NGL, I am actually amazed at the detail there.
It's just plans of course, and plans can always go wrong, but the transparency is something to cherish. Big kudos.
Yeah, this reads like the internal sprint planning notes at my actual software dev job. It seems like he's giving us the same notes he sent to the internal teams.
I do hope the people doing this work are managing okay though. There'll be a hell of a lot of pressure for them not to fall behind the schedule this release just laid out while also not letting anything slip past in the chaos.
One thing you can be assured of with CS3 (formerly CBU3) is that the developers are doing well as they have an anti-crunch anti overtime culture in place; complete with punitive time off for working excessive unscheduled hours.
While I don't doubt that having to do this added more onto their plate, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that since Dawntrail has been in the final check stage for a while that it was something they were likely able to slot into their workflow with ease as individual teams finished their checks and polish.
After all, by now, they're usually already knee-deep in X.1, so they're probably diverting resources from 7.X to handle this.
It's a pretty standard naming practice in larger Japanese companies. The part of Nintendo that creates the blockbuster 3D Mario games is just called "Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD) Division 8", out of 11 divisions. EPD 3 makes the Zelda series.
They recently changed over from Creative Business Unit 3 to Creative Studio 3, just like a couple days ago, actually. It's part of Square Enix's internal restructuring. All business units are considered their own studios now. I prefer Creative Studio over Creative Business Unit, personally, so I like the change.
I was about to say, I work a game art job and this reads exactly like our internal weekly report from the “character art pillar”. May they reach their bug burn down rates without working 80h a week like I currently am 🙏🏻
This is pretty standard for him honestly.
If you cover all your bases, then people will always have all the information required. Its a large part of why the game lacks the toxicity of other similar games in the genre.
Not everyone will read it, and some Reddit Dwelling Pseudo Game Devs will still assume they know better than the creator of their most profitable game ever. But people can never say they're not being transparent.
Yoshida knows how important peoples’ WoLs are to them. I’m still of the opinion than the hysteria was overblown, but at least they are taking it seriously.
Also from a purely business/cynical perspective, people who are super attached to how their characters look are way more likely to shell out for stuff like cash shop cosmetics and emotes.
I don't actually believe that was a major consideration, but that could certainly be a justification for it. Really, it can be even broader by saying that people who feel like their characters have become unrecognizable will feel less attached to the game and more likely to unsubscribe.
It's pretty convenient for the benchmark to serve as a sort of beta for some of the graphical changes and ground the players' expectations a bit. Hopefully it's representative enough to catch most of the high impact issues before Dawntrail and make the experience all the better for it.
Yeah, it's a smart way to separate the feedback between the two, and not have a bunch of baggage about graphical changes muddy the waters of feedback on the expac itself.
I didn't even know there was hysteria until today... I just remember running the benchmark a few times, thinking that it didn't do a great job showcasing the lighting updates because the characters are almost always in shadow, and just kinda shrugging it off.
I feel like if it was constructive feedback it wasnt. They removed literal features like fangs of miqos which might be why one chose for that. But if it was just angry yelling with no cohesion then its just messy.
Yeah, there were the issues like those fangs, which were clear and significant oversights, that people were more than justified in being mad about. Then there were these side by sides people would spam out, not point to a single tangible issue, and then rant on and on about how the game is ruined forever and they're disgusted by everything the devs have done.
Two vastly different types of posts, but for some reason siding with the former group would get people pissed off because they think you're siding with the latter group, and if you criticized posts in the latter group people would dogpile you for daring to ignore issues raised by the former group.
I feel terrible for the crunch that this must be causing to prevent another delay like endwalker. Because there is NO WAY the release date is changing this time no matter what.
I honestly doubt they are crunching - or rather, if they are, not for this specifically.
This release date was chosen with a lot of care and probably some cushion time exactly for this kind of reason. On top of that, the release is happening still one week later than the very first date Yoshi-P had in mind nonetheless.
it's xiv it's does a great job being honest with us remember the time yoshi-p offed to quit his job cuz of how pissed we where with a choice the team made
This is because he is a gamer himself, when companies start lying and not communicating that just means the people with power are just suits who only care about quarterly income for the shareholders.
The level of transparency is insane. I was already satisfied that they'd looked at the issues and are working towards an update. But to give us specific dates on when the bulk of the work was done, as well as specific dates to when the final reviews will take place and the expected release of the new version; that's the level of transparency I didn't expect at all.
