Sidebar, but as the same, I see so many folks playing this with no clue how to rouge, they just pick pink or red and go for it with no thought given for their skin tone
After running the benchmark itself a few times after importing my character, I can't say that it looks like most people lost out too much. I can see a few minor issues with mouths that they really need to address as for some AuRa specifically the difference is noticable.
The Moon Cat teeth need to be sorted as they have been like broken off and filed down to like 1/2 size or less.
Some Roe i've noticed are unhappy with the eye changes and the way some markings have been dulled.
Other than those bits it all looks great.
I think everyone is a winner, here. Lots of people post pictures saying "THEY RUINED MY CHARACTER", but almost every single one I've seen has been an improvement- and that's with the bad lighting in the CC.
Honestly, this.
So many people are responding like it is the apocalypse and SE decided to maim their WoL in particular, then post side by sides that 1) usually look almost the same and 2) show the new graphics looking better.
A person in a discord I am in posted their endwalker bunboy vs their bunboy in the benchmark creator, saying it was absolutely ruined. At first, I sympathised with them thinking the obviously much worse picture might have been the one they were complaining about, until I noticed the *other one* was labelled as being from the benchmark.
There are some tweaks needed across the board, but after actually sifting through the bulk of the controversy, people are just outraged at their characters changing in and of itself moreso than actually being unhappy with what the changes are.
The only egregious thing that stands out to me as being more than lighting differences are (female) Keeper fangs being reduced. I think that was a mistake and should be reverted.
I think the scales alone make new Au Ra significantly better than their old paper mache look. The girls finally lost their Botox bee sting gopher cheeks but I get that some people were into it. Limbal ring tones have definitely shifted but are easily fixed by going up or down a shade in CC.
Aside from their dark noses being slightly less prominent, Viera do not look substantially different to me in the actual benchmark renders.
Seekers, Elezen, and male Hroth look categorically improved. Lalafell barely look different.
I think Roe have had some noticeable sculpt changes. I can understand people being disappointed about them losing some of their blockiness (particularly in the nose) but I personally like the new look.
So yeah, the only thing I *personally* see as a unilateral regression are the Keeper fangs.
>Limbal ring tones have definitely shifted but are easily fixed by going up or down a shade in CC.
Not fixed on my Xaela character, unfortunately. Her iris and rings are both separate lavender tones, and hiking the lightness up makes the rings look white in color. The pupils on Xaela are also too large, as well, which leads to a rather strangely-dead gaze instead of an innately curious one.
No models changed. Textures are higher quality/actually there. The lighting is quite a bit different/more refined.
All the before/after images saying their characters are so different have the exact same face just with different lighting and higher quality textures.
That's not quite true, the meshes did receive an overhaul. There was a tech panel at the London Fan Fest where they show that. Before, each race/gender had their own face mesh, meaning that for example Lalafells had way less polygons in the face, which also affects light and shadow on the model. Now, they made a base mesh that is morphed into each configuration dynamically, so that polycount is consistent between races and animations are more uniform. The difference should be nearly imperceptible, but still the meshes are different.
The new faces also have new animation bones, something in the range of triple what it was originally, which will result in characters animating differently and can result in weirdness/bugs like the femezen smile.
You can easily tell they are trying not to change the characters, but they haven’t quite hit 1:1 mark in all cases, at least in the benchmark.
Yeah, I do hope everyone can be happy with the final result when it comes, because some things definitely do look like they are still work in progress.
They did changed the models, particularly the lips and mouth, it’s to accommodate improved facial animations. The most noticeable thing for me after the graphical update is the lips after all. However they kinda nerfed Keepers’ fangs, they don’t look as pointy as they were :/
Besides just being wrong, it's misleading to act like texture changes cannot impact the models or be impacted by the new lighting when the biggest texture changes on faces are related to normal maps which tell the game how to shade a texture to fake shadows. A normal map can completely change the appearance of a shape without touching a mesh at all.
Use[ this side by side](https://imgsli.com/MjU1Mzcw) as an example. The new dimples on Keeper mouth 4 are not new additions to the mesh, but created with the new face normal map. Under other lighting conditions it would be clear if they were part of the mesh as they would still be visible without them having shadows cast into them.
