Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[ZephyrMenodora]

Hi, just adding my voice to the choir. I appreciate the work that went into the graphics overhaul and the new textures look amazing in the overworld. My main grievance are the significant changes made to the faces. I tried giving it a few days to see if I would warm up to my WOL's makeover but three days on and I still can barely bring myself to look at her in cutscenes.

I have three main issues with my WOL's new face: 1) Darkening of her upper eyelid to the point where she looks like she's in a perpetual ಠ_ಠ face, 2) complete lack of depth on the eyebrows, and 3) entirely new shape of lips and smile. Here's a before pic:



... and after pic (both taken on PS5--not sure why the antialiasing is so bad in gpose):



Her eyes were heavily shaded before, but there was still a softness to the irises that made her eyes bright and open. Without that softness, it just looks like her eyes are half-shut in every cutscene:



The lack of shading on her eyebrows makes them blend into her skin. It's visible everywhere but it's especially bad in low lighting. And her upper lip is shaped completely differently than the same set of lips pre-7.0. Instead of having a soft smile with a full upper lip, the combination of a differently shaped upper lip with only the corners turning up in a smile gives her a C: smile rather than a (:




All in all, she used to have such a soft, lovely face. I was prepared for some differences but this is such a drastic change and I feel the end results are much more severe than I was expecting. Different lighting/shaders giving different effects I could understand, but I'm not sure why an entire reshaping of certain facial features (like lips) was necessary. One last before pic for good measure:



Thanks for hearing me out. I really did try to give the graphics upgrade a fair shake but the faces just aren't sitting right with me.

I think I can see what people are getting at with this one. These characters look more like cousins or sisters than the same person.

[CantDecide]

Right. It won't turn you back into a blurry pixel mess.

My character's face actually seems a bit more blurry now than it was before, especially in the lips. I've noticed it in some of the other screenshots in this thread, too. There's been a loss of clarity and depth somehow; The features don't pop individually anymore and seem out of focus. Maybe it's a hyur thing?

What happend to this guy, for example. Bro turned into a Sims 3 character. :/

These ones also come to mind:

original - DT

left is DT, right is EW

Though I can't tell if it's because of the eyes, lighting, or a normal map problem as some have suggested. I assume it's a combination of things.

I'm biased of course, but I think F midlanders got it the worst. Whoever was in charge of our new sculpt just fundamentally missed the impression of our old faces. I'm right there with you, I'm feeling depressed and barely have the motivation to keep playing.

Agreed. Some of the characters I've seen look improved by the update, but definitely not face 1 midlander women (I can't speak to the other faces as I'm not familiar with them). I've been away since Stormblood and recently resubbed, and though I'm going to give it a chance, I'm not sure how long I'll stick around. Had I known my character's aesthetic would be hit this hard I probably wouldn't have bothered coming back.

It sucks because part of the appeal of FFXIV for me was how nice the "human" characters looked. I've found a lot of other games tend to make human women look frumpy or plain, almost as if to make elves and other exotic races stand out more. It was really nice that SE managed to make all the races and clans look appealing in their own distinctive way. By contrast, I don't like the more generic and semi-realistic style they seem to be going for now. It reminds me of the kind of thing you might see in one of those dime a dozen pay-to-win MMOs. It's uncanny, and doesn't fit the bones of this game well.

Unfortunately, loss of charm and visual cohesion like this seems to be a really common pitfall of graphical updates to older games in general.

[Cai]

Just to add to the megathread, I acknowledge that plenty of characters look great, but clearly there are specific issues across multiple races where either the execution of the updated features feels off/strange or the quality that specific facial features previously conveyed is no longer there. In my case, the shared options between these face 2 F roegadyns completely lose the qualities that I chose them for. The heavy shadows on the eyelids make their eyes make them look tired or bored in cutscenes instead of like direct and commanding leaders and their lips have lost the unique interesting definition in place of their bottom-lip looking flat and over-pronounced. Recognizing that these are very small aspects of a character, together they personally change the feel of the characters significantly.

[Leosphinx]

I was being honest. The character doesn't look anymore dead or alive in the before or after image. It wasn't my goal to walk on egg shells or spare feelings. It was my intent to be honest about a comparison that was being offered to everyone here.

On that note, this is a thread meant solely to tell EA games that their graphic changes are complete garbage. All of you are being honest in your complaints about something that some people worked really hard on. I did nothing different and I won't apologize for my comment. I offer only honestly as you all are doing. I promise that I will always give my honest opinions.

Far too many people hide behind "honesty" as a justification to be insensitive or rude. Wasn't expecting an apology and I, for one, never said it was complete garbage. There are specific things I dislike with the changes that I stated in my first reply on this thread. I'm happy for you that you like your updated character and I agree that he looks great. But you don't have to "walk on eggshells" to come off a bit more tactful when addressing someone elses character that they created. A little kindness goes a long way but if that's not your thing, you do you. I wont keep going on about it, just agree to disagree.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

This is correct. Besides specific changes like mouth shapes and such, characters do look a lot like before but only under specific lighting conditions.

Yeah, that's also where I'm placing my strongest suspicions.
The lighting in the character equipment window is also awful in my case, though (and probably using the same setup as portraits, which is not very limbal ring friendly).

But the light definitely has way too much influence on colors compared to before, and the only times where I'm "oh, my character is back" is in the shadows, at night, just before sunrise lol
(I'm also not sure about the glowing limbal rings personally, I thought I would like them but it's really distracting and making the gaze look unfocused... don't know how it could be better tweaked though)

I think something's off with the skin material too. I have legitimately no problem with the gear so far, I love the velvet shader, the high rez cloth textures are a little distracting but I could get used to it, but gear in general doesn't seem to be as blown up and overexposed when in direct light.
I had Ifrit in my Trial roulette yesterday, and if you remember the lighting there is very... unique and made the face look a little weird at times before, but now the same effect only applies on gear, and the skin material barely has that blue rim light effect... it looked kinda off tbh, but I'll have to properly compare it later.

