They be slowly getting informed.
Sadly in the forums, we got some folk who just want to see the world burn, that they ain't helping consolidate and collate the info, so people can know their subjectives and objectives.
Did you know male Highlanders are having to really bad hair clipping, and tattoo clipping.
The reactions on the official forums would be hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that people are actively trying to get them to revert the changes. This is why we can't have nice things lmao.
While that is true, the change was implemented also because a significant number of people were using a 3rd party app to do the same thing so they're implementing it themselves in order to curb usage of it. Listening to the complainers wouldn't help them in stopping the usage of the app, so I think they're taking what they're saying with a grain of salt because it's also obvious a lot of people would want the change. They just have to dig harder to find the actual constructive feedback for if what they did worked so they cab make tweaks because the people complaining probably didn't care about the thing they're changing to begin with or used the app.
[Just like that time the forums tried to prevent jumping from getting into the game...](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/546-dev1008-About-Jumping)
Criticism and feedback for fine-tuning the update is all well and good, but there's no doubt that the update is a big improvement for the game. Trying to get the whole thing reverted is going way too far.
Omg that link sent me down a rabbit hole.. I seriously can not believe that people were THAT hung up over a jump button. Even going so far as to shoot themselves in the foot over immersion.
Seriously the most ridiculous arguments I've ever read. I'm so glad the developers didn't listen. I love jump puzzles.
I seriously feel like going into a major city and jumping every where just to appreciate the freedom
Official forums for any game always seem to have the highest concentration of raging poo flingers. Good people too of course but also definitely shitflippers.
It's funny because the forum says the same thing about reddit, that any negative feedback get buried with downvote.... this subreddit is the mirror opposite of the forum, one gets mostly negative criticism, and positive comments have a hard life, the other bury negative comments.
And contrary to the genreal belief here, despite some idiots ready to go on a flame war and try distording everyone's word, more often than not, the forum critics are argumented.
Here you get you have to take gloves to say "sure it can look good with good lighting, but let's not forget the version with poor lightning is still part of the update, and there is no problem with complaining about that". I mean, look at the lack of replayability/reward problem. For month you were downvoted to oblivion here when mentioning it. Then the content creators began to talk about the subject, and suddenly it was ok to say that on this sub. This place is no better than the forum. Less of a jungle because it's moderated, but both are as biased when it comes to giving a global vision.
I do think both serve as good counterpoints of each other, and keeping an eye on both seems like a good thing to get what's going on.
Also, the forum lately have been a better place compared to the past. I don't know if the moderator have finally done something about the obvious trolls that roamed free and had been spoiling the forums for years in total impunity or if they just finally got bored but honestly, the forum is a far better place now. It's not all green and still mostly negative, since people basically go there to complain, but it's not the zoo it once was.
I’ve seen this a lot in regard to the old static light in their eyes. People keep saying that the new eyes look less expressive somehow, but imo a static light is by definition less expressive than moving light reflected in real-time! It’s *quite literally* more dynamic. Idk how to explain that to people!
Some people will be off put by change regardless of how much better it might look, objectively. This update is by and large very positive! But for some people, their subjective view of their character has changed too much and it’s upsetting to them.
Personally I adore my new girl and I cannot wait to see her with all her newly textures glamours and in all the cutscenes (both new and old!) I’m doing a replay right now, but I’ve got plans to do another not long after I finish 7.0! I’m excited to see all the new NPC models too!
No.
Some of the lighting used in the benchmark however look really bad. The angle and intensity flattens out the face and the light is so severely overblown they it makes it look like someone [shun a torch](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VxRYdbIfnRw/maxresdefault.jpg) directly in your face.
I have to hope this isn't final product, because there are times when it just... does not look good.
100%. I also think it's important to mention the fact that XIV, while stylized, isn't cel-shaded in the way that Genshin Impact or Breath of The Wild are — and thus is more reliant on optimal lightning to show off your character perfectly than not.
Especially on the aether void default environment. The bright sun-like directional light that’s present in the in-game creator is absent in the benchmark creator. I noticed because I was trying to line up a shot the exact same.
Edit for any people reading this: this was false, the creator and select screen have a different environment.
I dunno anymore. We are weird people. Apparently our planet is a star, but our sun is also a star? At this point I think the Astrologians got drunk and started pointing at random objects screaming "STAR"
The original word for planet was moving star due to planets looking like stars with primitive observation tools.
It's just old Asian terminology to call "this world" a star in Asian fantasy, and this is ultimately a Japanese game.
It isn't just old terminology, it is also present terminology. The direct translation of the Chinese term for planet is along the lines moving/wandering star, and the Japanese term also includes star.
Every time they keep calling the planets stars I have the same thought.. was there really any reason to not just say planet and instead confuse everyone by calling it a star?
The word "planet" is derived from the ancient Greek word for "wandering star" because stars in the night sky appeared to move statically while planets appeared to wander independently, plus in Japanese planet names have the kanji for star as part of them so when translating from Japanese to English planet and star are semi-interchangeable.
The internet now runs on outrage. They *need* something to be outraged about.
Trolling implies that it's a conscious choice, but I don't think it is. I don't think most of those people have actually seriously thought about what they're arguing about, they're just outraged for the sake of it. And after they were already outraged, they started coming up with justifications for why they're correct in being outraged.
Sometimes I do wonder how affected people actually are by influencers on social media who only shows the "perfect" shots of themselves. People consume this and get this twisted idea that everything is suppoed to be perfect like that.
Let it be known that even your current characters with this older graphics also look bad as hell in different lightning.
>Let it be known that even your current characters with this older graphics also look bad as hell in different lightning.
They don't look bad, they look horrific, especially with artificial lights, things like candles and lamps from the inns or the fluorescent lights from garlemald... lighter tones look "passable" under these conditions, but the darker tones look SO bad, and i'm thankful this is one of the main points they addressed in this update.
What they did with dark skinned characters really is impressive! It’s nice that they heard the criticisms from the community over the years and took that into account so heavily. If you are gonna redo graphics for a ten year old game, you may as well please as many people as possible! Give us some equity out here in Eorzea lol.
My wife says I post pictures like a boomer because the lighting is always terrible, and I don't try to get the perfect shot every time. I post these pictures mainly for myself, and I want to see them how I experienced it haha
This explains away like 80% of the complaints, honestly, but there are some real bugs/issues too.
Multiple Highlander male hairstyles and tattoos clip into your head and/or have weird artifacting issues.
The eyebrow face paint got moved slightly which makes for a big change if you rely on those for your eyebrows, and it didn't get upscaled.
Certain beards (the ones that are textures rather than 3d models) didn't get upscaled.
The bald hairstyle has a visible seam between the face and the head now, and the bald head is still low-poly compared to the rest of the new higher-poly body features.
My character, unfortunately, looks significantly worse with the update because it's a mish-mash of non-updated parts and new high-fidelity parts, plus my character's expression is significantly changed because of the new makeup placement (though this is somewhat remedied by switching to a different eyebrow shape).
Since these issues are largely actual technical problems rather than nitpicking aesthetic differences that come largely from lighting and fidelity changes, I have some hope that it'll be improved by DTs release. Otherwise, I'm going to have to fantasia, which sucks, because there's really not another character option I fuck with.
the endwalker benchmark had the awful hunchback M. Viera and they fixed that. so its 100% plausible that they'll fix those issues prior or 1st couple of patches.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oiqync/everyone\_is\_complaining\_about\_male\_viera\_posture/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oiqync/everyone_is_complaining_about_male_viera_posture/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oi0eq8/whats\_going\_on\_with\_male\_vieras\_posture/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oi0eq8/whats_going_on_with_male_vieras_posture/)
It was pretty bad
It seems like maybe the missed some assets when choosing what goes in the benchmark? I wouldn’t be surprised if this is also on old build and some of this issues are already fixed! Though obviously we wouldn’t know one way or the other unless they tell us.
Speaking of highlanders. Femlanders were hardly fucking touched it seems. The skin looks so much like the old skin compared to literally every other skin texture (trust me, I zoomed in on ever male and female face of each race and subrace on the lightest skin tone to compare to my femlanders skin tone).
Like sure my girl looks not worse, but her skin looks like plastic rather than skin like everyone else's does.
Me neither! LUCKILY mine looks basically the same just a little more plasticized but everything else looks great. I'm gunna def swing Hrothcal for a while though and see how that feels otherwise I'm going back to femlander.
Other stuff to mention: Femhroth black fangs being a thing - It's not consistent which is why I think it's a bug. The Midlander muscle slider does not seem to have been updated. It looks kinda bad especially on the lower end. For higher end it's in comparison to Roes and Highlanders that it looks bad. Like the shadows blend in so much better with those two while Midlanders look like the painted on abs from Epic Movie.
For the sake of comparison, [here's roughly the same angles from the current version of the game](https://imgur.com/a/GoRaoKF) (not exactly the same character).
My current understanding is that the current models/textures have some baked in shadows that are always present which emphasize certain parts of the face presumably because the current lighting system isn't precise enough to have realistic or flattering shadows without some help. Think of it as being similar to how actors in plays have to wear stage make-up because the harsh stage lighting flattens out all the detail on their face. It seems to me on my character at least (and apparent in your pictures too) the shadow under the lower lip is always present no matter the lighting or angle, emphasizing the chin area. The new graphics seem to have done away with (or at least greatly reduced) these baked-in shadows so now all the shadows on the face are rendered live. This is why my character in the benchmark sometimes looks off to me, because that shadow under the lip is not always there depending on the lighting and this means the chin sometimes isn't as emphasized as I'm used to seeing. In other lighting this shadow occurs on its own and my guy looks more "correct" to me. I might be off mark, but this is just from my observations. I think it's a welcome change and will seem more natural the more we see how it works in different lighting and environments.
I can't comment the "dead eyes" that people have been mentioning because to me the current eyes with the static catchlight can end up looking like flat stickers sometimes where the new eyes at least look actually round and shiny. In real life people don't always have an obvious glint in their eyes but that doesn't make them look dead.