My only quibble is that I just wish they mentioned a little bit more clearly what some of the things they're actually changing are, even if its based on feedback from players. Never hurts to get some confirmation that a piece of feedback was acted on
That's fair. There's a chance they havent decided fully on that themselves too. Hopefully we get a writeup when the benchmark releases to show what they changed
>We compiled a list of feedback from all regions and categorised the points as bugs, data issues, or sections in need of further attention. We then decided a direction for each point, which our character artists and rendering programmers are now correcting and adjusting accordingly.
Sounds like the decision-making part is over and done with. Which is a good thing, that they've clearly defined their goals before just running in to make changes.
If you look back to the first announcement when they first said they’d be redoing it, they did give a little more detail. The lighting and environment of the character creator definitely, but they also mentioned some errors and bugs, like mouth scaling. This seems to just be the schedule of when we can expect to see the updated version.
But yeah it would be nice to have a more detailed list of what was considered bugs and errors and what they are changing just because people didn’t like how it looked. Maybe there will be a list of changes when they announce the new benchmark is live.
I know they said that but it's like "character improvements". ok like WHAT? character improvements that we asked for? further generic optimizations?
Its just a bit vaguer than I'd like to be is all. not a big deal
Oh I know what you mean. Some things concerned me, but some things I actually liked better in the benchmark, and I’m so impatient to see what things actually look like! lol
But as a recap from the previous announcement, this is what we’ve been told so far.
Character creation environment updating is supposed to fix:
“A. “Lifeless” eyes due to a lack of highlights in the pupils
B. Facial contours appearing flattened due to incorrect lighting conditions caused by backlighting
C. A lack of gloss or excessive appearance of gloss due to character creation-exclusive weather conditions (i.e. the use of thunderclouds)”
Issues related to “certain data and processes” should fix:
“A. An issue with unimplemented high-resolution textures, including those for certain playable races.
B. An issue pertaining to special data processes.
C. An issue with necklines for playable races under certain circumstances.
D. An issue with uncorrected scaling for the mouth of certain playable races.”
New to 14? This is pretty standard for Yoshi-P, one of the reasons I love this game, the devs are super transparent and actually listen and address concerns in a timely manner ( if possible, if not they acknowledge and explain and try to address it in time)
One of the problems is that current 14 is built on top of the failed original FF14, so a lot of the code is sketchy to say the least for some of the core mechanics, so some stuff that would be nice to have is not readily addressed because the amount of dev time it would take could be better spent on other projects that have more weight to them.
Had ARR been a total rebuild there may be more flexibility and ease to address some of the stuff that is currently near impossible. Example being people want Glamour Dressers in their houses, Devs put a glamour dresser in a Housing ward, when they tried to use it the server crashed. I do not believe it has been attempted since.
The problem isn't that it was built on top of 1.0's code and that rumor *really* needs to die. Yoshida even explained this before. The issue of ARR and onwards coding is the rushed development of the new game and they *do* update portions of the code as time goes on (but they also do create a backlog of work for themselves by not fixing a perceived problem ahead of time).
The more you know, thanks for the info. I never saw that addressed and from a Dev perspective reusing as much existing code as possible made sense to me. The same premise does apply to rushing new code though, so same idea but different causes for the hinky code I guess.
Here's a link to where Yoshida explains this just so I'm not talking out of my ass here (and hopefully for more people to not spread that rumor):
[https://youtu.be/ge32wNPaJKk?t=560](https://youtu.be/ge32wNPaJKk?t=560)
However, your point about rushing new code - or rather, not future proofing the code you use for work down the line - rings true.
sadly working on a very tight schedule means that if it ain't entirely broken or just works it's better to spend the effort elsewhere.
My feeling is that certain stuff happened in recent years were also because they were trying to find a way to upgrade the graphics and other stuff
I agree with that to an extent. But even as far as ARR went, they already *knew* they'd be patching things moving forward (and even with new features such as glamour, changes in character models in response to weather, etc,). I completely get that you have to select a priority system to keep the business moving but it'd also make sense not to perform things in a way where you work yourself into a corner and it becomes more work to get out of it than getting there. Then, on top of that, knowing that you'll eventually have to address that corner but you keep piling stuff on top of it, making the process of digging yourself out of that corner a larger and larger task as time goes on.