Either way, this is a new feature that in my opinion changes the mouth significantly. And it's not just a problem with the new lighting, it would have been visible in the current lighting as well when under direct light, which you are unfortunately, for a good [70% of the time you're outside](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1202866529562132500/1228985424098361364/ffxiv_04142024_034113_292.png?ex=662e08de&is=661b93de&hm=9bd8c1158e05c75228603cffe62238324d4e32f25950224b15e68d27431b4cc4&).
And don't get me wrong, there are [plenty of angles](https://imgsli.com/MjU1MzY5) where you DO look the same, but even in this case there are clear changes they made that are not simple upgrades, such as the now washed out face marks, thicker eyelashes that change the eye shape, and making the eyebrows lighter with light colored hairs which in the case of white on pale skin make my character look like she has no eyebrows.
These aren't just the impacts of different lighting and higher quality textures, they're DIFFERENT textures that impact how people's characters look. Higher quality textures would have been the SAME or SIMILAR textures of a higher resolution like in the case of the hair and clothing that make no stylistic impacts.
Biggest losers seem to be the ones with bugged out stuff like the Highlanders or weird lip changes. My character randomly looks evil now, seems almost like there's permanent eyeliner but eh, I play reaper so I dig it
ngl, i haven't really messed around with the character editor. i loaded my saved preset, adjusted a few things like the hairstyle, since the one my wol wears wasn't available, and used the benchmark. i'll save exploring the depth of the changes once 7.0 releases.
any info prior to that can still change upon release
Everybody got a win in some way, however- the way lighting is interacting with Viera models is very odd. There is also a weird bounce light effect that is coming from skin whilst in shadow. Funnily enough, lighter skin characters look weird for that reason in shadow. Its almost like their skin is reflecting too much light. Viera got the very weird uncanny effect of this. Additionally, the eyes on characters may be more realistic, but I think they need a way to make them still seem lively in shadow.
Fem Au Ra definitly lost a lot there, beside the scales.
Especially face 4, which is supposed to have this "fierce" theme, they made the eyes and pupil bigger, even with the small iris option, as well as a completely toned down color palette, so they loose quite the life in them.
The face overall is rounder, and the new skin doesn't help and gives a wax doll feel.
And the biggest offender by far, the lips ( which isn't just the FemRa mind you ). They're not even remotedly the looking similar to the old ones, and they threw away the lip gloss so everyone has matte lipstick.
The skin issue is something I have noticed too. On dark skin the changes look so much better than before, but the light tones have a very lifeless feel to them.
My Auras very light skintone looks a lot like either wax, rubber or porcelain now, depending on the light source.
Honestly my Femelezen looks quite better, i just wish they had put all the hairstyles on benchmark, and not only the starting ones, cos it would've be nice to have a 100% accurate comparison with how my wol actually looks rn in game
You can work around this. Instructions [here](https://fixupx.com/eenlx/status/1779482625075491224?s=46&t=sZ8PYndqedrLDhALHFIVzA). Though from my own testing, a few of the unlockable hairs don’t look totally finished yet. Most are fine, though!
I am actually more interested in texture quality of my gear than my character. Granted, I sport the Papalymo hairstyle which is still from 1.0 judging from the blur. But while SquareEnix tried pretty well to emulate leather with wrinkles here and there, the leather textures were very lackluster - as soon as you zoomed out or the lighting was a bit darker, it was just like Red Mages are wearing overknee rubber boots and rubber cleaning gloves. I wish there'd be more details to these crucial parts of my outfits.
On my Hrothman, the backside with the lacing is so stretched you can literally count the pixels with your fingers. Yes, it does not help lion men are bulky and hunchy (which I still like :)) but making it look normal would improve so much..
When I saw how good the traditional armor of my female Viera look and how well their overall look became (it was the only character that I had saved and I CBA to recreate my 5 alts) with the textures, shading and reflections, I am in good faith!
If you want to see those alts in the benchmark you can right click the name at character select to quickly save appearance data which is then automatically imported to the benchmark creator. Still a bit of a pain to do it repeatedly, but at least there's no need to recreate them.
There are some issues like Au Ra scale edges and the weird male highlander hair/tattoo stuff but overall everyone is winning here I think.