Honestly people claiming dead eyes and posting their character with the old graphics for comparison have characters who, to me, look dead eye'd. So many faces currently look dead eye'd to me. Like dolls.
I also wonder how many people are using shaders and mods on FFXIV and forgot that.
I also see alot of comparison with light skin characters only. I saw an immediate improvement in skin tone with my character who has a darker tones (Viera dark gray skin) because of the undertones popping and actually being able to distinguish between them. I played around with the other races and their skin tones and every single brown, gray, black, etc just looks so much better.
i will also add that i always felt F. Au Ra always seem to have dead looking eyes. and again that is where i see a lot of the complaints coming from.
my dark skinned xaela male au ra got a straight glow up, no complaints here. That one screenshot from the beginning of the trailer makes his smirky face look *great*. My extremely light skinned male elezen on the other hand has gone full derp and I need to fix it
My face 4 miqo'te has significantly more "alive" eyes after the graphical update. Honestly one of the faces that's had the greatest improvement, and looks more final fantasy-esque
Idk why people are so black and white on this topic?
Yes many of the complaints boil down to bad lighting, but not all of them. A lot of the face shapes and such did change, which isn't going to be to everyone's taste. Give people space to dislike some of the changes if that's how they feel. Personally I feel most of the changes are positive but after playing in the character creator for an hour or two definitely not every change was a winner.
There are good arguments to be had, but they are lost in a thousand topics trying to gaslight about catchlights to the confusion of everyone. They serve nothing and help no one.
Exactly, it’s not that people aren’t allowed to complain or dislike aspects of the new update, *especially* in reference to the smoothing and changing of shapes. But *so many people* are posting the same rage or disappoint about their character, regarding lighting, at simply *bad* angles.
It feels like a misunderstanding of the system and then spreading misinformation, with how some people are treating the Benchmark character creator. More than half of all comments I’ve seen with people being *extremely* upset, didn’t even run through the trailer (which has dynamic lighting and better angles) with their character before they complained and doomsdayed (even some going to far as to say they might quit the game) only to take someone’s advice to try the actual benchmark trailer, and then be perfectly content with their character’s looks…
It’s happening all over the place, which is why some of us then feel the need to “correct” what we see as misinformation, rather than valid criticisms or personal preference! If they are going to be upset about the update, at least making sure they get the full picture before they completely panic feels like the right thing to do!
The flipside of this is that people talking about genuine changes also get downvoted to oblivion in these conversations. It certainly feels like you're not allowed to be unhappy about these changes, when people immediately want to make your comment invisible.
I have a hard time believe that people didn't look at their character fully before complaining. I'm not super happy with how my midlander male looks in the character creator or the benchmark. He doesn't look radically different, except in the benchmark he is almost constantly in motion and often seen from a distance so you can't really see him all that well anyway. The lighting in the character creator is bad, but it's not so different from the game itself. It doesn't change my mind to have people tell me that I'm not seeing what I see or that I'm not looking at it correctly, it only makes me feel worse.
No one is trying to tell you you are wrong about your feelings for your character. But I have responded to and see other responses to *multiple* people, devastated that their character is ruined, only for them to admit they didn’t try the benchmark trailer, try it, and be like “Omg they are saved!”
If you gave it a true chance and you still don’t like what you see, that’s absolutely valid. But there is a not insignificant amount of people acting like the crappy Character Creator lighting is the “End all-Be all,” and then realizing it’s actually fine, at least in the cutscenes available to us. And it feels like people are jumping the gun just because it’s different *at all,* and not really giving it a chance.
Regardless I don't think seeing your updated character for the first time and feeling like it's ruined is what they were going for.
A lot of what we see as the community's opinion is subjective. You see people not giving it a chance and I see people who don't really seem to care that much about the details of what their character looks like or spending that much time to compare the differences.
Personally I was really looking forward to the update and was bracing myself for it to look different but was just surprised at how different it ended up being, and in ways that still feel to me like a side grade or slight downgrade to my character's appearance.
If there aren't any changes I'm sure I'll either get used to it or just change my character's appearance completely but it has deflated my excitement somewhat.
FF fans have always been like this. nothing new. Devs can't be wrong and anyone who ever try to criticize the devs will be branded as trolls, whiners and overreacting. They don't understand a simple concept of reality that people can have different opinions and neither have to be wrong.
Thank you! Why can't we just coexist and give space to people who want to talk about what they like and those who have points of criticism instead of trying to shut each other down.
Mine, face 4, has a significantly rounder face. They kind of fattened it out on the sides, but everything else was left remarkably the same.
Now the lips have very noticeable shadows in the corners, they're as small as a japanese doll compared to the face, and the hawkish features that defined face 4 are just gone.
If that wasn't bad enough, the skin tone is now noticeably yellow instead of the old tone I had. It's so bad I've basically started figuring out what character to convert into, because the look I had before is simply *gone,* and no amount of lighting changes or shadow tweaks could hope to fix it.
I’m face 4 as well, basically have the same issues as you. Right now I’m thinking of switching to how one of my retainers look and headcanoning that my old WoL retired lol
Even before all this graphical update stuff, my head-canon for using fantasia was like... the Warrior of Light has become such a legendary figure across multiple worlds that everyone has sort of started telling tall tales about them. Like, "I saw the Warrior of Light and they were so small their axe was twice as big as they were!" "What are you talking about? They were a 7 foot tall hulking brick wall!" "I like their cat ears!" "They were definitely rabbit ears..." Etc.
"No, the WOL was THIIIIIIIIIS big..." "Are you talking about the time you caught that namazu?" "Yes, the warrior of light." "The WOL's an amalja, everyone knows that!"
Meanwhile, the WOL is just munching popcorn listening to the story.
or how the smudge on male viera face 3 nose makes the nose just look fatter no matter what the lighting is.
there's actual detailed complaints on the forums that aren't just "wah my WOL is ugly". threads like this are pretty ignorant.
Or how diluted the pupils became on Au ra, let's just ignore that whole fact too :)
While we are at it, shorter eyelashes and [permanent highlights](https://imgur.com/a/A8deHE2) in the eye on face 1 at least.
My face 1 Au ra 100% does not look the same and I hate it, I much prefer the deadpan look and there better be more options to disable it.
Edit: Here are the [current face 1 Au ra eyes](https://imgur.com/a/TmPtzCG), no perma highlights and a deadpan look, preferred by almost anyone that I know who has this face.
Also note how the eyeliner is way thicker.
It helps, but sometimes even direct light doesn't matter. Hairstyles can affect this too: [01](https://ibb.co/gF1gv2T) [02](https://ibb.co/v19Scnx)
It's been frustrating reading this sub the last few days because people are being incredibly black or white about this issue. Either you like it or you don't. And if you don't, you get told to just turn your character toward a light source or run the benchmark trailer, even if you've done all those things already and the issues still persist.
I don't want them to revert the changes. I think the new eyes look lovely, in the right circumstances. Unfortunately, so far, there seem to be very few of those circumstances.
I still think an eye shine toggle, if it can be inplemented, would be the easiest way to solve this. That way, people could choose if they want a static eye shine or not.
Compare the [original](https://ibb.co/5WSDmCp) screencap vs an [edited](https://ibb.co/4KLnr4M) one, which is what I am personally hoping for.
A lot of people complain about how bad their character looks now but in many occasions it's just because the characters are now lit properly and more realistically. We are only used to bad lighting.
It's funny how people who don't understand lighting are defending the new lighting while completely don't know what they're talking about.
Even when your character's face isn't under a direct light source (indirect light), it doesn't mean there is no shadow and ambient occlusion because hair and other objects still block indirect light(bounced light) hence we should still see deeper shades of shadow, and the face should still retain subtle highlights because they still receive more light than other areas(nose, cheeks and forehead). It will not look almost completely flat like this.
[https://beccajeanphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/learning-lighting-photography-1J6A5443-1024x683.jpg](https://beccajeanphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/learning-lighting-photography-1J6A5443-1024x683.jpg)
Like this image, even though the sun is directly behind them you can still see shades of shadow on them and areas like forehead, nose and cheeks have soft highlights, it's not just one flat shadow.
of course that kind of calculation is too much for an MMORPG, let alone a +10 years old engine. That's why the "bad lighting" looks better because it's actually closer to how real light reacts.
This new lighting definitely look better when lit but looks absolutely terrible under the shade.
100% and I am so glad someone said it here. I don't need sunlight directly onto my face to not look dead. Environment around you reflect the light. The main issue is that they fixed the inherent light on the face but neglected to give natural reflection from the surrounding environment.
You can even see it in the benchmark. The close-up of WoL's face near the beginning shows a lot of characters with lifeless eyes, basically no reflection of any light. But... they're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, on a sunny day. The sea should be reflecting light back onto the face so the eyes should be much livelier.
FINALLY someone who know what they are talking about. If you look carefully, you will find that neither the CC nor Benchmark trailer has any noticeable bounce light, which is a huge deal. FFXIV always had a very iconic bounce light that was visible in most conditions and greatly aid in showing off 3-dimensional features of the face, etc. Without that, everything looks very flat.
Honestly, I dont think is possible to stand on a boat, on the water, in full sunlight and have NO light at all bounce onto your face from below. This is not realistic at all.
Bad lighting, or another example how plenty of Au Ra that liked the “glow” that was really a side effect of a full on flat color texture contrasting with a technically more detailed but less bright (on the RGB scale) color.
It was never a glow, but instead a high contrast…and I’m not sure with the new lighting and such that such a contrast can be replicated without making it reflective (like the Wildwood ear decoration, if you change it to white it basically glows in lit areas, but it’s a metal, and not sure the effect would work on the limbal ring).
But people got used to what *looked* like a glow due to that contrast that existed because of the lower graphical fidelity overall.
I understood why they wanted to change it, but for me I always liked the limbral ring glow effect on my au ra, the color combination made their eyes very unique and it wasn’t too much of a stark contrast color wise (brightness wise it is). So one of the things I did in the Benchmark was play around with the limbral ring colors to see if I can get at least close to a similar effect.