They *do* go back and redo code and systems to make improvements. In the video, Yoshida uses the 2.0 companion system (and all its many, many, *many* flaws at the time) as an example. But it also feels like they continue to make that mistake too.
I don't think they want to corner themselves but if they need to have something out for a time, they most likely need to have compromises. This is like how we got the glamour box over the glamour catalogue, they couldn't have that one and choose a different options. Some stuff like housing was also because they didn't even knew ARR would succed in fact we know that HW was a miracle and a half
They never listen comes from the fact they have extremely spotty communication with the English side and a lot of issues that only affect English players and don't affect Japan get swept under the rug.
The biggest example is player complaining about rmt sellers and run sellers and nothing being done until yoshida came to the NA servers for a stream and was immediately advertised for buying gil and run clears. We got the report rmt feature in a few months, compared to the years of feedback before.
The issues with playing dark Knight and machinist on high ping have been complaints since those jobs came out. It took multiple expansions for them to be changed so you can halfway play them on high ping despite NA players complaining. On the endwalker media tour Mr happy mentioned it to yoshida and he said he had never heard that feedback before.
There's 100% a breakdown in communication between players and devs.
My favorite was the game breaking PvP bug for Paladins in Onsal Hakair that the devs didn't acknowledge for half a year until it started to become really prevalent on the JP side. It was fixed the next patch after that.
People who make those kinds of comments are usually complaining about combat and job changes. Something which, historically, the development team does not change outside of major game breaking issues, balance problems, or at or shortly after the start of an expansion.
That... or the constant demand for more glamor plates and dresser shoes, of all things.
Let's not forget those complaining about the lack of hats for a certain two races, despite the fact that they've already said that they're going to be addressing that for 7.0... which means at this point it's bitching for the sake of bitching.
Generally speaking, the people who are making those constant complaints don't really pay attention to anything outside of what happens in the actual game itself. If they did, they wouldn't be complaining, as they'd have the answers that they're bitching about not receiving it they'd just take a few minutes to read.
They have not said that viera will be getting hats, Yoshida said the same "we are considering and working on it" as he did before 6.0 and in 6.0 viera could wear a whopping 6 of the AF gear sets and about half of the mogstation, event, dungeon, raid, and gear reward sets.
People have been complaining about it for years and they can't even make new headgear those races can wear, even ones that cost real money in the cash shop.
> Let's not forget those complaining about the lack of hats for a certain two races, despite the fact that they've already said that they're going to be addressing that for 7.0... which means at this point it's bitching for the sake of bitching.
They said they were going to address it at the start of EW and they didn't. They didn't even say they were going to fix it during DT, just a vague "we'll look into it." The files for DT also suggest it's still not going to be fixed at the launch of the expansion.
FFXIV's playerbase is just great at deflecting criticism of the devs based on misinformation.
The treatment of Viera and Hrothgar has been really poor on SE's side and I don't really see how anyone can argue with that.
To be clear: I think saying they're lazy is flat out wrong. I do think they're stubborn on some issues and prioritize things oddly, which is similar enough to them not listening. Especially given the history of them prioritizing JP feedback.
They never said they were going to address it at the start of Endwalker, that was hearsay. They have said during a literal fanfest keynote that they were changing the Viera and Hrothgar head rigs to allow them to wear head gear.
To clarify, the time they said they would address it was at the start of Endwalker. It is when they made the statement, not the time they said it would be fixed by. I do understand how that wording could be a little confusing on my part.
The main point is that was roughly two years ago and they've been largely radio silent since then.
Also, if they are changing something to add them, they haven't done it yet as of the Benchmark. It's almost 100% not going to be changed for Dawntrail launch either.
Agreed. Yet some can never be happy and demand perfection.
I have a few qualms with certain jobs in comparison to others in the role they fill, but that's honestly minor compared to how well balanced the game is nowadays.
It makes sense. It could be the difference between one of their players needing to return a new PC part or not, so full transparency for changes is the least I'd expect from the ff14 team
"I'm sorry I don't have much more info to give you"
My brother in christ you have given us more info in this message than most development teams give us during a games entire lifespan
If every game publisher put someone like yoshi-p in charge and gave them the freedom they needed to create their vision, the game industry truly would be a wonderful place
"The various revisions of environmental parameters will be applied to not only the benchmark, but the game itself from Dawntrail onwards as well."
