Thread: New 7.1 hairstyle looks nothing like the winning hairstyle from the 2023 contest

What a lame answer. Small indie company SE, everyone.

"we just did a major graphics update but can't even do 1 hairstyle" ok guess we get a wet noodle mop hair

Originally Posted by Caro178

What did you want them to do? They said it right there. This is no longer "Natural Curls" and they will persevere to look for other ways to implement "Natural Curls". They weren't going to pull the inspired-by hairstyle out of the game last second and fix it in a day. This reassurance that they will try again is the best answer you could have possibly hoped for. Corporate speak or not the fact that a response was issued is in and of itself a very positive sign.

They've backtracked and fixed things before many times especially when outrages are this big the very least I was expecting was announcing to remodel the hairstyle atleast for a different patch but waiting for a new hairstyle will take about another expansion or two.

Originally Posted by BeoCat

Because the modders don't take into account that the game has to also run on toasters so they do not care about stuff like optimisation and poly counts and complex shaders.

Exactly - And then modders complain they crash because they have to load in half a million polygons per player when they enter a area with high player traffic, like Limsa or Solution Nine.
So they have to disable them in order the game to work.

Can you imagine SE going "Sorry Low End guys, this hairstyle and clothing breaks the fight for you, please unequip." ?

I love how this is just a nice way of saying how POC hair is difficult to manage. Something most of us have heard from media out whole lives. Meanwhile they don't want people using mods to get the natural hair that apparently can't be done in game.

Originally Posted by Chesskyth

Hello.

Thank you for all your feedback on the hairstyle that will be implemented in Patch 7.1. We would like to apologize for the major confusion we have caused.

For this patch, we started work to implement "Natural Curls" from the winning entries of the Hairstyle Design Contest, based on the idea of adding not only straight hair but also a variety of other hairstyles.

However, as the development work progressed, the light, delicate, and voluminous curls required for Natural Curls could not be implemented perfectly, despite implementation of the recent graphical update in FFXIV, due to limitations such as the polygon count.

Therefore, the finished result is a hairstyle that has not been implemented as Natural Curls, but as a wavy bob hairstyle, which is called "Doing the Wave" in-game.

However, since we did use the winning entry as a reference in the development process, we included a statement to that effect in the patch notes. We are deeply sorry that this has resulted in a great deal of confusion and concern.

Although we were not able to make it happen this time, the development team will continue to strive to implement many more hairstyles in the future. As for Natural Curls, which was not implemented in Patch 7.1, we will persevere in our efforts to look for other ways to implement this hairstyle.

We appreciate your feedback and hope you continue to enjoy FFXIV!

I appreciate that this answer was meant to be diplomatic but it really comes off as dismissive of the issue. I sincerely hope when the "issues" are solved and Natural Curls releases finally it will be a free default hair for all players. Everyone deserves access to a hairstyle like this by default so they can make their WoL look like themselves if they so choose. And that's the real root of this issue, the lack of representation that people are asking for repeatedly. I hope the team can find some consultants for this like they did for Dawntrail and fix these issues. If other games can work within their own technical confines to bring representation, in at least hair, to the table there is no reason CBU3 can't do the same.

Originally Posted by IvoryHawk

How are modders able to do this better than the official team? we already have full blown afros, jheri curls, dreads....

Simple really, modest are not beholden to polygon count, player come count or physics.

The limits they imposed on themselves are to maintain the minimum system requirements.

If they did not have those, then yes, the sky is the limit.

I remember seeing that this one had won the contest and had been really excited for it, though I don't think it would suit any of my current characters.
Completely unsurprised Square Enix didn't do it any justice, like why did they even pick this hair if they weren't going to actually make it.
It honestly doesn't even look like they tried.