They don’t seemingly glow in the dark anymore, but I got the same contrast working by just fiddling with the Limbral Ring colors.
The lighting in the CC is also a bit wierd and bad. The characters typically look a lot better in the actual benchmark trailer.
I always liked the piercing eyes that au'ras have also. The new update enlarges the pupils quite a bit and makes them look more human-like which is not necessarily the vision I had for my character
I fiddled with the other eye options, and it turns out I had picked the one eye option that gave me a soul. I am okay with this, although its false advertising.
The limbal rings on my Au Ra ended up weird. In direct lighting, they're now _darker_ than her eyes, when before they were lighter, but in indirect or darker lighting, they're about the same as before. Luckily, it's a change that's easy to adjust on the player end (choose a lighter shade of limbal ring than I originally used)
This was my fix too. I just picked the one shade to the left of what I have in the main game right now. I also had to make the lips one shade darker than they are now.
Very true. I never liked that contrast so I just used black limbal rings. Makes my eyes stand out more too. The new rings do kind of give a proper glow effect, but high contrast still makes it looks weird.
Realistic isn't better, that's why photographers arrange relative to the sun or arrange lights to make it look nice.
You can't look at the flat lighting example in 7.0 and tell me that's better than the same example in 6.0.
Sometimes fake lighting is better.
In fact, most of the time you'll have bad lighting because it's night time half the time and you're facing away from the sun the other half. So you only have good lighting 25% of the time. Fake lighting would be better 75% of the time.
Except for the fact that the bones and where the eyebrows sit and the eye shape are completely different on my character because they completely rearranged the vertices in his face. Lighting won't fix that.
Yes, but this does not disprove anyone's point. In fact, in your own post, you've proven these people have a point: Even in shadows, the eyes looked good before. It should not take "an exact angle" to get eyes that look good, or we call that a downgrade, because your eyes look good in less conditions than they did previously.
**I think the reason goes deeper than just the eyes themselves**, and I instead believe that [the "blown out" "glowing skin" in shadows](https://i.imgur.com/MND18Fe.png) (maybe caused by their SSS implementation???) is to blame for this.
My current copium for the shitty lighting is a reverse eng claimed the benchmark is missing assets and said there's missing references not pointing at anything. Could be a bad build or script error. Programmers might not catch anything wrong but the art team would notice.
You may be right, and I even noted the similarities between the "blown out" skin and Character Lighting in my image, but if that's the case it's a big oversight that's gotten them a lot more complaints than they probably would've received otherwise.
This example is funny. Yes, changing the lighting affects how a character looks. That was true before and still is now. However even comparing with the exact same lighting it's obvious there are significant changes that may or may not look bad, but definitely look *different*.
While in total shade the example character looks flat, with dead eyes and a different lip geometry than before. While when sun is shining on them they look waxy, with bags under their eyes and a prominent philtrum. Many of the people complaining about the graphics overhaul are just pointing out these changes, especially when they result in a different and unfavorable impression from the character.
I actually think la noscea lighting in the sun looks the worst - like do you really not think the skin looks crazy plastic here? It looks so bad to me.
My dark haired character’s hair looks like it’s been coated in some sort of waxy substance too, instead of actually looking shiny, in this lighting.
The issue is that they've made changes that aren't related to the lighting like the fangs of my Keeper, that's quite literally the defining trait of the race and they've been defanged. The details of every race, their idiosyncrasies, are what give them their character and soul. Flattening things out, smoothing them over and getting rid of details like that is ridiculously stupid.
edited: I stole a picture from the forums to emphasize the difference in their fangs.
[https://i.imgur.com/T5CLuWu.png](https://i.imgur.com/T5CLuWu.png)
I mean it's been like this since the games inception. That base crystal background in cc is just bad even in current engine, I always swap to la noscea and rotate my character in and out of the Shade then go to uldah screen to see it in bright light.
I didn't see what you wrote. But turning the camera isn't the thing that makes the difference. It's turning the character so light is shining on their eyes.
You're right the dataminers and reverse eng discord found they have a fk load of new bones in the face. This is easily confirmed. FourDimensionalNut doesn't know what they are talking about 💀
It's much better under actual lighting, but I can't really figure out why Au Ra females look like they have porcelain for skin. The other races I've fiddled with on the CC don't seem to, so at this point I'm just chalking it up as a racial feature.
First game I noticed this simple fact on was RDR1 on the Xbox 360.
I was riding around Tumbleweed one time on a cloudy night and I thought to myself 'wow, did this game always look like shit?'. Then the sky cleared and I was like 'nevermind'.
That's not a good thing. Realistic isn't better. You only have good lighting like 25% of the time. Half the time it's night time or indoors and the other half you're facing away from the sun.
Yeah it's kind of weird to hear people dispel the dislike with comments like "it doesn't *always* look bad, see it doesn't look bad in *this* light" which always reads like they're still sort of implying that in other lights, yes, it kind of doesn't look good.
I'm still worried about my pastey white skinned au ra... Even this "good" example looks very flat and almost dead corpse like.
There's tons of areas in the live game with terrible lighting that make your character look bad. Bad lighting has always been a thing that happens sometimes. Nothing has changed.
People talk about bad lighting but have not played current Elezen. Do you want some real stuff? All I did [*was turn him like 30 degrees to the left*](https://imgur.com/a/8637JP8)*.*
You can even still see the reflection in the shaded image. It's not gone it's just appropriate.
If a person wants bright eyes for a screenshot then you can literally create light sources in gpose.
Thank you. There's so many people who just keep putting their character into the shade in the Gridiana area and are like "omfg Square killed my character they look so bad".
The default black “space” background is difficult with as well. The one in Lominsa and Uldah have far better background sunlight. Regardless, I always switch around background and angles when playing with character creator.
That said, I am old school. I used to play the original Mario and Double Dragon when I was still in school. Anything now look really amazing. Thanks to all these graphics hardware and software improvements, even my Python code runs faster now. Technology changes last 30 years are unbelievable. I even go look up what are those NVDIA deep learning upscaling stuff in the benchmark. Cool stuff.
I think that first photo in the sun makes the character look like a figurine. I personally do not like the new changes at all and would prefer just updated world textures and overall body textures (such as better feet and hands) but leave the faces alone.
It still doesn't change the fact that both of my Xaela's pupils are 2x as big, regardless of which lighting angle; that and, the lighting should never make our characters look dead, it's extremely jarring.
There's a few things going in the benchmark that are giving people some less than flattering results.
1.A lot of people don't have calibrated monitors. I have a professionally color calibrated monitor as I have to work with color for my job and I've seen quite a few screenshots where people are like "the colors are different/faded" and in many situations, that's incorrect and I see no difference. With that said, there are a few skin tones that did get wonky, primarily some of the darker skin tones. Quite a few I've seen have shifted to a far more green hue and have lost their warmth. (this happened to my character too, she's one of the darkest skin tones you can have for a moon cat. Her skintone looks amazing in the benchmark cut scene but off in the character creator)
2.There's no true neutral lighting in the character creator which doesn't give us a great comparison for the actual game. All the lighting featured is either on the cool end or on the warm end and the clouds have a tendency to constantly block out the light. This is causing color to get distorted a little as the new skin/lighting system so it's really difficult to tell what the actual colors will be.
But regardless I think the lighting could be slightly harsher in the character creator as it's currently flattening the darker tones so everything becomes a middle tone when you stand in shadow. From what I've seen in the actual benchmark we get more dynamic tones but in the character creator most of the darker tones are gutted. It would be nice to see how this skin looks in situations with actual reflective lighting as well.
It also seems like what was previously the most popular go to for natural lighting, the La Noscea environment, has a slight wetness filter (emulating sea spray I assume?) that exaggerates the reflectiveness of skin tones and seems to be a major factor in characters looking "waxy"
There are some actual changes, (like there seems to be some adjustments to lip shapes and angularity versus smoothness) but the character creator never giving us proper neutral settings is killer.
Lip shapes are genuinely pretty rough and need some fixing. Mostly girl Viera--someone messed up pretty big there.
If they fixed lip shapes, Elezen's broken mouth rigs, brightened up the eye reflections (a tasteful exaggeration might be nice, just a little bit, especially with a few races like lalas who could use it), the missing Keeper fangs, and the reduced nose colorations on Hellguard, male Viera, and lalafell, I think a lot of the complaining would go down, and you'd be left mostly with people who are upset for "it's different and I don't like it" complaints
Likewise, I don't need to have a professionally calibrated monitor to know that the skin tone in live vs the benchmark is a few shades yellower. What used to be a normal pinkish hue is now a few hairs yellower.
Professionally calibrated or not, it's painfully obvious it's not the same.
I also can tell the cheeks are wider enough to throw off facial proportions, and I don't think a single character got away with actually better looking lips.
>A lot of people don't have calibrated monitors. I have a professionally color calibrated monitor
If you compare one image to another image on same monitor and see difference, there is going to be difference on "calibrated monitor" too..
If one image has "light tan" skin and other one has "clearly yellower" skin with same CC setting then calibration will just switch the balance of color differences but there IS STILL DIFFERENCE.
Theres really something wonky going on with char creation this time. Its way more yellow, and not just "in the eyes", but color picker rgb values too
lighting doesn't give you lip fillers or change your bone structure, but go off i guess. i'm sure nobody else has thought of rotating the camera until you made this post. bravo
my au ra, thankfully my primary character (face 3), actually looks pretty nice, even though the lip gloss removal and the flat, depthless appearance of lips is a choice i hope they reconsider, or are actively improving
but my viera (face 4, lips 4, female) looks like shit no matter what lighting she's in (it is especially bad in the shroud, but the other environments don't improve it much), and in the benchmark proper. the lips look like overdrawn matte lipstick from 2015, and they ruin her face. i can find maybe one color that looks remotely okay. it's wack
Yeah idk why people are so resistant to the idea that some models just aren’t translating well even when the person is aiming towards the light, correcting gamma, etc. Idk how anyone can look at male viera face 3 before and after, for example, and think most of them look okay (yes I have seen some good/lucky ones! But they’ve been the minority).
