For other FFXIV Femroe enjoyers, I thought I'd pass this along! Now is the time to get your feedback in! Note that it doesn't only effect femroes, so if there is something you don't like the look of let the devs know.
Alrightyyyyyyy! I need some help from my lovely FFXIV community members!
I've finally finished up my feedback about the face changes in the graphical update, but I can't post them on the official FFXIV forums myself because of that pesky old profanity permaban. I'll post it all here, so if one of you beautiful and wonderful people could copy and paste it over to the thread I'll link below I would really, really, really appreciate it.
It's been about 8 years since I could post there so I don't know the situation for posting images, but if you need me to host them someplace so you can use the necessary html, just let me know!
This was the thread I was hoping to post my feedback in, but if you see more that it would be helpful to add parts of it to or a different one you feel it's better suited for, feel free to paste it there as well!:
FINAL FANTASY XIV Forums
Add whatever note you want at the front to clarify that this is just a post made on behalf of another player! My own character info is: Nozomi Kei on the Balmung server, Crystal DC, NA
Feedback starts under the cut~
I'm going to try to cover everything I can find wrong and pray that at least the biggest issues are addressed, otherwise I may have to retire the character I've played for almost a decade. I will be talking primarily about face 2 male Duskwight Elezen, as that is what I play. Some of these issues might be present in all Melezen faces or isolated to face 2, but I wouldn't know unless one of you here has talked about it.
First, an issue several others have mentioned: Face 2 Duskwight suddenly having the textures of a Wildwood; eyebags being especially noticable and unwanted. I chose my character to be Duskwight specifically because I didn't want the eyebags.
Actually something seems off with all of the textures on face 2 Duskwight? My previously powder-smooth, even-toned skin now has a mottled, almost artifacted appearance, same with the skin on the lips which have both mottling and oddly darkened edges on the lower lip especially. The eyelid textures seem to have just straight up been placed wrong, with part of the weights snagging a section of the eyebrow down and leaving a notch during blinks. The eyebrows also look like maaaybe they were misplaced and that's why they're thicker for some of us, because they're being stretched over a different area than intended that is bigger than their previous real estate.
The obvious texture stretching aside, the new eyelid has removed my faint eyeliner, and changed the gently pink lid to the same jaundiced beige as areas like the forehead. Eyelids are naturally pinker in real life because of the thin skin amd abundant blood vessels. This ties into the larger observation I've made about the changes to face skin textures for 7.0, which is that their color now looks unnaturally one-toned and even more lacking in the natural hue variation of living skin than the current faces.
A note on the eyebrows and lips that is more of a suspicion than confirmed, but I'm starting to feel like these features have just been outright homogenized? Perhaps in order to make applying morphs easier? Several people have made mention of their brows being straightened out and/or thickened. The elderly faced gentleman on page 12 posted by Cio had his magnificent, shapely brows reduced to mundanity. A lot of unique lip shapes are being changed in a consistent direction. The 'standard' shape is a strong cupid's bow on top with very pointed peaks, color wrapping around the corners of the mouth, a wide and shallowly curved underside to the bottom lip, and less fullness overall. Some are seeing their gently rounded peaks made pointy, others are seeing skinny-in-width bottom lips widened, folks with broad upper lips are being thinned. My little lift in the center underside of my bottom lip was flattened
My lips are also now weirdly dark by default, and trying to colorcorrect the unattractive mauvish beige leaves me looking like I'm wearing heavy lipstick. I think part of this is the change in how lips handle lighting, and part is the bad texture that was swapped in, plus the harsher edges to the liplines where previously there was a gentle, natural transition.
At first I thought I was imagining it before I imported my current settings, but now I am sure when I say my cute and small triangular ears whose shape added to the sharpness of my face have been made bigger and rounder. I made the smallest, most Tolkien elf ears I could because I wanted them to be subtle and elegant. This reshaping has added to the myriad changes that mean my character no longer looks like the same person.
While I can see changes to my beloved hook nose I will concede that at least in profile the shape is nearly identical. Like others observed there has generally been a lessening of the details that made the nose unique. Raised ridge, bigger septum, nostril shortening.
I'm going to try to list things out, starring the things that I think are issues that especially need to be changed/fixed because they are errors rather than just somewhat expected (if unwanted) differences caused by increased poly count and modelling changes.
☆☆• Face 2 Duskwight face textures have been swapped for Wildwood textures?
☆• Lips have been reshaped
☆• Eyebrows have been thickened
• Ears have been made bigger and more rounded in the middle and lobe regions
☆• Lips are darker by default which causes issues with lipstick
• The edges of lips have a hard edge instead of the previous gentle transition
☆• The bizarre 'milk mustache' above the upper lip
• My chin has been made bigger and more round in profile
• My lower lip has been plumped.
☆• Mottled skin textures, especially on my cheeks
• Very flat lip lighting/sheen
☆• Elongated dark smudges about 2cm long on either side of my mouth?
☆☆• Texture issues in eyelid region (very visible during blink animation)
• Harsher, darker eyelashes (not thicker from above though??)
• Lack of eyeshine and dark upper iris making my lids appear lower and changing my default expression
• Angular facial geometry in cheeks seems smoothed which changes the harsher look of the race (possibly just the faulty benchmark lighting)
• Hair lighting has changed; seems more matte, less hue variation between lit and shadowed areas
___
Changes I've seen in other players:
• Face skintone now seems very one-note and unalive
• Waxiness
• Harsher eye makeup that appears too dark or stark
• Removal of texture detail that was unique to individual faces, especially in eye regions
☆• Moon Miqo fangs drastically shortened
___
In seeing all of this unfold I've been dismayed to notice a lot of the unique charm of faces across the board being airbrushed away, from subtle shading in eye areas on various viera faces, to expressive and quirky default expressions being toned down and made more average in Elezen girls and Miqo girls, to wrinkles disappearing from older faces, to facial topology that created personality via cast shadows being rounded and smoothed and lightened into nonexistence. The result is consistently a more calm, mature, generic look. A lot of female characters' makeup has turned weirdly harsh, sharp-edged, and dark so that it more closely resembles stage makeup, both eye and lip. Then the awkwardly single-toned skin tops things off with me left feeling that very few looks are 'upgrades' even when the owner is happy with the result.
A couple side notes: Something odd is happening to the hairline on this style near the middle? Looks like an error. My racial gear necklaces have changed from a visible leather texture to some unidentifiable line-y texture?
Come on now SE, you're still doing the dark-skinned characters dirty even after the graphics update? I thought we were over this! Do the new lighting settings not apply to old content?
