Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Aurumis]

We would like to thank everyone for their feedback regarding the graphical update.
The Development team has been carefully reviewing this thread and many others, including bug reports and concerns raised outside of the official forums.

We are currently working on an update based on the feedback provided, as well as preparing to share details about our planned course of action.
As these are undergoing thorough final inspections, we expect to make an announcement in late August.

Thank you all for your patience as we continue fine-tuning the graphical update.

Thank you so so so so much for replying and let us know!!

As I haven't been in this forum for a while. I want to refresh the issue with this face that we all want fixed PLEASE. Please take note...

Male miqo'te face 4 eyes 3:
The eyes pls. Fix the eyes. They look dead inside, they are more closed than before, and they look too much obscured, like you can barely see the Iris of the Sun Miqo'te's.... We want the eyes how they were before pls. This are dull and looks awful. Nothing like they were. This are not "loyal" to how the characters looked at all.
They also have the eyebrows thinner than before...and the corners of the lips upwards making them smile when they are neutral... and makes the emotes and other faces looks awful because of the coners of the lips now being always upwards. If you use an emote that smiles, it is more exaggerated than before. But please the BIG ISSUE with this face are the EYES. FIX THE EYES. Please please make the devs know... The face is nothing like they used to be...

[Argantaelle]

(part I)

I'm still not sure if the community manager's post is not just some PR air vibration (especially considering FFXIV is going to be released in China and South Korea in a few months), but let's pretend it's not.

Most of my feedback applies to the second face of male Au Ra Xaela (unsurprisingly, the character I played until DT). Let's start from the top.

1. Hair
This issue has been reported multiple times since the first benchmark. True black is gone, instead it got mixed with random patches of deep blue. They are very noticeable in the bright light. It seems like all races are affected by this change.

[Tahli]

Feedback around issues involving NPCs that are yet to be updated (Yotsuyu eyelash clipping, Zenos low res) are mute.

I would disagree that those bits of feedback are moot, considering some 7.0 changes to those npcs aren't simply the same as before, but actually glitched. I appreciate the game staff for accepting my bug report on Zenos, and we have been encouraged to keep reporting bugs as we see them.

[Argantaelle]

(part II)

2. Eyebrows
For some mysterious reason, SE decided to move eyebrows lower, make them less curvy, and turn their lower ends into almost straight lines. This change greatly affected characters's expressions (the lower eyebrows are, the angrier character looks, and male Au Ra hasn't been known for their gentle faces). It's quite interesting that in the first version of the benchmark, the eyebrows were in their natural position; this change occurred only with the second benchmark and later went live.

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2. The second type of eyebrow got affected the most.


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3. Lines under the eyebrows
After the changes in eyebrow shape, a strange phenomenon occurred: in some environments, the second-face type got sharp lines under the muscle part of the eyebrow.
I've already posted about it a few weeks ago; I might as well make a repost.

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4. Light-haired eyebrows
If the hair colour is very light, the eyebrows are almost invisible. Vanilla eyebrows had some kind of second colour, which helped to make them more prominent. With DT, this second colour is gone, thus the eyebrows on some faces almost disappeared.
Many races have this issue, but as for male Au Ra, only the 1st and 4th faces were affected the most.

face 1

face 4

[Argantaelle]

(part 3)
5. Eyes
I'm grateful that SE preserved original eye shapes with minimal changes (only the eyelids became more pronounced). But unfortunately, the new eyes look smaller. The part of the old sclera is taken by the new thicker eyelids and the shadow under the upper eyelid; also, it seems like the irises have been enlarged. Thus, the eyes look darker and narrower.

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3. It's especially noticeable with the 3d eye type, as it is the narrowest of all.


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It would be great if the eyelid and shadow changes were compensated in a way to preserve the initial impression of eye size (by making the whites in the eye more... white, or enlarging the eye size, etc.).

6. Iris
The iris also got changed. Its edges got more rough and looked as if they were corroded with acid. The contrast between the outer ring and the centre got more pronounced, almost as SE decided that the players will always use limbal rings and there is no need to try to make the transition more smooth and natural.

[Argantaelle]

(part 4)
7. Nose
The noses of the second face got slightly wider, but I think it's the change to the good. They were too sharp before. If SE is going to revert all the changes, I would like to have one option of a slightly wider than usual nose (my character had the 6th nose type with the widest nose bridge).