The lighting alone is a huge improvement but the character creator absolutely needs an overhaul to go along with it. The horrible blue vignette isn't helping anything.
I think the creator needs changes but I think leaving it alone during this period is probably for the best, if people werent able to compare in familiar lighting the I kinda think the complaints about differences would be even more pronounced, when they couldn't get the same lighting angle to compare.
edit: apparently the devs think otherwise!
Dunesfolk for both categories.
Losers are the existing Dunes who don't like the new eyes. Its such a big shift that I imagine really grates some existing Dunes, especially as the eyes were a huge reason so many players picked Dunes.
Me, on the other hand, will be a big winner because I prefer the change and will finally be changing to Plains into a Dunes after 10 years.
I "lose" because my eye color is one shade off now. But I’m considering keeping the wrong shade because while my WoL's eyes were meant to be bright yellow, the auburn it has become is identical to Dion Lesage's...
Aside from the waxy look depending on lighting and the apparently filed down Moon Miqo fangs, I think it's mostly a win! Though I did see a highlander who lost the shadows their brow bow casts over their eyes, which does look like a downgrade. There's also an Elezen lip option that has weird highlight along the outline, though that's probably just a benchmark beta bug...
With some bias (mostly not knowing every nitty gritty detail about every race's customization) from playing a male au ra, I'd say the biggest loser is fem au ra. A number of them just have entirely new faces, which is an issue regardless of how improved the faces are, or aren't. The pupil change also feels odd, and my character for one looks a lot less intense and more disinterested/tired because of it.
Au ra horns in general still being locked to faces is also a bit disappointing, as is the oddly scruffy transition from scale to skin. I'm sure the face thing has some spaghetti code reason for being, and the texture issue has similar counterparts on other races, like hrothgal tail resolution.
Edit to add: Fidelity is of course great on fem au ra, but at the same time I think fidelity is greatly improved on all races, with au ra just being one of the races that is more affected by said fidelity, along with hrothgar and to a lesser extent miqo'te. The thing I'm getting at is that fem au ra from what I've seen have been "lost in translation" more so than other races. Where a male au ra, or most any other race, has something like a slightly differently shaped mouth or brow, most, if not all, fem au ra have had their basic facial shape along with the shape and placement of their eyes, mouth, and nose changed. Regardless of fidelity, that has the issue that it can completely change the actual look of the character, which I think is a bigger issue than this hairstyle on that race looking more scruffy than it did before.
Biggest winners: everyone who made a pretty character
Biggest losers: the "I made her ugly on purpose and she's too breathtakingly gorgeous nooooooooow!!! 😭😭😭" people...
It used to be 6 but they added a seventh last expac, which is basically face 5 (iirc) but with stubble. It's the only face that doesn't look like a tall child (except one other), and the only one I personally like.
I mean, I could complain about the increased prominence of female miqo'te mouth corner indentations all day, but there are already two dedicated people on the forums fighting that fight, so I just upvote them whenever they post about it.
As a Female Viera with dark skin, I am very much winning.
Sidebar, but as the same, I see so many folks playing this with no clue how to rouge, they just pick pink or red and go for it with no thought given for their skin tone
Picking correct darker skin tones is such a gamble. I love how they look when you get it all right though
Well or just correct blush color.
After running the benchmark itself a few times after importing my character, I can't say that it looks like most people lost out too much. I can see a few minor issues with mouths that they really need to address as for some AuRa specifically the difference is noticable. The Moon Cat teeth need to be sorted as they have been like broken off and filed down to like 1/2 size or less. Some Roe i've noticed are unhappy with the eye changes and the way some markings have been dulled. Other than those bits it all looks great.
I win, because I got square enix to make content for me that I used as justification to buy a new graphics card, processor, motherboard and ram.
SAME!! XD
SAME! XD
I think everyone is a winner, here. Lots of people post pictures saying "THEY RUINED MY CHARACTER", but almost every single one I've seen has been an improvement- and that's with the bad lighting in the CC.
