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

[ArtemisXIV]

Taking a moment to add to my disappointment about the hair, as is. The original concept had *lift* and *body*, and this is just flat and lifeless. It doesn't even seem "inspired by" the original concept, as it doesn't even have the *intention* behind the original concept in mind. It's like the developers thought the sentiment of 'oh, add some zig zags' was the main point, and they missed the mark on what the *point* of the design was.

[crawlerette]

Wow I did not even recognize this as the winning entry until someone shared this thread... Extremely disappointing. :\

[Tenefix]

Please reconsider on this one. If you can't execute a hairstyle like that correctly, please hire someone with the knowledge base to do so. There are plenty of people that can do it justice!

[SkankyRoe]

How much should we bet that they're not going to pull this "inspired by" bs when it comes to any of the straight hair winners, and they'll ACTUALLY put effort into replicating it?

You mean like the kpop twink hairstyle we got in 7.0?

[ThePaintEnjoyer]

Logging here to express support for this sentiment
As a latina, I wonder the reason for the contradiction of the dedication to good cultural portrayal in Dawntrail and turning around to do this to a real hair many people on the planet have, including many Latinoamericans the real-life Turali.


Even if there was no ill intention, this reflects poorly on the teams involved and needs proper addressing and fixing. The hair style doesn't even try to follow the volume in the art direction. Surely that isn't a problem with gear clipping since the very questionable Afro disco hair is in this game?


I'm sure many Black artists would be happy to be consultants for the technical team. Representing things well is part of artistic skill and would level up their resumes, which if I remember correctly is one of the reasons behind the graphical update. I really hope they do this.

[Kanehon]

I saw the new hair saying it was from the contest winner, sorry, "Inspired" by the contest winner, and I couldn't even think which one they were trying to do.

This is disappointing, and disrespectful to both artist and community. It's like they didn't bother.

[Kakii]

chiming in with my first ever forums post to emphatically voice my disappointment with the implementation of this new hair. i have spent four years playing this game hoping to get another at least wavy, if not outright curly hairstyle. this is not it. there are far too many liberties taken with this, and the texture looks abysmal. cbu3 constantly makes a joke out of black hairstyles (note: the bouncy afro) and im sick of it. I was excited for a new hair for ONCE and im really hoping they change this :/

[ThePaintEnjoyer]

I would be interested to hear what these games are! I saw someone else mention Guild Wars 2 but they have higher specs than Dawntrail
I've been meaning to collect different replies into one big one with references that hopefully serves as good feedback for when the devs address this (as they should)

[Kezona]

Responding to this thread to +1 support revising this hairstyle to be faithful to the original artist's intent. Hopefully the devs treat this as seriously as complaints about the updated character models and take swift steps to address the problems outlined in this thread.

[minttea]

Set up my forum account to chime in.

I understand the polygon limitations, and yes, it probably isn't possible to recreate the original one to one. However, the hair could have had more curls painted into the normal, or a couple layered flat texture to get this some lift. As it is, the first thing I thought was that it looked limp, and I never could have guess it was supposed to be the contest winner. Though I hadn't intended on using the original style, I was another person who was very excited to see them win, so this is very disappointing to see.