8. Mouth
Lots has been said about changes in the mouth shape and its unification across the first three male Au Ra faces. I posted about the same issue a month ago:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6497195

Also, I would like to post the link to the very detailed feedback of a Chinese Au Ra player:
https://ff14risingstones.web.sdo.com.../detail/105087

Their comparison pictures are much better than mine, haha.

The mouth shape got unified across 1-3 faces; only the fourth one got relatively unscathed (and improved, because the vanilla mouth was very low-poly). So players got the same mouth shape, just a little bit wider or thinner. The second face got affected the most because its original mouth was very different. Their almost straight line (which helped to maintain a neutral or friendly facial expression) turned into an arc facing downward.

I wonder what caused the original change (except for the desire to minimise efforts, of course). Did they really think they were improving the original shape?

[Argantaelle]

(part 5)
9. Skin
Many players complain about the skin texture: all of a sudden, characters got small wrinkles under their eyes or enlarged pores, and the skin texture got more rough. Certainly, my character got affected too. I personally like this change; before, I had to imitate the unevenness of the colour with face paint (the grease one) to make the face look less plastic. But I can survive if the skin gets more smooth; I just put some grease on again.

10. Scales
For reasons unknown, all scales (both Xaela and Raen) got a cold grey undertone, so they started to look more rough than before. The change affected Raen folk the most, especially the scales on the chest.

Look how unnatural and rough they look, and how high the contrast is. It's almost as if this particular Au Ra just bathed in a pool full of dirt and forgot to clean his chest scales properly.

It's especially noticeable with the fourth face type. The 4th face has been upgraded significantly and all of a sudden got more handsome (yeah, I know that some people were attached to its individuality, but it would be nice to preserve an "instagramized" option too). Just look at these beautiful, creamy, delicate, and smooth horn and "beard" textures and how they contradict the roughness of chest scales.

It's kind of strange that the scales on the back got affected less (except for the tail, which got the same cold grey undertone as the scales on the chest).

[Argantaelle]

(part 6)
11. Some random stuff.
a) I'm one character player, but I do have some alts I visit from time to time. My Elezen stayed more or less the same, except for the swollen lips (a common issue after the graphical update) and permanent lip gloss. I would like to have matte lips back, please.

b) I liked the 4th Viera male face more of all others, but its lips averted me from making a Viera alt. After the graphical update, they got new lips, and even if they are more generic, for me, they look better.
I know that there are people attached to this particular shape who find it more interesting and attractive, so I would like to have both the old and the new shapes available.


The conclusion:
The ideal solution to satisfy everyone is to have a new character creation tool with both new and old features available (with SE recreating old facial features on a new facial structure with better textures and polygon count).

But it will take lots of work, so I'm afraid FFXIV management is going to walk the way World of Warcraft once did. After the announcement of the new models, they just put old skins on the new rigs and, in a few years, deleted them too, so players had to comply (fortunately, I had already quit WoW by this time).

I think we will get our low-poly vanilla features back, and in a few years, they'll force us to switch to new ones. Because no one would care to animate the old ones properly.

Yeah, I know, I'm bitter, and I would be glad to be proven wrong.

P.S. Gods, it was a very long post, and making it and taking all the pictures wasted about 4-5 hours of my life.

[Dysvalence]

Here's my plate before the update:




And here it is, largely unmodified, in DT:





I feel like my plate portrait best shows the issues with the update. The flame animation from an aug law's order RDM out of frame is excessively diffused, and is missing that sharp glare/highlight that used to land perfectly on the glasses. The flame's color cast now almost looks sickly, for the lack of a better term.



My other big complaint, and one that has persisted since the first DT benchmark, is how the upper edge of the eyeshadow isn't as sharply defined as it used to be, making my character constantly look sleepy, and in particular this really hurts story cutscenes that are already lacking in gravitas. The pupil also blends with the eyeshadow a bit and that doesn't help either.



To be fair, the hair is substantially improved, though my opinion on the update largely hasn't changed- it's perfectly playable, but overall still a downgrade.

[Celmar]

While the updates for Viera were mostly great and the changes to dark skin were especially fantastic all around, the glossy texture of our skin under certain bright light settings seems to make it look unnatural and plastic-like