves didn't like what they had before and wanted to "update" it. Completely disregarding the fact that many people spent literal years making memories of their character, and thus would not want to log in and see a stranger staring back at them. Even though I tried to be hopeful in my post earlier, but to be frank I am really tired of waiting with baited breath on whether or not my characters were changed back to what I remember then as. At this rate, it will possibly take literal years to get a final answer, and I don't know about you, but I think there's something wrong with needing to wait years for the chance of my characters returning.

So, I would really like some transparency on this issue. They give detailed notes for the rest of the patch, why is it just the character feature corrections that do not get detailed notes? Can we please get a timeline and a detailed list of what changes will be made, for what race, face type, mouth type, eye type, etc from now on? That way we are not kept in this state of constant suspense.

That said, I am thankful that the dev team is still making changes, and I hope that they will hire or assign people who are more detail oriented to the tweaking process. Because right now it feels like those types of people are sorely lacking in the department.

[Larirawiel]

1. Why are they going back and updating ARR zones when, arguably, the most important priority they should have right now is the characters? Since that is one of the biggest things that draw people in and keep people playing in FFXIV at least? As far as I know, very few people were complaining about the ARR zones?

I guess, the people, who rework the old zones are not the same people who rework the character models. And letting all people rework the models could do more harm than good. Software development does not scale very well with the head count. Adding more people to a software development team can slow it down. Yes, it sounds strange but it is what it is.

2. In addition, don't they have the original old models? Surely it is not that difficult to put them side by side, or even overlay them to see the exact differences between the two? If we as customers can make GIFs overlaying two screenshots to point out some rather blatant differences between models, surely it would be easier for them—with the source material—to spot the difference?

They have surely the old models and they can surely compare them.

But the case is more complicated. A character is not only a model, it is a combination of a model, textures and lighting tricks ala normal-/shadow-/parallax maps. And especially the third part is the problematic one. It seems, that the devs are incapable to create correct normal-/shadow-/parallax maps. And the bigger problem is, they were also completely wrong in the pre 7.0 game the whole time. But it seems, that the people got used to it and did not complain about it.

And i do not know the reason why the devs struggle so hard with creating correct normal-/shadow-/parallax maps. Maybe they have some weird restrictions ala "correct normal-/shadow-/parallax maps cost too much performance" or "it will not run on the PS4 because it needs too much memory" or something like that.

And the more frustrating part is, i am active in some nightclub discords and i see modded characters there. And then i wonder, how can it be, that some modders, who create those mods unpaid in their free time, can do so much better work than the FF14 devs. I simply do not get it.




Cheers

[Alice_Rivers]

And the more frustrating part is, i am active in some nightclub discords and i see modded characters there. And then i wonder, how can it be, that some modders, who create those mods unpaid in their free time, can do so much better work than the FF14 devs. I simply do not get it.

That's the easiest question to answer: The modders care.

[Aco505]

how can it be, that some modders, who create those mods unpaid in their free time, can do so much better work than the FF14 devs. I simply do not get it.

I am surprised you say this when the answer is because it's not the same implementing something client side than server side. Does this mean SE should be excused because of this? Of course not, but introducing high quality textures for the entire game, for instance, has way more implications than for a single computer.

That said, there are things like the viera/hrothgar hat situation, in which a single modder was able to fix the head pieces for them, that simply have no explanation besides the fact that they just don't want to bother with it because it'd take time and resources that someone at the company isn't willing to provide.

[Loggos]

1. Why are they going back and updating ARR zones when, arguably, the most important priority they should have right now is the characters? Since that is one of the biggest things that draw people in and keep people playing in FFXIV at least? As far as I know, very few people were complaining about the ARR zones?

I wonder if those are alibi actions? By updating the zones they can signal that they are working on the graphics overhaul (of the game as a whole) and create the impression that they are involved, they care, they are on it.
But at the same time I fathom that zones are easier to update because people don't expect a near perfect translation of old models. With zones the overall outcome and feel are more important than every pebble having the same size and shape. So I think you have more liberty when updating areas while still producing a result most people will consider an improvement.
But that doesn't apply to character models. Here the devil is in the details.
By choosing the easier thing to focus on they can show more positive results (even though it's not what we've been asking for). Perhaps they hope that those results will maintain (some of) the goodwill of the playerbase.

