For many Final Fantasy 14 players testing the Dawntrail Benchmark, their Warriors of Lights may have looked unusual. Now, in an update penned by director Naoki Yoshida, known as Yoshi-P to the fanbase, the FFXIV team has acknowledged that there are issues bringing down Benchmark characters' quality.
As explained in the official Lodestone post, the first of the issues has to do with the character creator itself, which Yoshi-P explains is so far out of date that it’s most likely entirely altering how certain features appear to players.
“The character creation system was created over ten years ago, based on the release version of A Realm Reborn,” Yoshida explains. “Although it used the same processes as the actual game, certain aspects (such as weather) were combined to create special conditions exclusive to character creation.”
He later continues, “The character creation environment should have been updated, but was overlooked as we prioritized the development of Dawntrail and tuning the graphical update in the actual game, for which I would like to apologize.
“We are currently expediting a rework of the environments and light sources of character creation for both the actual game and the benchmark; once that is complete, the current benchmark will be replaced.”
The issues outlined for this particular issue are as follows:
- “Lifeless” eyes due to a lack of highlights in the pupils
- Facial contours appearing flattened due to incorrect lighting conditions caused by backlighting
- A lack of gloss or excessive appearance of gloss due to character creation-exclusive weather conditions (i.e. the use of thunderclouds)
The facial contours were a major complaint from many players. And even with the improvements to skin lighting, especially to darker skin, the gloss was certainly one of the more unusual visual points in the character creator.
The other set of frustrations explained in this update had to do with “issues related to certain data and processes.” In short, because the amount of data used to process characters and textures is being changed at such a massive scale, it sounds like some calculations are getting thrown off.
In this case, these problems manifest in the Benchmark as:
- An issue with unimplemented high-resolution textures, including those for certain playable races.
- An issue pertaining to special data processes.
- An issue with necklines for playable races under certain circumstances.
- An issue with uncorrected scaling for the mouth of certain playable races.
As explained in the letter, the Benchmark will be replaced to reflect the changes from both sets of issues as much as the team can manage. It’ll all be finalized in 7.0, which is thankfully two and a half months from now, which is both a lot of time and also a tight squeeze for a development team.
Character creation is such an important part of the game to many FFXIV players, and players can only hope that the update is taken with the care that players have for their Warriors of Light.
If you still wanna get a glimpse at the update while the changes are made, it’s available for free on the official FFXIV site. Or, if you’re just trying to kill time before the benchmark update and Dawntrail’s release in two and a half months, we’ve got a checklist of the most important things to do to catch up. 0
Also, since everyone on Twitter's doing it: Hey, at least my catgirl still looks great. Look at her:
Also, the Edenmorn outfit's crystals look great in this new update. That's all. Please do show/complain about/admire how your characters turned out below, since we have image embedding here.