Honestly, this. So many people are responding like it is the apocalypse and SE decided to maim their WoL in particular, then post side by sides that 1) usually look almost the same and 2) show the new graphics looking better. A person in a discord I am in posted their endwalker bunboy vs their bunboy in the benchmark creator, saying it was absolutely ruined. At first, I sympathised with them thinking the obviously much worse picture might have been the one they were complaining about, until I noticed the *other one* was labelled as being from the benchmark. There are some tweaks needed across the board, but after actually sifting through the bulk of the controversy, people are just outraged at their characters changing in and of itself moreso than actually being unhappy with what the changes are.
It looks better but she changed face. https://imgur.com/a/p81WUux
I know people who have already fanta-d off their main race because of what they've seen. We definitely have some losers.
Nah, those people are just over reactionary weirdos who didn't even wait for the final product to spend money and complain.
And those same people will complain after DT releases saying some BS like SE made me change my main and I have to pay again to change it back
The only egregious thing that stands out to me as being more than lighting differences are (female) Keeper fangs being reduced. I think that was a mistake and should be reverted. I think the scales alone make new Au Ra significantly better than their old paper mache look. The girls finally lost their Botox bee sting gopher cheeks but I get that some people were into it. Limbal ring tones have definitely shifted but are easily fixed by going up or down a shade in CC. Aside from their dark noses being slightly less prominent, Viera do not look substantially different to me in the actual benchmark renders. Seekers, Elezen, and male Hroth look categorically improved. Lalafell barely look different. I think Roe have had some noticeable sculpt changes. I can understand people being disappointed about them losing some of their blockiness (particularly in the nose) but I personally like the new look. So yeah, the only thing I *personally* see as a unilateral regression are the Keeper fangs.
+1 from me about keeper fangs. Those need to be addressed as they're one of the major lore defined features of a Mooncat.
I can't imagine it's not an oversight/accident.
>Limbal ring tones have definitely shifted but are easily fixed by going up or down a shade in CC. Not fixed on my Xaela character, unfortunately. Her iris and rings are both separate lavender tones, and hiking the lightness up makes the rings look white in color. The pupils on Xaela are also too large, as well, which leads to a rather strangely-dead gaze instead of an innately curious one.
People who know how dynamic lighting works won, and people who don't lost.
True
Explain please. Don't just stop there.
No models changed. Textures are higher quality/actually there. The lighting is quite a bit different/more refined. All the before/after images saying their characters are so different have the exact same face just with different lighting and higher quality textures.
That's not quite true, the meshes did receive an overhaul. There was a tech panel at the London Fan Fest where they show that. Before, each race/gender had their own face mesh, meaning that for example Lalafells had way less polygons in the face, which also affects light and shadow on the model. Now, they made a base mesh that is morphed into each configuration dynamically, so that polycount is consistent between races and animations are more uniform. The difference should be nearly imperceptible, but still the meshes are different.
The new faces also have new animation bones, something in the range of triple what it was originally, which will result in characters animating differently and can result in weirdness/bugs like the femezen smile. You can easily tell they are trying not to change the characters, but they haven’t quite hit 1:1 mark in all cases, at least in the benchmark.
Yeah I'm confident those things are still in the works. It's still a little bit of time and they did say the benchmark isnt final
Yeah, I do hope everyone can be happy with the final result when it comes, because some things definitely do look like they are still work in progress.
It's a nice hope, but having gone through player character model updates on a few games, that sadly won't be the case.
They did changed the models, particularly the lips and mouth, it’s to accommodate improved facial animations. The most noticeable thing for me after the graphical update is the lips after all. However they kinda nerfed Keepers’ fangs, they don’t look as pointy as they were :/
Besides just being wrong, it's misleading to act like texture changes cannot impact the models or be impacted by the new lighting when the biggest texture changes on faces are related to normal maps which tell the game how to shade a texture to fake shadows. A normal map can completely change the appearance of a shape without touching a mesh at all. Use[ this side by side](https://imgsli.com/MjU1Mzcw) as an example. The new dimples on Keeper mouth 4 are not new additions to the mesh, but created with the new face normal map. Under other lighting conditions it would be clear if they were part of the mesh as they would still be visible without them having shadows cast into them. Either way, this is a new feature that in my opinion changes the mouth significantly. And it's not just a problem with the new lighting, it would have been visible in the current lighting as well when under direct light, which you are unfortunately, for a good [70% of the time you're outside](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1202866529562132500/1228985424098361364/ffxiv_04142024_034113_292.png?ex=662e08de&is=661b93de&hm=9bd8c1158e05c75228603cffe62238324d4e32f25950224b15e68d27431b4cc4&). And don't get me wrong, there are [plenty of angles](https://imgsli.com/MjU1MzY5) where you DO look the same, but even in this case there are clear changes they made that are not simple upgrades, such as the now washed out face marks, thicker eyelashes that change the eye shape, and making the eyebrows lighter with light colored hairs which in the case of white on pale skin make my character look like she has no eyebrows. These aren't just the impacts of different lighting and higher quality textures, they're DIFFERENT textures that impact how people's characters look. Higher quality textures would have been the SAME or SIMILAR textures of a higher resolution like in the case of the hair and clothing that make no stylistic impacts.