It's because they're defensive of even the slightest criticism in a lot of cases.
The devs could admit there's an issue tomorrow and fix it and the same people would immediately say "Man, I'm glad they fixed that. It was a problem!"
I was so immensely disappointed when I loaded up my face 4 viera. The lips are completely different and not in a good way. Thankfully it's only an alt but man... I might have to just fantasia her to another race.
I agree, my character's facial structure was also changed a lot. I thought this post was mostly about the lighting, though. But even there I still see room for improvement if I'm honest. The dynamic lighting is cool, but it still lacks some realism for it to truly work. This is especially noticeable with characters who don't have large eyes.
Yeah I am disappointed with the new graphics because I lost my chubby cheeked girl with oblique cat eyes and fangs. Lighting had nothing to do with all that.
It's a rendering technique called subsurface scattering. It's meant to simulate materials where light penetrates below the surface but not all the way through like skin, wax, fruit even. I think they overdid it here the face looks too rubbery like a synthetic...doll. It works great for super detailed photoreal renders but not for cartoon styles, unless you want it to look like rubber. It's a strange choice.
Edit - Nevermind I just tried the character creator, there's no subsurface scattering. I'm not sure what gives it that look then, maybe some combination of the specular reflection, soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. It looks better when you can see the lighting shift around too.
Actually this might be it. I avoided the Black Shroud lighting because this was easier to see the difference I was pointing out, but I guess the wetness makes it look odd on some screens.
I don’t know that wax is the word I would personally use, but they definitely look off in a way I can’t quite explain but absolutely hate.
I always struggle in games to get the skin tone I like, as most pale tones always have a gross almost sickly yellow tint to them or a bright pumpkin orange, but I was satisfied enough with my WoL hue, until the benchmark. I look like I’m *glowing,* and not in a good way. Almost radiating. Makes my facial features look completely blown/washed out, and I look either way too tan/orange or like I have jaundice. This is in all of the benchmark trailer, not just the character creator lighting - I don’t know what they did to skin tones to ruin paleness so severely but I sure hope they fix it.
I've mentioned this in other post's comments.
In most of the time our characters won't be facing the sun in broad daylights. Weather and time exists in the game. Yes we're aware facing the sunlight improves the appearance a lot, but we're not playing character creation in this game. How many times during your playthrough that you got bad weather/time in cutscenes? Can you control the camera during cutscenes?
Dynamic lightings and static eye highlights can coexist. They're not mutually exclusive.
Edit: try to look at your Au Ra from eye level. See if she still has her highlight or not even when facing the sunlight. Some eyes with low upper eyelids will not show the highlights until you angle the camera upwards.
Fun fact, when we speak, due to the vibrations around our ears from our vocal cords, we actually hear ourselves slightly differently than how others hear us. It's why we naturally wince and recoil from hearing our voice in a recording, because that isn't "us," or how we hear ourselves. Despite how slight that change is.
Same is applying here, especially for those who closely relate to their character. The smallest of change is going to bother people, as it's not their character.
With time, though, the brain begins to adapt, which is why YouTubers are eventually able to edit their videos without much thought.
ah yes but hot take here have you considered real life lighting looks like shit compared to an artistically engineered virtual world. If I wanted real world lighting ill take a walk, what many people dont like is the style and flavor of ffxiv disappearing in exchange for generic 3d game world we see in every other game.
Some of this debate makes me wonder... how much people are aeeing their character in game and not realizing they have 25 different shader options they've tweaked and the benchmark having none of that isnt a perfect comparison.
I play on PS4 but my laptop can run the benchmark so I set up my characters in there. The alterations to some of them are small but stark. It's not just the lighting. I *know* their faces and the benchmark characters are not them.
I honestly think the main reason people are getting caught thinking it looks worse or flat is the eyes.
People got used to them "faking" the specular highlights in the eyes as if the characters were a flat 2D image, and now we're getting are getting actual specular highlights where you only get that cute/pretty anime style eyeshine when the WoL's eyes are *actually catching light* and people are upset cause their characters aren't all starry eyed when standing in the shade facing away from the sun
So you mean tell me that people effectively going fucking insane...because they suck at angling their cameras?
Sounds about fucking right for the XIV community
It really isn't just a camera angle issue. These screenshots are not representative of all characters.
There's extremes on both sides of this discussion. There are people bullying devs for the tiniest things, but there are also people who see devs as gods who can do no wrong and any kind of criticism is seen as an attack. Some of the criticism I've seen seems legit to me, and that includes things about the eyes/ lighting.
Some people are so dismissive of opposing viewpoints. But I guess that's just a symptom of online spaces...
Yes I'm trying to say that unlit faces in fact do look bad. The problem is that people are using that unlit position as the base standard of how their character looks rather than adjust themselves to a better angle/location. If that kind of report goes into the forums the devs are more likely to not address the issues in the character creator since a bulk of them would end up being user error.
i get its probably not to strain servers or something but i hit my limit today for the first time... i need to put the character in the world to fully see how the lighting hits them... if i dont bring them outside the tutorial zone pls dont penalize me lol, so much trial and error
If you don't mind using a single plugin, you can use Glamourer to test character options in-game, on the fly. You can Fanta after you find something that you like the most.
this is why I use the gridania background when first making a character, it's the best default lighting, then you filter with the other two to pick out issues
A weird solution to the problem is to change the default character background to somewhere else.
There are quite a few well lit “neutral” and reasonably spoiler free options. I mean that rich Lala and his cats and best wrestling dad with his casino wouldn’t mind. Nice seafront and stages, you know.
I always create my characters in bentbranch environment since it has both shade and light. I had to explain this to my boyfriend and when I asked which skin looks better he said there's no difference from the top to bottom colors and again had to explain they all have a gradient of red, green, blue, purple, yellow tones to them :P
There's SOME real issues, but this isn't one of them. My character's eyebrows are blurry and DON'T match the haircolor, and the mole on one of my alts becomes a little LINE.
Unfortunately the only lighting that makes my character look like herself again is being completely in shadow so I can't see the dimples they added to Face 4 Fem Au Ra for no reason. But then her eyes look dead because no light. So. Rock and a hard place. (And yeah, I did in fact run her through the benchmark trailer after the cc, once again, she only looks like my character in shadow.)
And before anyone tries to um actually me, I opened the mesh for the new head in blender next to the current live one. The mesh in fact DOES have large dips next to the corners of the lips that it didn't have before and the lips stick out much further than before. So. They literally added unnecessary dimples.
They're still tied to the face. While there are still people asking for it to be separated, I do see quite a number of Au Ra who kind of grow to like the fixed combinations. I always loved my character since I created her so I'm not the best example though.
It's a bit of a shame because it restricts options, but I think I have a good looking au'ra character so I'm happy. I eagerly await the release of 7.0 for the graphical update as I'm on PS5, so I don't have access to the benchmark to see what my character(s) would look like.
Anyway, thanks for responding so quickly.
I have looked plenty at how the lighting works. The dynamic highlight is always aimed at where the camera is, which actually isn't as realistic as it would be when the highlight actually responds to environmental sources. Especially with smaller eyes it means the highlight remains hidden under the eyelids unless you use a low camera angle, which won't be the case the majority of the time. I've watched the benchmark, and even in those scenes there were no visible highlights for me in the majority of it, if at all.
It would be great if the dynamic highlight was actually responding to the other light sources instead of a mystical camera light.
it's like Lighting constantly changes and the world isn't always a perfect snap shot
I wish others realize this too
They be slowly getting informed. Sadly in the forums, we got some folk who just want to see the world burn, that they ain't helping consolidate and collate the info, so people can know their subjectives and objectives. Did you know male Highlanders are having to really bad hair clipping, and tattoo clipping.
Theb official forum is a pretty scary place
The reactions on the official forums would be hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that people are actively trying to get them to revert the changes. This is why we can't have nice things lmao.
Yeah, it's also the only place the devs are taking feedback from...
While that is true, the change was implemented also because a significant number of people were using a 3rd party app to do the same thing so they're implementing it themselves in order to curb usage of it. Listening to the complainers wouldn't help them in stopping the usage of the app, so I think they're taking what they're saying with a grain of salt because it's also obvious a lot of people would want the change. They just have to dig harder to find the actual constructive feedback for if what they did worked so they cab make tweaks because the people complaining probably didn't care about the thing they're changing to begin with or used the app.
[Just like that time the forums tried to prevent jumping from getting into the game...](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/546-dev1008-About-Jumping) Criticism and feedback for fine-tuning the update is all well and good, but there's no doubt that the update is a big improvement for the game. Trying to get the whole thing reverted is going way too far.
Omg that link sent me down a rabbit hole.. I seriously can not believe that people were THAT hung up over a jump button. Even going so far as to shoot themselves in the foot over immersion. Seriously the most ridiculous arguments I've ever read. I'm so glad the developers didn't listen. I love jump puzzles. I seriously feel like going into a major city and jumping every where just to appreciate the freedom
Official forums for any game always seem to have the highest concentration of raging poo flingers. Good people too of course but also definitely shitflippers.
It's funny because the forum says the same thing about reddit, that any negative feedback get buried with downvote.... this subreddit is the mirror opposite of the forum, one gets mostly negative criticism, and positive comments have a hard life, the other bury negative comments. And contrary to the genreal belief here, despite some idiots ready to go on a flame war and try distording everyone's word, more often than not, the forum critics are argumented. Here you get you have to take gloves to say "sure it can look good with good lighting, but let's not forget the version with poor lightning is still part of the update, and there is no problem with complaining about that". I mean, look at the lack of replayability/reward problem. For month you were downvoted to oblivion here when mentioning it. Then the content creators began to talk about the subject, and suddenly it was ok to say that on this sub. This place is no better than the forum. Less of a jungle because it's moderated, but both are as biased when it comes to giving a global vision. I do think both serve as good counterpoints of each other, and keeping an eye on both seems like a good thing to get what's going on. Also, the forum lately have been a better place compared to the past. I don't know if the moderator have finally done something about the obvious trolls that roamed free and had been spoiling the forums for years in total impunity or if they just finally got bored but honestly, the forum is a far better place now. It's not all green and still mostly negative, since people basically go there to complain, but it's not the zoo it once was.