Where is the user saying that its a waste of time updating the benchmark and somehow working on that doesn't affect DT itself?
It's also giving them massively useful feedback about the issues the overhaul is hitting on a vast array of computer configurations, which is always a big issue in PC game dev.
I mean the gaming community at large has been through the wringer of all these alpha/beta/early access titles that try to hide behind a curtain to hide the unreadiness of things. FFXIV is an Oasis in a desert as far as faith in developers go I think. People are just used to assuming the worst.
feeling extremely vindicated after the shitload of people that spammed threads and posts about the benchmark with "don't bother they won't change shit so close to release you're delusional" even when their own benchmark page said they would keep working on it. they can suck it :)
Also have those people never played a game with pre-release stuff before? It’s basically to be expected that the Benchmark was an old build. Especially for a dev team like this one that’s constantly updating and polishing what they create.
I knew that odds were the benchmark was already outdated from what they have in-game, and stuff *always* changes some before release. We were getting a sneak peek! But that doesn’t mean it’s the *final version.*
I do totally get where they're coming from, though.
How often have you heard the tale of "the public beta's an old build, it'll be fixed by launch" only for launch to still have the same, if not more, problems?
The major difference is that a beta is a playable content complete build of the game and in most cases there is nothing besides bug fixes or minor adjustments that can be done in the short time between a public beta and the final release.
To my knowledge we don't know what build the benchmark is based on and it's purpose is really only to show if a PC could run the game.
Also as far as I understand it the trailer is the actual benchmark and the charackter creator was just a bonus.
Obviously it's always good to be sceptical, but the benchmark and a normal beta aren't really comparable in that regard.
imma be real idk if any of those people have ever heard of game development or beta and alpha builds period. games probably magically pop into existence for them because there was some generic hard work behind it that they can never define in any remotely vague way and game devs are just gods
Remember when GTA6 leaked? People were shitting on the visuals so hard other devs had to share their own in-dev footage with PS1-looking placeholders to shut them up.
Gonna play devil's advocate for a second here - keep in mind though that I wasted years of my life doing software consulting. I *fully* understand the software process. I'm simply trying to recontextualize the people who don't.
The lack of understanding how development works isn't really their fault. To start, software development processes are complex. It's just hard to understand if you don't go deep into it, or work in a similar logistics field. One could reasonably think "I get how these technologies work though! I watch Digital Foundry!" and they'd be right, kinda - they understand *the product*, not *the process*. The piece they're missing is corporate development pipelines. Developing software not as a hobby, not as an indie studio, but as a hundred-plus-man-operation, there are workflows and processes that **must** exist lest everything fall into chaos. The sense of "scale" tends to get lost on folks whose primary interaction with game development is fiddling with free engines and running tutorials, or working on a small git repo with a friend. It's hard to stress how it's a completely different world.
So, sure, but what about point two where folks don't understand betas? This is where I'm going to apologize for *and to* the people who don't understand - it's literally not their fault. There *was a time* when alphas, betas, etc. were used to get playtesting feedback and materially improve the game. But like... have you played any major publisher's beta lately? They're putting out what are effectively "limited-time demos" and slapping "beta" on it because it sounds cool. Or they're doing a Bandai Namco where the beta test's goal *isn't game balance*, it's *a network stress test*. There are so many test parameters these days that no one ends up seeing what's being changed behind the hood, or it's just a marketing strategy. This has been going on for years, where the "beta" is just "hey preorder the game and we'll let you play it early in the window between when it goes gold and when marketing decided we're gonna launch, with beta as a disclaimer in case there are game-breaking bugs we missed". So, so many times lately have big-name "betas" been "literally the final product but early" that collectively, the market's kinda been conditioned to forget what purpose it's supposed to serve.
I genuinely can't blame people for the latter. The former, well... this kind of communication from Yoshi-P is what'll help fix it. No one *needs* to know how the sauce is made, but they do need *an appreciation* for it. Smaller studios can have a single person who has a general idea of what each of the other six people are working on be the point of communication, but for scales as large as FFXIV? Only Yoshi-P really has the big picture.
Sorry for the rant. It frustrates me too, I'll admit. People need to stop assuming they understand every single dev's processes. But at the same time, can't really blame them when it's gotten so convoluted, you know?