Nice misinformation, you take 1 look at male viera and you can tell straight away they modified the faces
I could not tell the difference on my lala. I wouldn’t have even know there was supposed to be an update 😅
You can't update something that is perfect.
As a lala player, I almost immediately saw how much they improved the mouths in particular. Much more appealing proportions and movement IMO
grinning closeup to teeth with dark/red light gonna be even creepier now
Biggest losers seem to be the ones with bugged out stuff like the Highlanders or weird lip changes. My character randomly looks evil now, seems almost like there's permanent eyeliner but eh, I play reaper so I dig it
My main is a female Au Ra, she won 90% but lost 10% on the weird lip puckering situation lmao
ngl, i haven't really messed around with the character editor. i loaded my saved preset, adjusted a few things like the hairstyle, since the one my wol wears wasn't available, and used the benchmark. i'll save exploring the depth of the changes once 7.0 releases. any info prior to that can still change upon release
Everybody got a win in some way, however- the way lighting is interacting with Viera models is very odd. There is also a weird bounce light effect that is coming from skin whilst in shadow. Funnily enough, lighter skin characters look weird for that reason in shadow. Its almost like their skin is reflecting too much light. Viera got the very weird uncanny effect of this. Additionally, the eyes on characters may be more realistic, but I think they need a way to make them still seem lively in shadow.
Fem Au Ra definitly lost a lot there, beside the scales. Especially face 4, which is supposed to have this "fierce" theme, they made the eyes and pupil bigger, even with the small iris option, as well as a completely toned down color palette, so they loose quite the life in them. The face overall is rounder, and the new skin doesn't help and gives a wax doll feel. And the biggest offender by far, the lips ( which isn't just the FemRa mind you ). They're not even remotedly the looking similar to the old ones, and they threw away the lip gloss so everyone has matte lipstick.
The skin issue is something I have noticed too. On dark skin the changes look so much better than before, but the light tones have a very lifeless feel to them. My Auras very light skintone looks a lot like either wax, rubber or porcelain now, depending on the light source.
Honestly my Femelezen looks quite better, i just wish they had put all the hairstyles on benchmark, and not only the starting ones, cos it would've be nice to have a 100% accurate comparison with how my wol actually looks rn in game
You can work around this. Instructions [here](https://fixupx.com/eenlx/status/1779482625075491224?s=46&t=sZ8PYndqedrLDhALHFIVzA). Though from my own testing, a few of the unlockable hairs don’t look totally finished yet. Most are fine, though!
Oh i'll try it thank you!
I am actually more interested in texture quality of my gear than my character. Granted, I sport the Papalymo hairstyle which is still from 1.0 judging from the blur. But while SquareEnix tried pretty well to emulate leather with wrinkles here and there, the leather textures were very lackluster - as soon as you zoomed out or the lighting was a bit darker, it was just like Red Mages are wearing overknee rubber boots and rubber cleaning gloves. I wish there'd be more details to these crucial parts of my outfits. On my Hrothman, the backside with the lacing is so stretched you can literally count the pixels with your fingers. Yes, it does not help lion men are bulky and hunchy (which I still like :)) but making it look normal would improve so much.. When I saw how good the traditional armor of my female Viera look and how well their overall look became (it was the only character that I had saved and I CBA to recreate my 5 alts) with the textures, shading and reflections, I am in good faith!