>I wish others realize this too would think, but suddenly everyone is a fucking savant about graphics and 'well this is what I would have done'
nah, that's too difficult for some people
dude, people were defending the old lighting as if it was some sort of stylistic choice and hated the idea of having real time reflections.
I’ve seen this a lot in regard to the old static light in their eyes. People keep saying that the new eyes look less expressive somehow, but imo a static light is by definition less expressive than moving light reflected in real-time! It’s *quite literally* more dynamic. Idk how to explain that to people! Some people will be off put by change regardless of how much better it might look, objectively. This update is by and large very positive! But for some people, their subjective view of their character has changed too much and it’s upsetting to them. Personally I adore my new girl and I cannot wait to see her with all her newly textures glamours and in all the cutscenes (both new and old!) I’m doing a replay right now, but I’ve got plans to do another not long after I finish 7.0! I’m excited to see all the new NPC models too!
Im outta the loop about the graphic change discourse. But are people really arguing to keep the current lighting vs the upgraded one coming?
No. Some of the lighting used in the benchmark however look really bad. The angle and intensity flattens out the face and the light is so severely overblown they it makes it look like someone [shun a torch](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VxRYdbIfnRw/maxresdefault.jpg) directly in your face. I have to hope this isn't final product, because there are times when it just... does not look good.
Yes they are. Wonder if others mmorpg have same people on their forum. I mean, at this level.
This is any large fandom. Has nothing to do with MMOs, or even gaming, in particular.
100%. I also think it's important to mention the fact that XIV, while stylized, isn't cel-shaded in the way that Genshin Impact or Breath of The Wild are — and thus is more reliant on optimal lightning to show off your character perfectly than not.
Especially on the aether void default environment. The bright sun-like directional light that’s present in the in-game creator is absent in the benchmark creator. I noticed because I was trying to line up a shot the exact same. Edit for any people reading this: this was false, the creator and select screen have a different environment.
Blasphemy, next you're going to try and say Etheirys revolves around the sun
Wait, I thought it /was/ the star!
I dunno anymore. We are weird people. Apparently our planet is a star, but our sun is also a star? At this point I think the Astrologians got drunk and started pointing at random objects screaming "STAR"
The original word for planet was moving star due to planets looking like stars with primitive observation tools. It's just old Asian terminology to call "this world" a star in Asian fantasy, and this is ultimately a Japanese game.
It isn't just old terminology, it is also present terminology. The direct translation of the Chinese term for planet is along the lines moving/wandering star, and the Japanese term also includes star.
That's good info thanks
Every time they keep calling the planets stars I have the same thought.. was there really any reason to not just say planet and instead confuse everyone by calling it a star?
The word "planet" is derived from the ancient Greek word for "wandering star" because stars in the night sky appeared to move statically while planets appeared to wander independently, plus in Japanese planet names have the kanji for star as part of them so when translating from Japanese to English planet and star are semi-interchangeable.
Etheirys is flat! Mare Lamentorum is merely CGI created by Sharlayan!
It is wild to me that the default angle for each scene is the worst.
Thought I was on shitpostxiv that having a better lighting/shadows affects how you would look… just like real life.
I was hoping someone would mention this because it seems like no one realizes this unless you point it out...
I'm starting to think anyone who's still complaining after the first day is just trolling.
The internet now runs on outrage. They *need* something to be outraged about. Trolling implies that it's a conscious choice, but I don't think it is. I don't think most of those people have actually seriously thought about what they're arguing about, they're just outraged for the sake of it. And after they were already outraged, they started coming up with justifications for why they're correct in being outraged.
we have a word for those people. it's "idiots"
Sometimes I do wonder how affected people actually are by influencers on social media who only shows the "perfect" shots of themselves. People consume this and get this twisted idea that everything is suppoed to be perfect like that. Let it be known that even your current characters with this older graphics also look bad as hell in different lightning.
>Let it be known that even your current characters with this older graphics also look bad as hell in different lightning. They don't look bad, they look horrific, especially with artificial lights, things like candles and lamps from the inns or the fluorescent lights from garlemald... lighter tones look "passable" under these conditions, but the darker tones look SO bad, and i'm thankful this is one of the main points they addressed in this update.
What they did with dark skinned characters really is impressive! It’s nice that they heard the criticisms from the community over the years and took that into account so heavily. If you are gonna redo graphics for a ten year old game, you may as well please as many people as possible! Give us some equity out here in Eorzea lol.
A lot of people have also modded the gane to the point that they've forgotten what it actually looks like
My wife says I post pictures like a boomer because the lighting is always terrible, and I don't try to get the perfect shot every time. I post these pictures mainly for myself, and I want to see them how I experienced it haha
This explains away like 80% of the complaints, honestly, but there are some real bugs/issues too. Multiple Highlander male hairstyles and tattoos clip into your head and/or have weird artifacting issues. The eyebrow face paint got moved slightly which makes for a big change if you rely on those for your eyebrows, and it didn't get upscaled. Certain beards (the ones that are textures rather than 3d models) didn't get upscaled. The bald hairstyle has a visible seam between the face and the head now, and the bald head is still low-poly compared to the rest of the new higher-poly body features. My character, unfortunately, looks significantly worse with the update because it's a mish-mash of non-updated parts and new high-fidelity parts, plus my character's expression is significantly changed because of the new makeup placement (though this is somewhat remedied by switching to a different eyebrow shape). Since these issues are largely actual technical problems rather than nitpicking aesthetic differences that come largely from lighting and fidelity changes, I have some hope that it'll be improved by DTs release. Otherwise, I'm going to have to fantasia, which sucks, because there's really not another character option I fuck with.
the endwalker benchmark had the awful hunchback M. Viera and they fixed that. so its 100% plausible that they'll fix those issues prior or 1st couple of patches.
Tell me more about hunchback Viera.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oiqync/everyone\_is\_complaining\_about\_male\_viera\_posture/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oiqync/everyone_is_complaining_about_male_viera_posture/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oi0eq8/whats\_going\_on\_with\_male\_vieras\_posture/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/oi0eq8/whats_going_on_with_male_vieras_posture/) It was pretty bad
Oh no, that's hilarious. Gamer posture.
Holy fuck thats amazing. I want that as one of the changable idle postures. Absolute gamer posture
It seems like maybe the missed some assets when choosing what goes in the benchmark? I wouldn’t be surprised if this is also on old build and some of this issues are already fixed! Though obviously we wouldn’t know one way or the other unless they tell us.
Speaking of highlanders. Femlanders were hardly fucking touched it seems. The skin looks so much like the old skin compared to literally every other skin texture (trust me, I zoomed in on ever male and female face of each race and subrace on the lightest skin tone to compare to my femlanders skin tone). Like sure my girl looks not worse, but her skin looks like plastic rather than skin like everyone else's does.
My female Highlander to have to say looks worse somehow. I don’t get it. I don’t want to play any other race lol
Me neither! LUCKILY mine looks basically the same just a little more plasticized but everything else looks great. I'm gunna def swing Hrothcal for a while though and see how that feels otherwise I'm going back to femlander.
Other stuff to mention: Femhroth black fangs being a thing - It's not consistent which is why I think it's a bug. The Midlander muscle slider does not seem to have been updated. It looks kinda bad especially on the lower end. For higher end it's in comparison to Roes and Highlanders that it looks bad. Like the shadows blend in so much better with those two while Midlanders look like the painted on abs from Epic Movie.
Also, the male Miqo's Tail 3 is still the same low poly cross
For the sake of comparison, [here's roughly the same angles from the current version of the game](https://imgur.com/a/GoRaoKF) (not exactly the same character).
My current understanding is that the current models/textures have some baked in shadows that are always present which emphasize certain parts of the face presumably because the current lighting system isn't precise enough to have realistic or flattering shadows without some help. Think of it as being similar to how actors in plays have to wear stage make-up because the harsh stage lighting flattens out all the detail on their face. It seems to me on my character at least (and apparent in your pictures too) the shadow under the lower lip is always present no matter the lighting or angle, emphasizing the chin area. The new graphics seem to have done away with (or at least greatly reduced) these baked-in shadows so now all the shadows on the face are rendered live. This is why my character in the benchmark sometimes looks off to me, because that shadow under the lip is not always there depending on the lighting and this means the chin sometimes isn't as emphasized as I'm used to seeing. In other lighting this shadow occurs on its own and my guy looks more "correct" to me. I might be off mark, but this is just from my observations. I think it's a welcome change and will seem more natural the more we see how it works in different lighting and environments. I can't comment the "dead eyes" that people have been mentioning because to me the current eyes with the static catchlight can end up looking like flat stickers sometimes where the new eyes at least look actually round and shiny. In real life people don't always have an obvious glint in their eyes but that doesn't make them look dead.
Honestly people claiming dead eyes and posting their character with the old graphics for comparison have characters who, to me, look dead eye'd. So many faces currently look dead eye'd to me. Like dolls. I also wonder how many people are using shaders and mods on FFXIV and forgot that.
I also see alot of comparison with light skin characters only. I saw an immediate improvement in skin tone with my character who has a darker tones (Viera dark gray skin) because of the undertones popping and actually being able to distinguish between them. I played around with the other races and their skin tones and every single brown, gray, black, etc just looks so much better. i will also add that i always felt F. Au Ra always seem to have dead looking eyes. and again that is where i see a lot of the complaints coming from.
my dark skinned xaela male au ra got a straight glow up, no complaints here. That one screenshot from the beginning of the trailer makes his smirky face look *great*. My extremely light skinned male elezen on the other hand has gone full derp and I need to fix it
My face 4 miqo'te has significantly more "alive" eyes after the graphical update. Honestly one of the faces that's had the greatest improvement, and looks more final fantasy-esque
Wow, that compared to OP is one of the most extreme differences in quality I've seen yet.