[Doopliss]

Hi, just adding my voice to the choir. I appreciate the work that went into the graphics overhaul and the new textures look amazing in the overworld. My main grievance are the significant changes made to the faces. I tried giving it a few days to see if I would warm up to my WOL's makeover but three days on and I still can barely bring myself to look at her in cutscenes.

I have three main issues with my WOL's new face: 1) Darkening of her upper eyelid to the point where she looks like she's in a perpetual ಠ_ಠ face, 2) complete lack of depth on the eyebrows, and 3) entirely new shape of lips and smile. Here's a before pic:



... and after pic (both taken on PS5--not sure why the antialiasing is so bad in gpose):



Her eyes were heavily shaded before, but there was still a softness to the irises that made her eyes bright and open. Without that softness, it just looks like her eyes are half-shut in every cutscene:



The lack of shading on her eyebrows makes them blend into her skin. It's visible everywhere but it's especially bad in low lighting. And her upper lip is shaped completely differently than the same set of lips pre-7.0. Instead of having a soft smile with a full upper lip, the combination of a differently shaped upper lip with only the corners turning up in a smile gives her a C: smile rather than a (:




All in all, she used to have such a soft, lovely face. I was prepared for some differences but this is such a drastic change and I feel the end results are much more severe than I was expecting. Different lighting/shaders giving different effects I could understand, but I'm not sure why an entire reshaping of certain facial features (like lips) was necessary. One last before pic for good measure:



Thanks for hearing me out. I really did try to give the graphics upgrade a fair shake but the faces just aren't sitting right with me.

I apologize for potentially adding on to your woes, but I noticed this in the Benchmark too. Female Viera eyes were shaded so carefully and deliberately prior to the graphical update that I still can't believe this was allowed to pass...

It gives all of their stares a different feeling, and essentially changes most of their eye colors almost as drastically as limbal ring colors were changed.

I just cannot believe those eye colors are supposed to be the same, with or without the shaders.

[Gwen_Lavellan]

Hi, just adding my voice to the choir. I appreciate the work that went into the graphics overhaul and the new textures look amazing in the overworld. My main grievance are the significant changes made to the faces. I tried giving it a few days to see if I would warm up to my WOL's makeover but three days on and I still can barely bring myself to look at her in cutscenes.

I have three main issues with my WOL's new face: 1) Darkening of her upper eyelid to the point where she looks like she's in a perpetual ಠ_ಠ face, 2) complete lack of depth on the eyebrows, and 3) entirely new shape of lips and smile. Here's a before pic:



... and after pic (both taken on PS5--not sure why the antialiasing is so bad in gpose):



Her eyes were heavily shaded before, but there was still a softness to the irises that made her eyes bright and open. Without that softness, it just looks like her eyes are half-shut in every cutscene:



The lack of shading on her eyebrows makes them blend into her skin. It's visible everywhere but it's especially bad in low lighting. And her upper lip is shaped completely differently than the same set of lips pre-7.0. Instead of having a soft smile with a full upper lip, the combination of a differently shaped upper lip with only the corners turning up in a smile gives her a C: smile rather than a (:




All in all, she used to have such a soft, lovely face. I was prepared for some differences but this is such a drastic change and I feel the end results are much more severe than I was expecting. Different lighting/shaders giving different effects I could understand, but I'm not sure why an entire reshaping of certain facial features (like lips) was necessary. One last before pic for good measure:



Thanks for hearing me out. I really did try to give the graphics upgrade a fair shake but the faces just aren't sitting right with me.

Thank you for putting word right in the right place. This summaries why I feel I lost my girl…
I felt like plastic, all the gentle vibes gone.

[Noelani]

Putting this here in the main discussion:



Here is a really clear example of the puffy face problem. This user goes through many of the super fine detail differences in the middle of this image, but the single factor that is contributing more than all of those is the loss of several really important shadows that were previously contouring their face and are now so diminished that they aren't doing the contouring job anymore.

In EW, the face almost always has 'edge shadowing' where, near the edges of the face's viewed dimension, contrasting tones were used. Sometimes these were bright reflections instead of shadow, but they all served the same purpose! They showed the depth of the face in the Z axis into the screen, and they functionally narrow the visual space that the facial features are arranged within.



Look at the difference in shading along the jawline here. It's prominent from the sideburns down to the chin. The shadowing around the EW chin makes it clear that the chin is in front with the jawline smoothly tapering back. The loss of the chin's edge shading in particular has done a lot to make people's faces lose visual height, even if the model is dimensionally the same, as the chin blends into the neck and becomes indistinct.



Note the significant contouring work being done by the nose shadow. It really helps bring it forward from between the eyes, giving the face as a whole a distinct depth-read with the nose in front, the face in the middle, and the jawline receding backwards into shadow.

By contrast, when those shadows are missing or so faint they can't be discriminated, the face appears flattened and widened.



Here it is shown that the size and basic proportion of the face and jawline is identical. The DT face is not actually significantly rounder, but due to improper shading it appears severely rounder.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

Use imgur or another hosting website to post your images, linking from Discord directly doesn't work in a lot of cases.

[KageTokage]

Well, I just discovered today that it's the increased light reflect/shiny effects from the "glare" setting that was tanking my FPS and making it choppy in places, and ever since I turned it to low I've been getting consistent performance again outside of high traffic areas.

It honestly makes things look too shiny sometimes, so I don't really mind its absence too much.