[CuteBucket]

1. Why are they going back and updating ARR zones when, arguably, the most important priority they should have right now is the characters? Since that is one of the biggest things that draw people in and keep people playing in FFXIV at least? As far as I know, very few people were complaining about the ARR zones?

I apologize if this gets a little tinfoil hat, but I have been thinking about these things myself and this is my working hypothesis. They are putting priority on ARR zones because those are what new players see. New players don't care about the old graphics, they just started playing, after all. New players don't care about lack of endgame content, they're new players, after all. New players don't know about any of that, they just want a cool looking character and a pretty world to explore. That's what I wanted when I was new, I didn't know anything else. It's much easier to appeal to new players than keep old ones happy. And in this day and age of business, short-term profits are all that matter. Any invenstment that would make long term growth possible isn't as appealing because it doesn't make shareholders more money right now. It would be great if they made jobs feel better at lower levels for new players, but hey, new players don't know how bad that job feels until they experience it at higher levels, right? So why invest in overhauling it?

2. In addition, don't they have the original old models? Surely it is not that difficult to put them side by side, or even overlay them to see the exact differences between the two? If we as customers can make GIFs overlaying two screenshots to point out some rather blatant differences between models, surely it would be easier for them—with the source material—to spot the difference? The model of current business is that of cancer--growth at all costs, even if down the line it destroys itself in doing so.

Yes, you can--I've done it myself in Blender. It would be great if there was a way to simply shape one face over the other, but the files are so different that it just doesn't really work to try it. I tried my hand at fixing things myself, but frankly it is way above my skill level to accomplish, as I am very new to learning 3D modeling. It is hard to explain just how radically different the old and new 3D models are. There is no porting the old onto the new, they are fundamentally changed from the ground up. All of the bones are different. All of the weights are different. The texture maps are totally different, not just with some new formats, but even the orientation that the texture maps are laid out on has been changed. It's all different, at ever level of the model. All the old sculpts can do now is serve as a visual reference.

3. It honestly is starting to feel more and more to me that they wanted to change things for the sake of changing them, because they themselves didn't like what they had before and wanted to "update" it. Completely disregarding the fact that many people spent literal years making memories of their character, and thus would not want to log in and see a stranger staring back at them. Even though I tried to be hopeful in my post earlier, but to be frank I am really tired of waiting with baited breath on whether or not my characters were changed back to what I remember then as. At this rate, it will possibly take literal years to get a final answer, and I don't know about you, but I think there's something wrong with needing to wait years for the chance of my characters returning.

That is how I feel now too. Someone on the dev team decided that these models look better and our opinion as players doesn't matter. They will begrudgingly fix the very few things that weren't "spec" and then tell everyone else to deal with it, we like this look better. After all, why make a bunch of veteran players happy chasing after fixing their models when they can put money and dev time to things to bring more streamers and new players to the game? All those years of loyalty and monthly sub money? That's expected, that's just status quo, that's not growth.

They give detailed notes for the rest of the patch, why is it just the character feature corrections that do not get detailed notes? Can we please get a timeline and a detailed list of what changes will be made, for what race, face type, mouth type, eye type, etc from now on? That way we are not kept in this state of constant suspense.

That said, I am thankful that the dev team is still making changes, and I hope that they will hire or assign people who are more detail oriented to the tweaking process. Because right now it feels like those types of people are sorely lacking in the department.

We get such detailed notes on all the other changes being made--it does feel kind of lazy that they can't put what they're changing in the patch notes or give us any previews or indication of any kind whatsoever on what things they are working on or not. If they could just tell me flat out that my Au Ra's flat ugly lips are an intentional design choice, then I can at least have my answer and move on with my life. I get that the notes would be very long--maybe link to a separate document in the patch notes instead of in the patch notes itself--but we deserve to know what exactly is being worked on for each race and gender of face.

But I get the sense that they just don't care. I don't think they care that a percentage of players that have been playing longer than 6 months are upset by these changes and unsub from the game--they'd rather focus on new players.

Is this a good business plan? Gods no. But it sure looks like the direction they're taking the game if you ask me.