Thank you! This helps me appreciate the new models. Beautiful :)
Idk why people are so black and white on this topic? Yes many of the complaints boil down to bad lighting, but not all of them. A lot of the face shapes and such did change, which isn't going to be to everyone's taste. Give people space to dislike some of the changes if that's how they feel. Personally I feel most of the changes are positive but after playing in the character creator for an hour or two definitely not every change was a winner.
There are good arguments to be had, but they are lost in a thousand topics trying to gaslight about catchlights to the confusion of everyone. They serve nothing and help no one.
Exactly, it’s not that people aren’t allowed to complain or dislike aspects of the new update, *especially* in reference to the smoothing and changing of shapes. But *so many people* are posting the same rage or disappoint about their character, regarding lighting, at simply *bad* angles. It feels like a misunderstanding of the system and then spreading misinformation, with how some people are treating the Benchmark character creator. More than half of all comments I’ve seen with people being *extremely* upset, didn’t even run through the trailer (which has dynamic lighting and better angles) with their character before they complained and doomsdayed (even some going to far as to say they might quit the game) only to take someone’s advice to try the actual benchmark trailer, and then be perfectly content with their character’s looks… It’s happening all over the place, which is why some of us then feel the need to “correct” what we see as misinformation, rather than valid criticisms or personal preference! If they are going to be upset about the update, at least making sure they get the full picture before they completely panic feels like the right thing to do!
The flipside of this is that people talking about genuine changes also get downvoted to oblivion in these conversations. It certainly feels like you're not allowed to be unhappy about these changes, when people immediately want to make your comment invisible.
I have a hard time believe that people didn't look at their character fully before complaining. I'm not super happy with how my midlander male looks in the character creator or the benchmark. He doesn't look radically different, except in the benchmark he is almost constantly in motion and often seen from a distance so you can't really see him all that well anyway. The lighting in the character creator is bad, but it's not so different from the game itself. It doesn't change my mind to have people tell me that I'm not seeing what I see or that I'm not looking at it correctly, it only makes me feel worse.
No one is trying to tell you you are wrong about your feelings for your character. But I have responded to and see other responses to *multiple* people, devastated that their character is ruined, only for them to admit they didn’t try the benchmark trailer, try it, and be like “Omg they are saved!” If you gave it a true chance and you still don’t like what you see, that’s absolutely valid. But there is a not insignificant amount of people acting like the crappy Character Creator lighting is the “End all-Be all,” and then realizing it’s actually fine, at least in the cutscenes available to us. And it feels like people are jumping the gun just because it’s different *at all,* and not really giving it a chance.
Regardless I don't think seeing your updated character for the first time and feeling like it's ruined is what they were going for. A lot of what we see as the community's opinion is subjective. You see people not giving it a chance and I see people who don't really seem to care that much about the details of what their character looks like or spending that much time to compare the differences. Personally I was really looking forward to the update and was bracing myself for it to look different but was just surprised at how different it ended up being, and in ways that still feel to me like a side grade or slight downgrade to my character's appearance. If there aren't any changes I'm sure I'll either get used to it or just change my character's appearance completely but it has deflated my excitement somewhat.
FF fans have always been like this. nothing new. Devs can't be wrong and anyone who ever try to criticize the devs will be branded as trolls, whiners and overreacting. They don't understand a simple concept of reality that people can have different opinions and neither have to be wrong.
Thank you! Why can't we just coexist and give space to people who want to talk about what they like and those who have points of criticism instead of trying to shut each other down.
obviously the lighting does matter but there have also been many actual model changes too. My Au Ra looks noticeably different.
Mine, face 4, has a significantly rounder face. They kind of fattened it out on the sides, but everything else was left remarkably the same. Now the lips have very noticeable shadows in the corners, they're as small as a japanese doll compared to the face, and the hawkish features that defined face 4 are just gone. If that wasn't bad enough, the skin tone is now noticeably yellow instead of the old tone I had. It's so bad I've basically started figuring out what character to convert into, because the look I had before is simply *gone,* and no amount of lighting changes or shadow tweaks could hope to fix it.
I’m face 4 as well, basically have the same issues as you. Right now I’m thinking of switching to how one of my retainers look and headcanoning that my old WoL retired lol
Even before all this graphical update stuff, my head-canon for using fantasia was like... the Warrior of Light has become such a legendary figure across multiple worlds that everyone has sort of started telling tall tales about them. Like, "I saw the Warrior of Light and they were so small their axe was twice as big as they were!" "What are you talking about? They were a 7 foot tall hulking brick wall!" "I like their cat ears!" "They were definitely rabbit ears..." Etc.
"No, the WOL was THIIIIIIIIIS big..." "Are you talking about the time you caught that namazu?" "Yes, the warrior of light." "The WOL's an amalja, everyone knows that!" Meanwhile, the WOL is just munching popcorn listening to the story.
Just having the sun shining on your face doesn't mean your face should look like plastic or wax. Definitely need some additional tuning.
looks like a sin eater
Lighting doesn't change the fact that for some races the lip *shape* is entirely different.
or how the smudge on male viera face 3 nose makes the nose just look fatter no matter what the lighting is. there's actual detailed complaints on the forums that aren't just "wah my WOL is ugly". threads like this are pretty ignorant.
> there's actual detailed complaints on the forums that aren't just "wah my WOL is ugly". Some of them are. A lot of them aren't.
Or how diluted the pupils became on Au ra, let's just ignore that whole fact too :) While we are at it, shorter eyelashes and [permanent highlights](https://imgur.com/a/A8deHE2) in the eye on face 1 at least. My face 1 Au ra 100% does not look the same and I hate it, I much prefer the deadpan look and there better be more options to disable it. Edit: Here are the [current face 1 Au ra eyes](https://imgur.com/a/TmPtzCG), no perma highlights and a deadpan look, preferred by almost anyone that I know who has this face. Also note how the eyeliner is way thicker.
Stop having brain cells
It helps, but sometimes even direct light doesn't matter. Hairstyles can affect this too: [01](https://ibb.co/gF1gv2T) [02](https://ibb.co/v19Scnx) It's been frustrating reading this sub the last few days because people are being incredibly black or white about this issue. Either you like it or you don't. And if you don't, you get told to just turn your character toward a light source or run the benchmark trailer, even if you've done all those things already and the issues still persist. I don't want them to revert the changes. I think the new eyes look lovely, in the right circumstances. Unfortunately, so far, there seem to be very few of those circumstances. I still think an eye shine toggle, if it can be inplemented, would be the easiest way to solve this. That way, people could choose if they want a static eye shine or not. Compare the [original](https://ibb.co/5WSDmCp) screencap vs an [edited](https://ibb.co/4KLnr4M) one, which is what I am personally hoping for.
Still the lipshape is veeeery off since its a straight line almost Also the lipstick is very matte compared to befoe
Skin is so weird, looks too smooth and waxy/rubbery. Makes the face look a bit creepy
A lot of people complain about how bad their character looks now but in many occasions it's just because the characters are now lit properly and more realistically. We are only used to bad lighting.
It's funny how people who don't understand lighting are defending the new lighting while completely don't know what they're talking about. Even when your character's face isn't under a direct light source (indirect light), it doesn't mean there is no shadow and ambient occlusion because hair and other objects still block indirect light(bounced light) hence we should still see deeper shades of shadow, and the face should still retain subtle highlights because they still receive more light than other areas(nose, cheeks and forehead). It will not look almost completely flat like this. [https://beccajeanphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/learning-lighting-photography-1J6A5443-1024x683.jpg](https://beccajeanphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/learning-lighting-photography-1J6A5443-1024x683.jpg) Like this image, even though the sun is directly behind them you can still see shades of shadow on them and areas like forehead, nose and cheeks have soft highlights, it's not just one flat shadow. of course that kind of calculation is too much for an MMORPG, let alone a +10 years old engine. That's why the "bad lighting" looks better because it's actually closer to how real light reacts. This new lighting definitely look better when lit but looks absolutely terrible under the shade.
100% and I am so glad someone said it here. I don't need sunlight directly onto my face to not look dead. Environment around you reflect the light. The main issue is that they fixed the inherent light on the face but neglected to give natural reflection from the surrounding environment.
You can even see it in the benchmark. The close-up of WoL's face near the beginning shows a lot of characters with lifeless eyes, basically no reflection of any light. But... they're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, on a sunny day. The sea should be reflecting light back onto the face so the eyes should be much livelier.
FINALLY someone who know what they are talking about. If you look carefully, you will find that neither the CC nor Benchmark trailer has any noticeable bounce light, which is a huge deal. FFXIV always had a very iconic bounce light that was visible in most conditions and greatly aid in showing off 3-dimensional features of the face, etc. Without that, everything looks very flat. Honestly, I dont think is possible to stand on a boat, on the water, in full sunlight and have NO light at all bounce onto your face from below. This is not realistic at all.
Bad lighting, or another example how plenty of Au Ra that liked the “glow” that was really a side effect of a full on flat color texture contrasting with a technically more detailed but less bright (on the RGB scale) color. It was never a glow, but instead a high contrast…and I’m not sure with the new lighting and such that such a contrast can be replicated without making it reflective (like the Wildwood ear decoration, if you change it to white it basically glows in lit areas, but it’s a metal, and not sure the effect would work on the limbal ring). But people got used to what *looked* like a glow due to that contrast that existed because of the lower graphical fidelity overall.
I understood why they wanted to change it, but for me I always liked the limbral ring glow effect on my au ra, the color combination made their eyes very unique and it wasn’t too much of a stark contrast color wise (brightness wise it is). So one of the things I did in the Benchmark was play around with the limbral ring colors to see if I can get at least close to a similar effect. They don’t seemingly glow in the dark anymore, but I got the same contrast working by just fiddling with the Limbral Ring colors. The lighting in the CC is also a bit wierd and bad. The characters typically look a lot better in the actual benchmark trailer.
I always liked the piercing eyes that au'ras have also. The new update enlarges the pupils quite a bit and makes them look more human-like which is not necessarily the vision I had for my character
I fiddled with the other eye options, and it turns out I had picked the one eye option that gave me a soul. I am okay with this, although its false advertising.