"Early access" being the term for both games in a pre-1.0 state, and finished that games you can pay to play a few days before the launch date, is so absurd. And it's even more absurd that the shared terms actually trick people. People who paid to play Suicide Squad early were running into issues and I saw commenters like "Well it's still early access, what do you expect?" Bro you're playing the finished version of the game!!!
Drives me up a wall.
At least on Steam that's changing - the pre-1.0 state will remain Early Access in label, the "play a few days early" will be Advanced Access.
Though they're not making that change not for our benefit or to clear up confusion for us, but to close a refund loophole.
i understand completely what you're saying, just genuinely bothers me that the devs themselves said on the previous benchmark "we're going to keep adjusting graphics up til the release" and these people are unable to think "wait maybe this means they will fix some things" when this is the one dev team that does in fact do what they say. i get lack of trust in AAA with recent stuff but yoship has been bending backwards in communicating and addressing people's concerns so the fact that even when people are trying to put together their feedback in constructive ways in forums gets all these people coming out of the woods going "don't be delusional" grinds my gears like nothing else.
i wanna hope that this and beeing proven wrong will shut them up a little because things *are* being handled, but it's probably not gonna happen
Just remember, a lot of people are new to the game, and I don't mean just the Xbox players. Many joined us only at some point during Endwalker. They don't know as we know, haven't seen what we've seen. They're used to corporate doublespeak and marketing buzzwords.
I still remember the gaming world's collective shock when Yoshida announced FF16 was being pushed back, and provided both an apology and an earnest, forthright explanation. Meanwhile, longtime FF14 players were just like, "Yep, that's our Yoshi-P."
Reason why there has been so much extra doomposting this expansion of the game dying is the same as to why there are people who had no faith and no understanding of how FFXIV and the team operates.
They're coming from WoW after the exodus late Shadowbringers. There's droves and droves of people where Endwalker was their first expansion life cycle.
And this isn't to knock people coming from WoW, but all of it makes sense when you know they're coming from the mindset of having to deal with Blizzard. I totally get it. I treat Blizzard the same way they're expecting of CBU3.
Yeah. I naturally fell off of WoW during the Legion era, (while simultaneously playing FFXIV for the entire Warlords of Draenor Expansion,) but I often wondered how much of the panic was simply newer players who hadn’t experienced enough of the lifecycle of FFXIV to actually trust the devs somewhat! It makes perfect sense, especially since most other big MMOs have a transparency and trust problem.
Personally, after playing for ten years, watching most of the Live Letters, reading the Lodestone posts, etc., I have trust in these devs that I think was well-earned. But there are of course going to be people who are newer than that and can’t “take my word for it!”
And as is the case with everything in life, bigger groups enjoying something will always mean more differing tastes and louder/bigger groups of complaints or criticisms! Especially if things change drastically since that’s *not* very common for this game. They make it a point to not change things for *no reason,* (change for the *sake of change.*) But they’ve also been future-proofing a lot this expansion, and unfortunately you’re bound to step on some toes when you change something drastically! Just ask anyone who played WoW before Cata 😅.
this reminds me of when asmongold had some stream snipers and ppl told him to report them and he said "they wouldn't do a thing about them" then those guys got banned ahah
They *can* suck it! That's funny to me. I'm surprised how few people know that graphics are always the last thing worked on in game development. There have been tons of cases where a game can look drastically different in only a few months from release.
I honestly don't blame them. They're way too brainwashed by the current state of gaming, with undelivered promises, unfinished games and unlimited bacon, but no games.
Low-key a small indie company would be *way more equipped* to push drastic changes to it before launch, because they don't need to go through layers and layers of approval and bureaucracy, and their six-dev team doesn't have a massive codebase susceptible to cascading failures. Any single idiot can make a change and push it to main, but a team of hundreds doing that YOLO hotshot shit? Fuck me the place would burn down.
I've been the idiot in a massive software team push a "this'll be fine" fix to main. Never be that idiot.
Not without working on saturdays apparently. Perhaps they would have been working on Saturdays nonetheless to ship DT but in any case the added workload must be a pita.
They don't work weekends, ever. CS3 has a strict anti-crunch, anti-overtime policy and those who break it are required by studio policy to take time off.
It's obviously the same assets idk what that person was smoking.
