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

[ValeriyApocalypse]

That's not a "Natural Curls" style, that's a "Wavy Bob" at most.
There are two hairstyles that SQEX categorically refuses to get in the game: very long hair (at least past shoulder blades) with front bangs (every long hair has no bangs) and very curly hair/afro.
And I seriously doubt it's an actual game limitation, more like the unwillingness to do so. So we'll get the umpteenth variation of short to medium hair with slightly different bangs varying from straight to very vaguely wavy. If they feel "creative" they'll have a little braid on one side, or a small ponytail.

They could also make a lot of good things by splitting the hair choices between front bangs and back, giving people the chance to mix and match different styles.
But they don't.
And then wonder why there are so many of those things that start with an M and end with odds without one D.

[odysseybookworm]

Replying to this to add my voice to the thread, but I really feel like the dev team could do better than this! Even ignoring that it looks nothing like the design they were taking inspiration from it just looks sad... like wet gel hair.... I wish they had at least given it a bit more bounce!

[Sindele]

My real question is, what are the tri and texture size limits the team is operating under for hair? Have these standards actually been updated since the PS3 era?

I struggle to believe this is an artist failure any more or less than every other crunchy, weak hairstyle they've dropped over the past several years - it's just a more immediately visible one. The core issue is the engine's poor handling of transparency and the fact that tri limits in particular don't seem to have come up sufficiently to compensate for hairstyles that need more detail than just normal maps can provide.

[Villa101]

This is actually embarrassing, i feel like this expansion kinda sold itself on "new diverse land of people and cultures" the first opportunity to create a new asset in that direction, hair. A thing that historically has been lacking in that respect since the game came out, and its done poorly. This combined with the teams strange statements about aspects of ff16 really feel like those in charge don't really care about actually committing to aesthetics of this diverse idea that contradicts whatever aesthetic they have in their head. But I guess we were wrong to expect any better after looking at berets hair in ff7r

[Jangle]

I remember seeing the original art for this hair and thinking it looked really cute, the way square enix has implemented it it looks nothing like curls/textured hair. I really hope they can consider redoing this and putting the proper effort in to respect the original artists' vision.

[Rikaku]

Even if this says "inspired" by the contest winners, I feel like the fact that majority of responses here on the forums and elsewhere have largely been "I didn't even know it was supposed to be that one" is pretty telling. While the previous hairstyle entries done in the past contest pre-2023 were also 'inspired by', I felt like each one was still close enough that you could point to the artwork by the artists and readily identify the hairstyle in-game that inspired it. That one fact alone to me says that this hairstyle needs to be looked at and addressed.

Many players were very excited over a curly-style hairstyle to be in the game, and especially given the graphical updates we just had with Dawntrail. It should not be impossible to put in a hairstyle that is faithful to the creation and I hope the team revisits this hairstyle.

[Doopliss]

exactly.
To have such hair in good quality it would need the amount of polygons of whole character.

For those that say the new hair is bad, it would be nice to provide example or suggest way how to model the hair to not completely fry gpus with millions of hair strings.
The player-provided examples from other games sadly don't look appealing.

This creation-within-limitations (again, with limitations quite similar to FFXIV!) doesn't look appealing enough to add to the game...


...but this one somehow does?


Make it make sense, man, lol.

[Iscah]

In addition to the general complaints, I feel like something the in-game version is suffering from is the absence of the "yellow" section and replacing it with a more severe parting line.

There is also no sign of shorter strands emerging from the overall shape of the hair, changing its basic concept from an evenly spread ball of short strands to an awkward, ragged style that has been cut to different lengths in different sections.

It also has an oddly 2D look about it, which seems to be a common problem with hairstyles after the graphics update rather than a specific issue with this one, and I've been noticing it a lot when I've been making comparison screenshots. (e.g. here, here and here -- the hair reflects light in the old graphics but looks flat in the new graphics.)

[BrailRahas]

I whole heartedly agree! The graphic quality on the FFXIV hair is drastically too low! Those are barely curls! It looks more like someone got wet!

[MAJRIS]

Make it make sense, man, lol.

Please don't twist the information. I never said the xiv version looks appealing. I said it's not easy to make volume of strands to look good and while hitting polygon limits - especially for xiv visuals that up to the past expansions still had to comply for older console standards.
it's not that good curls haircut is impossible, but they probably don't have way to make it look good while adhering to their polygon limits and standards.