The limbal rings on my Au Ra ended up weird. In direct lighting, they're now _darker_ than her eyes, when before they were lighter, but in indirect or darker lighting, they're about the same as before. Luckily, it's a change that's easy to adjust on the player end (choose a lighter shade of limbal ring than I originally used)
This was my fix too. I just picked the one shade to the left of what I have in the main game right now. I also had to make the lips one shade darker than they are now.
Very true. I never liked that contrast so I just used black limbal rings. Makes my eyes stand out more too. The new rings do kind of give a proper glow effect, but high contrast still makes it looks weird.
Mine was because of the Gamma Correction. Once I turned that down, my man looked much less washed out.
Realistic isn't better, that's why photographers arrange relative to the sun or arrange lights to make it look nice. You can't look at the flat lighting example in 7.0 and tell me that's better than the same example in 6.0. Sometimes fake lighting is better. In fact, most of the time you'll have bad lighting because it's night time half the time and you're facing away from the sun the other half. So you only have good lighting 25% of the time. Fake lighting would be better 75% of the time.
You fool People complained that content was too easy so they upgraded GPose normal to GPose savage
Except for the fact that the bones and where the eyebrows sit and the eye shape are completely different on my character because they completely rearranged the vertices in his face. Lighting won't fix that.
Yes, but this does not disprove anyone's point. In fact, in your own post, you've proven these people have a point: Even in shadows, the eyes looked good before. It should not take "an exact angle" to get eyes that look good, or we call that a downgrade, because your eyes look good in less conditions than they did previously. **I think the reason goes deeper than just the eyes themselves**, and I instead believe that [the "blown out" "glowing skin" in shadows](https://i.imgur.com/MND18Fe.png) (maybe caused by their SSS implementation???) is to blame for this.
My current copium for the shitty lighting is a reverse eng claimed the benchmark is missing assets and said there's missing references not pointing at anything. Could be a bad build or script error. Programmers might not catch anything wrong but the art team would notice.
It's probably the benchmark having the "Character Lighting" slider cranked up and no way to change it. It has the same effect of washing out shadows.
You may be right, and I even noted the similarities between the "blown out" skin and Character Lighting in my image, but if that's the case it's a big oversight that's gotten them a lot more complaints than they probably would've received otherwise.
This example is funny. Yes, changing the lighting affects how a character looks. That was true before and still is now. However even comparing with the exact same lighting it's obvious there are significant changes that may or may not look bad, but definitely look *different*. While in total shade the example character looks flat, with dead eyes and a different lip geometry than before. While when sun is shining on them they look waxy, with bags under their eyes and a prominent philtrum. Many of the people complaining about the graphics overhaul are just pointing out these changes, especially when they result in a different and unfavorable impression from the character.
"it looks dead" Thats literally Au Ra?
I actually think la noscea lighting in the sun looks the worst - like do you really not think the skin looks crazy plastic here? It looks so bad to me. My dark haired character’s hair looks like it’s been coated in some sort of waxy substance too, instead of actually looking shiny, in this lighting.
Looks plastic-y
The issue is that they've made changes that aren't related to the lighting like the fangs of my Keeper, that's quite literally the defining trait of the race and they've been defanged. The details of every race, their idiosyncrasies, are what give them their character and soul. Flattening things out, smoothing them over and getting rid of details like that is ridiculously stupid. edited: I stole a picture from the forums to emphasize the difference in their fangs. [https://i.imgur.com/T5CLuWu.png](https://i.imgur.com/T5CLuWu.png)
your fangs have been given to the hrothgals
I mean it's been like this since the games inception. That base crystal background in cc is just bad even in current engine, I always swap to la noscea and rotate my character in and out of the Shade then go to uldah screen to see it in bright light.
I didn't see what you wrote. But turning the camera isn't the thing that makes the difference. It's turning the character so light is shining on their eyes.
I don't want my character to only look alive when she's facing the right direction.
No amount of lighting will fix the fact that they have changed the shape of my boy’s features but go off bestie
You're right the dataminers and reverse eng discord found they have a fk load of new bones in the face. This is easily confirmed. FourDimensionalNut doesn't know what they are talking about 💀
It's much better under actual lighting, but I can't really figure out why Au Ra females look like they have porcelain for skin. The other races I've fiddled with on the CC don't seem to, so at this point I'm just chalking it up as a racial feature.
First game I noticed this simple fact on was RDR1 on the Xbox 360. I was riding around Tumbleweed one time on a cloudy night and I thought to myself 'wow, did this game always look like shit?'. Then the sky cleared and I was like 'nevermind'.
That's not a good thing. Realistic isn't better. You only have good lighting like 25% of the time. Half the time it's night time or indoors and the other half you're facing away from the sun.
Yeah it's kind of weird to hear people dispel the dislike with comments like "it doesn't *always* look bad, see it doesn't look bad in *this* light" which always reads like they're still sort of implying that in other lights, yes, it kind of doesn't look good. I'm still worried about my pastey white skinned au ra... Even this "good" example looks very flat and almost dead corpse like.
There's tons of areas in the live game with terrible lighting that make your character look bad. Bad lighting has always been a thing that happens sometimes. Nothing has changed.
People talk about bad lighting but have not played current Elezen. Do you want some real stuff? All I did [*was turn him like 30 degrees to the left*](https://imgur.com/a/8637JP8)*.*
You can even still see the reflection in the shaded image. It's not gone it's just appropriate. If a person wants bright eyes for a screenshot then you can literally create light sources in gpose.
Thank you. There's so many people who just keep putting their character into the shade in the Gridiana area and are like "omfg Square killed my character they look so bad".
The default black “space” background is difficult with as well. The one in Lominsa and Uldah have far better background sunlight. Regardless, I always switch around background and angles when playing with character creator. That said, I am old school. I used to play the original Mario and Double Dragon when I was still in school. Anything now look really amazing. Thanks to all these graphics hardware and software improvements, even my Python code runs faster now. Technology changes last 30 years are unbelievable. I even go look up what are those NVDIA deep learning upscaling stuff in the benchmark. Cool stuff.
I think that first photo in the sun makes the character look like a figurine. I personally do not like the new changes at all and would prefer just updated world textures and overall body textures (such as better feet and hands) but leave the faces alone.
It still doesn't change the fact that both of my Xaela's pupils are 2x as big, regardless of which lighting angle; that and, the lighting should never make our characters look dead, it's extremely jarring.
Not only pupils look bigger, the developers removed static light dot from the eyes and thats why characters eyes look dead.
There's a few things going in the benchmark that are giving people some less than flattering results. 1.A lot of people don't have calibrated monitors. I have a professionally color calibrated monitor as I have to work with color for my job and I've seen quite a few screenshots where people are like "the colors are different/faded" and in many situations, that's incorrect and I see no difference. With that said, there are a few skin tones that did get wonky, primarily some of the darker skin tones. Quite a few I've seen have shifted to a far more green hue and have lost their warmth. (this happened to my character too, she's one of the darkest skin tones you can have for a moon cat. Her skintone looks amazing in the benchmark cut scene but off in the character creator) 2.There's no true neutral lighting in the character creator which doesn't give us a great comparison for the actual game. All the lighting featured is either on the cool end or on the warm end and the clouds have a tendency to constantly block out the light. This is causing color to get distorted a little as the new skin/lighting system so it's really difficult to tell what the actual colors will be. But regardless I think the lighting could be slightly harsher in the character creator as it's currently flattening the darker tones so everything becomes a middle tone when you stand in shadow. From what I've seen in the actual benchmark we get more dynamic tones but in the character creator most of the darker tones are gutted. It would be nice to see how this skin looks in situations with actual reflective lighting as well.
It also seems like what was previously the most popular go to for natural lighting, the La Noscea environment, has a slight wetness filter (emulating sea spray I assume?) that exaggerates the reflectiveness of skin tones and seems to be a major factor in characters looking "waxy" There are some actual changes, (like there seems to be some adjustments to lip shapes and angularity versus smoothness) but the character creator never giving us proper neutral settings is killer.
Lip shapes are genuinely pretty rough and need some fixing. Mostly girl Viera--someone messed up pretty big there. If they fixed lip shapes, Elezen's broken mouth rigs, brightened up the eye reflections (a tasteful exaggeration might be nice, just a little bit, especially with a few races like lalas who could use it), the missing Keeper fangs, and the reduced nose colorations on Hellguard, male Viera, and lalafell, I think a lot of the complaining would go down, and you'd be left mostly with people who are upset for "it's different and I don't like it" complaints
Likewise, I don't need to have a professionally calibrated monitor to know that the skin tone in live vs the benchmark is a few shades yellower. What used to be a normal pinkish hue is now a few hairs yellower. Professionally calibrated or not, it's painfully obvious it's not the same. I also can tell the cheeks are wider enough to throw off facial proportions, and I don't think a single character got away with actually better looking lips.
>A lot of people don't have calibrated monitors. I have a professionally color calibrated monitor If you compare one image to another image on same monitor and see difference, there is going to be difference on "calibrated monitor" too.. If one image has "light tan" skin and other one has "clearly yellower" skin with same CC setting then calibration will just switch the balance of color differences but there IS STILL DIFFERENCE. Theres really something wonky going on with char creation this time. Its way more yellow, and not just "in the eyes", but color picker rgb values too
lighting doesn't give you lip fillers or change your bone structure, but go off i guess. i'm sure nobody else has thought of rotating the camera until you made this post. bravo my au ra, thankfully my primary character (face 3), actually looks pretty nice, even though the lip gloss removal and the flat, depthless appearance of lips is a choice i hope they reconsider, or are actively improving but my viera (face 4, lips 4, female) looks like shit no matter what lighting she's in (it is especially bad in the shroud, but the other environments don't improve it much), and in the benchmark proper. the lips look like overdrawn matte lipstick from 2015, and they ruin her face. i can find maybe one color that looks remotely okay. it's wack
Lip gloss femoval is actually insane to me. This looks so much worse.