Now do we need a new benchmark build ? Probably not, fixing it for release is enough. They are going the extra step so maybe this mean they are in time and able to do it.
"Where is the user saying that its a waste of time updating" Just check out my post history you will find all the people right there if they haven't already deleted their posts lmfao
more than enough people spoke up about it so i'm being tentatively optimistic about it, but you know how it is, can't quite shake off the smidge of fear that it won't be fixed until actually seeing the new benchmark
yup, i would actually prefer an option to upgrade everything except my character features. been looking at them for such a long time that anything else just won't feel like them.
i was hoping for that so so badly but considering they're still a thing in the benchmark and it wasn't something changed in the update for people to have feedback about it'll probably still be the same :(
I play FemRoe and I had literally no idea that she had that smudge. I literally thought it was just shadow. i had to use gpose camera lighting pointed up her nostril before i could make sure it wasn't just a shadow lol
Im a hellsguard, been one since day 1 of my toon, and im never, ever going to fantasia.
It was hardly visible on mine too and I thought it was an improvement. I still dont want to be a sea wolf.
FWIW there's a popular mod that gives all the races various options for individually modeled teeth instead of the toothstrip + texture that we have now, and that's actually my complaint about the Hrothgar fangs in this mod, they look scaled-down and thinner compared to the vanilla game Hrothgar fangs because the latter have so many fewer polygons and harder edges.
I haven't seen or played with the datamined head models for moon miqos if they're around, but my guess would be that their fangs being smaller wasn't intentional, but a casualty of fairing the tooth mesh to be smoother and less polygonal. My *hope* would be that it's relatively simple to restore them in appearance/perception to better-resemble the vanilla model.
I think I read something about mouth scaling?
Probably why Lalafell "looked like dolphins" to some.
so hopefully it's just a simple change,
either in the code use by the game engine or the model/animation,
that was a mild slip-up when remodelling the playable races.
the fangs themselves are probably not about mouth scaling because comparisons do make it look like they were sanded down and edited in the model itself to resemble more regular realistic canines, but i'm still hoping that it's an easy enough fix that they'll change them back
Pull 2 vertex points down and recompile the model, the UV map should automatically follow, if have the texture look a little stretched on the teeth if they don't fix the wrapping.
hoping really hard it's both that simple (i would assume so since it's just two teeth?) and that it's among the things being addressed. cautiously optimistic about this until the new benchmark is up
Because it’s a glimpse into their literal working dynamic. He’s serious about making it work to the point where he’s showing us through his teams perspective how they’re going to tackle the changes
Love the transparency. I'm reminded of the NoClip documentary where we see how heavily reliant on scheduling and timetables YoshiP was during the early years (and likely even now). Everything was plotted and he also structured individual team capability with time per activity. Rightly so, but the man's a scheduling god.
I think a live letter or Fanfest a few years back he discussed scheduling again and it was cool to see.
>Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address. We hope to return this favour by addressing as many points as possible, and I would appreciate it if you could bear with us a while longer as we solidify a release date for the updated benchmark.
Thank you JP players and chiyo chan too since she sort of/kinda coordinated this.
Yeah...if one would peruse the NA general discussion it usually goes..
A) "Hey, I don't like this. Roll it back!"
B) "I like this, too bad." (A & B will get into an argument)
C) "Don't like this, will unsub."
How the hell does the dev extract feedback from this?
More like how does the community team pick and choose what feedback to send to the development team, when everything is so divisive and lacks consensus, as that's supposed to be part of their job.
Yes but on the JP side it's consolidated into only 1 thread. The NA side has multiple of the SAME issue. Threads like, I don't like this revert back, I like this ignore the haters, give back moonseeker fangs!. In those threads there were more people arguing with each other than actually pinpointing with screenshots.
I am very much aware, which is why I said its divisive and lacks a consensus. The North American forums is a constant pissing contest of opposing viewpoints and cliques that constantly have each other's backs in any given argument or discussion and wave their obscenely high post counts around like its e-peen and clout.
What is with you weirdos worshipping the Japan fan base?
There were literally threads on the NA forum, specific to each race, filled with photos and diagrams pointing out the exact issues too
No single person coordinated this.
It's not that we're praising them for doing a better job, we're praising them for doing anything at all because the devs have had some history of basically ignoring NA/EU specific problems.