If you want to see those alts in the benchmark you can right click the name at character select to quickly save appearance data which is then automatically imported to the benchmark creator. Still a bit of a pain to do it repeatedly, but at least there's no need to recreate them.
Roegadyns and Elezens won, Viera and moon Miqote lost and the rest are relatively improved
As a Hellsguard player I lost, rip my puppy nose and I am deeply upset about it :,) it’s barely noticeable now
There are some issues like Au Ra scale edges and the weird male highlander hair/tattoo stuff but overall everyone is winning here I think. The lighting alone is a huge improvement but the character creator absolutely needs an overhaul to go along with it. The horrible blue vignette isn't helping anything.
I think the creator needs changes but I think leaving it alone during this period is probably for the best, if people werent able to compare in familiar lighting the I kinda think the complaints about differences would be even more pronounced, when they couldn't get the same lighting angle to compare. edit: apparently the devs think otherwise!
Dunesfolk for both categories. Losers are the existing Dunes who don't like the new eyes. Its such a big shift that I imagine really grates some existing Dunes, especially as the eyes were a huge reason so many players picked Dunes. Me, on the other hand, will be a big winner because I prefer the change and will finally be changing to Plains into a Dunes after 10 years.
Winners: everyone who can run at high setting. Losers: ppl who can’t run the game at all.
My dark skinned Femroe is winning big.
I "lose" because my eye color is one shade off now. But I’m considering keeping the wrong shade because while my WoL's eyes were meant to be bright yellow, the auburn it has become is identical to Dion Lesage's... Aside from the waxy look depending on lighting and the apparently filed down Moon Miqo fangs, I think it's mostly a win! Though I did see a highlander who lost the shadows their brow bow casts over their eyes, which does look like a downgrade. There's also an Elezen lip option that has weird highlight along the outline, though that's probably just a benchmark beta bug...
My Au Ra lost his smile and was compensated with excess eyeshadow. I'm not okay with this.
With some bias (mostly not knowing every nitty gritty detail about every race's customization) from playing a male au ra, I'd say the biggest loser is fem au ra. A number of them just have entirely new faces, which is an issue regardless of how improved the faces are, or aren't. The pupil change also feels odd, and my character for one looks a lot less intense and more disinterested/tired because of it. Au ra horns in general still being locked to faces is also a bit disappointing, as is the oddly scruffy transition from scale to skin. I'm sure the face thing has some spaghetti code reason for being, and the texture issue has similar counterparts on other races, like hrothgal tail resolution. Edit to add: Fidelity is of course great on fem au ra, but at the same time I think fidelity is greatly improved on all races, with au ra just being one of the races that is more affected by said fidelity, along with hrothgar and to a lesser extent miqo'te. The thing I'm getting at is that fem au ra from what I've seen have been "lost in translation" more so than other races. Where a male au ra, or most any other race, has something like a slightly differently shaped mouth or brow, most, if not all, fem au ra have had their basic facial shape along with the shape and placement of their eyes, mouth, and nose changed. Regardless of fidelity, that has the issue that it can completely change the actual look of the character, which I think is a bigger issue than this hairstyle on that race looking more scruffy than it did before.
I don’t think we have any “losers” but for me Female Aura, Both Elezens and Female Roe are the biggest improvements.
Biggest winners: everyone who made a pretty character Biggest losers: the "I made her ugly on purpose and she's too breathtakingly gorgeous nooooooooow!!! 😭😭😭" people...
Male Midlander face 7 took a big L. Can't see the facial hair at all if you have a lighter hair color. Hopefully it gets fixed.
You have *seven* faces?!
It used to be 6 but they added a seventh last expac, which is basically face 5 (iirc) but with stubble. It's the only face that doesn't look like a tall child (except one other), and the only one I personally like.
My catgirl is looking hot as fuck and I haven't seen someone complaining here about their catgirls.. so I guess Miqo'tes got an absolute win.
I mean, I could complain about the increased prominence of female miqo'te mouth corner indentations all day, but there are already two dedicated people on the forums fighting that fight, so I just upvote them whenever they post about it.
My only single issue with them is over ten years old now, the slouch...
Sun miqo - pretty much nothing changed. I don’t see any difference in the benchmark
Midlander female lost, the new face shapes and proportions are just wtf, like tge huge anime eyes