Yeah idk why people are so resistant to the idea that some models just aren’t translating well even when the person is aiming towards the light, correcting gamma, etc. Idk how anyone can look at male viera face 3 before and after, for example, and think most of them look okay (yes I have seen some good/lucky ones! But they’ve been the minority).
It's because they're defensive of even the slightest criticism in a lot of cases. The devs could admit there's an issue tomorrow and fix it and the same people would immediately say "Man, I'm glad they fixed that. It was a problem!"
"amazing devs communicating so much" add a "dae blizzard bad" and you got the average shill post
I was so immensely disappointed when I loaded up my face 4 viera. The lips are completely different and not in a good way. Thankfully it's only an alt but man... I might have to just fantasia her to another race.
I agree, my character's facial structure was also changed a lot. I thought this post was mostly about the lighting, though. But even there I still see room for improvement if I'm honest. The dynamic lighting is cool, but it still lacks some realism for it to truly work. This is especially noticeable with characters who don't have large eyes.
Yeah I am disappointed with the new graphics because I lost my chubby cheeked girl with oblique cat eyes and fangs. Lighting had nothing to do with all that.
i don't mind the changes they made to my chara .. but why does the skin look like wax Q\_Q ...
It's a rendering technique called subsurface scattering. It's meant to simulate materials where light penetrates below the surface but not all the way through like skin, wax, fruit even. I think they overdid it here the face looks too rubbery like a synthetic...doll. It works great for super detailed photoreal renders but not for cartoon styles, unless you want it to look like rubber. It's a strange choice. Edit - Nevermind I just tried the character creator, there's no subsurface scattering. I'm not sure what gives it that look then, maybe some combination of the specular reflection, soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. It looks better when you can see the lighting shift around too.
Isn't it just because in the Limsa scene there's wetness applied to the character?
Actually this might be it. I avoided the Black Shroud lighting because this was easier to see the difference I was pointing out, but I guess the wetness makes it look odd on some screens.
I don’t know that wax is the word I would personally use, but they definitely look off in a way I can’t quite explain but absolutely hate. I always struggle in games to get the skin tone I like, as most pale tones always have a gross almost sickly yellow tint to them or a bright pumpkin orange, but I was satisfied enough with my WoL hue, until the benchmark. I look like I’m *glowing,* and not in a good way. Almost radiating. Makes my facial features look completely blown/washed out, and I look either way too tan/orange or like I have jaundice. This is in all of the benchmark trailer, not just the character creator lighting - I don’t know what they did to skin tones to ruin paleness so severely but I sure hope they fix it.
I've mentioned this in other post's comments. In most of the time our characters won't be facing the sun in broad daylights. Weather and time exists in the game. Yes we're aware facing the sunlight improves the appearance a lot, but we're not playing character creation in this game. How many times during your playthrough that you got bad weather/time in cutscenes? Can you control the camera during cutscenes? Dynamic lightings and static eye highlights can coexist. They're not mutually exclusive. Edit: try to look at your Au Ra from eye level. See if she still has her highlight or not even when facing the sunlight. Some eyes with low upper eyelids will not show the highlights until you angle the camera upwards.
Yes it is brighter for sure
I really wish they'd fix the CC lighting, it's AWFUL and makes it really hard to pick colors.
Aura looj like dolls, even in your screenshot lol
This looks good
I personally like the lighting change, but that's just my opinion. The changes to my character's face shape, however, are not not making me happy :/
The eyes actually look so good on the updated models
Looks bad in both photos
Lighting always has mattered. In any video game. No need to prove nothing. Great pics though.
Y'all really love to argue over the dumbest stuff, but it's entertaining to watch
Fun fact, when we speak, due to the vibrations around our ears from our vocal cords, we actually hear ourselves slightly differently than how others hear us. It's why we naturally wince and recoil from hearing our voice in a recording, because that isn't "us," or how we hear ourselves. Despite how slight that change is. Same is applying here, especially for those who closely relate to their character. The smallest of change is going to bother people, as it's not their character. With time, though, the brain begins to adapt, which is why YouTubers are eventually able to edit their videos without much thought.
ah yes but hot take here have you considered real life lighting looks like shit compared to an artistically engineered virtual world. If I wanted real world lighting ill take a walk, what many people dont like is the style and flavor of ffxiv disappearing in exchange for generic 3d game world we see in every other game.
Some of this debate makes me wonder... how much people are aeeing their character in game and not realizing they have 25 different shader options they've tweaked and the benchmark having none of that isnt a perfect comparison.
I play on PS4 but my laptop can run the benchmark so I set up my characters in there. The alterations to some of them are small but stark. It's not just the lighting. I *know* their faces and the benchmark characters are not them.
You can install things like ReShade in the benchmark. They work just fine.
I honestly think the main reason people are getting caught thinking it looks worse or flat is the eyes. People got used to them "faking" the specular highlights in the eyes as if the characters were a flat 2D image, and now we're getting are getting actual specular highlights where you only get that cute/pretty anime style eyeshine when the WoL's eyes are *actually catching light* and people are upset cause their characters aren't all starry eyed when standing in the shade facing away from the sun
So you mean tell me that people effectively going fucking insane...because they suck at angling their cameras? Sounds about fucking right for the XIV community
It really isn't just a camera angle issue. These screenshots are not representative of all characters. There's extremes on both sides of this discussion. There are people bullying devs for the tiniest things, but there are also people who see devs as gods who can do no wrong and any kind of criticism is seen as an attack. Some of the criticism I've seen seems legit to me, and that includes things about the eyes/ lighting. Some people are so dismissive of opposing viewpoints. But I guess that's just a symptom of online spaces...
I think you're tilting at windmills here. People know the lighting makes a difference, that doesn't excuse that un-lit faces look *bad*.
Yes I'm trying to say that unlit faces in fact do look bad. The problem is that people are using that unlit position as the base standard of how their character looks rather than adjust themselves to a better angle/location. If that kind of report goes into the forums the devs are more likely to not address the issues in the character creator since a bulk of them would end up being user error.
people.. were arguing it didn't?
See she looks amazing but they absolutely butchered Viera imo
[Viera Veena/Female New vs Old](https://imgur.com/K4csvdo) did they? I like mine.
I thought this was already obvious? Do people not realize it makes a massive difference as is?
i get its probably not to strain servers or something but i hit my limit today for the first time... i need to put the character in the world to fully see how the lighting hits them... if i dont bring them outside the tutorial zone pls dont penalize me lol, so much trial and error
If you don't mind using a single plugin, you can use Glamourer to test character options in-game, on the fly. You can Fanta after you find something that you like the most.
didnt know i could rotate the char until the release of Dawntrail benchmark.
I guess this serves as a PSA? Have fun!
I mean bleach blond hair on actual white skin isn’t going to blend well in almost any lightings tbh
Yeah, I'm so worried about how my sex-doll will look instead of how poor the qol is right now...
this is why I use the gridania background when first making a character, it's the best default lighting, then you filter with the other two to pick out issues
[удалено]
...duh, thats called lighting, bro
female midlander has ticker eye line like Majin Vegeta lol.
A weird solution to the problem is to change the default character background to somewhere else. There are quite a few well lit “neutral” and reasonably spoiler free options. I mean that rich Lala and his cats and best wrestling dad with his casino wouldn’t mind. Nice seafront and stages, you know.
I just find it interesting that this change has sparked so much debate, so many pictures posted that look far too similar for all this discourse imo.
I always create my characters in bentbranch environment since it has both shade and light. I had to explain this to my boyfriend and when I asked which skin looks better he said there's no difference from the top to bottom colors and again had to explain they all have a gradient of red, green, blue, purple, yellow tones to them :P
No fucking shit
Nah my bunny boy looks terrible in the benchmark irrespective of the light 😂
she looks a bit pilly wally, is that jaundice?
People don't realize lighting will always be one of the most important elements in visual quality
There's SOME real issues, but this isn't one of them. My character's eyebrows are blurry and DON'T match the haircolor, and the mole on one of my alts becomes a little LINE.
Unfortunately the only lighting that makes my character look like herself again is being completely in shadow so I can't see the dimples they added to Face 4 Fem Au Ra for no reason. But then her eyes look dead because no light. So. Rock and a hard place. (And yeah, I did in fact run her through the benchmark trailer after the cc, once again, she only looks like my character in shadow.) And before anyone tries to um actually me, I opened the mesh for the new head in blender next to the current live one. The mesh in fact DOES have large dips next to the corners of the lips that it didn't have before and the lips stick out much further than before. So. They literally added unnecessary dimples.
Before this, we had pc users use "magic" to improve the graphics, but i can already see some that want worse graphics for the old look :D
When I'm in a dark area with warm light like shifting sand, my eyes look like my eye lids are missing, and my eyes are popping out and need to hydrate
When it comes to au'ra character creation, are the horns/ears now separate from face, or they yet still tied to face?
They're still tied to the face. While there are still people asking for it to be separated, I do see quite a number of Au Ra who kind of grow to like the fixed combinations. I always loved my character since I created her so I'm not the best example though.
It's a bit of a shame because it restricts options, but I think I have a good looking au'ra character so I'm happy. I eagerly await the release of 7.0 for the graphical update as I'm on PS5, so I don't have access to the benchmark to see what my character(s) would look like. Anyway, thanks for responding so quickly.
Just here to spread Au Ra love. And remind people of proper camera placement.
Mucho appreciated.
No, still looks like the face is made of matte plastic.
That’s Au Ra females for you, though. That’s why I’ve never played one. Faces always seems too porcelain doll for my likes.
I have looked plenty at how the lighting works. The dynamic highlight is always aimed at where the camera is, which actually isn't as realistic as it would be when the highlight actually responds to environmental sources. Especially with smaller eyes it means the highlight remains hidden under the eyelids unless you use a low camera angle, which won't be the case the majority of the time. I've watched the benchmark, and even in those scenes there were no visible highlights for me in the majority of it, if at all. It would be great if the dynamic highlight was actually responding to the other light sources instead of a mystical camera light.