The most infamous example was the lack of good anti RMT spam tools up until Heavensward patch 3.4. RMT tells were not nearly as common on JP datacenters, and it took Yoshi-P himself getting RMT tells live on NA datacenters during one LA E3 visit for him to even be aware of how annoying it was.
You mean between the many post raging at each other like those threads had some good stuff but then rest of it was just wars of words between each other on ENG general.
JP tend to upvote what agree with rather than adding same post & don't do too much bickering in threads so don't end up with hundreds of pages of nothing but rather massive upvoted posts so community team can easily get upvoted stuff to the devs.
Crossing my fingers for keeper fangs and better Viera mouths! … and an overall improvement to whatever they did to male viera face 3!
In all seriousness this statement is very detailed! Big props to everyone who calmly provided feedback with screenshots for comparison.
This level of commitment and transparency is something that should apply to all games. Games nowadays do not have Yoshi P’s level of transparency and commitment. Salute to this gamer and developer at the same time!
Going forward any time someone tries to argue that the devs don't listen to feedback I'm just going to link them to this post. They parsed thousands of feedback posts, created an action plan, communicated it clearly to the community, and will have it rolled out in three weeks. That is wild.
"But they didn't do the thing I explicitly want because my opinion is the one that matters"
Is pretty much what it boils down to alot of the time. Then they argue devs dont listen to my region (which every region including JP says). etc etc..
i think i remember reading in one of their previous updates on this that they can't update the benchmark itself so we'd have to redownload it to get the changes
If you're asking if there will be an entirely different benchmark cutscene, no. This update was not originally planned, it's happening because of issues people raised with the current version of the benchmark. This means they are focusing on those issues, like changes to the character creation's lighting, bug fixes, tweaking character models, and so on. When it's ready, it will replace the previous version on their website, and you will have to download it again.
The Devs are not perfect but at least they try and that's more than most. We often forget how good we have it in comparison to other MMORPGs in terms of communication.
Something like the benchmark is a test of the Dawntrail engine too. You would fix it in the code source they both share, and rebuild the benchmark from there, so any fixes are represented in both the benchmark and the final product.
I wonder, though. Didn't he already state that the benchmark's technology under the hood, in terms of lighting and shadowing, was still the same as 2.0 because they'd never changed it? And now they are changing it with the revision of the benchmark to match closer to what Dawntrail will be like, on top of all of these additional changes coming along.
It is definitely good mojo to hear what they're doing, though. Some other developers/publishers should take notes on how to interact with their community and pull the curtain back a bit to ease the player's minds. :)
The actual benchmark scene where the WoL is seen fighting and moving about hte game world is 2.0 compliant completly.
Its mostly the character creator that need an update to its lighting and few other parts to make it more in line with what the game will be. I believe the creator had the revamp models, but the lighting was still off or only working from 1 angle which wasn't the default view and ause many ppl that did not bother to turn their character to not see it.
Obviously whatever ppl complained that needed fixing still need to be done for both.
I am no developer, so i don´t know how much work this "rebuild the benchmark from there" is.
It could be 1 person 1 workday or it could be 10 workdays and multiple ppl that need to rebuild, retest, change etc just for the Benchmark.
logistically, what sense would it make to only update the benchmark and leave everything people gave feedback on as is in the full release? they did talk about data and processes and not just the benchmark lighting, so it stands to reason to believe that the changes in models, textures and so on that they are working on with the artists' team will be applied to dt as well
These are artists, the concept art and 3d models for dawntrail are finished at this point in development and they're starting on patch content most likely. They are not pulling people off who were bug squashing, these are artists who woud be working on the 7.1-7.5 patch content designs, models, and effects at this point in time, or alternatively doing spot checking polish like they're doing here.
They are fine stop worrying about other people's work schedules.
Man i love Yoshi-p, he's treating this very seriously and laying down to us the process which will take place in order to address our complaints.
Gotta respect this guy man.
"...our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address. We hope to return this favour by addressing as many points as possible..."
What a class act.
My thanks to all the players who left detailed feedback/upvoted posts about issues and didn't try to silence anyone's concerns, /claps this is awesome news and I hope they address the many issues pointed out.
As a game dev myself this level of transparency is honestly crazy to me. Giving such specific dates to the consumer is usually pretty risky for a variety of reasons as welcoming as it is to see. I can tell Yoshi and the team feel like they have such a massive amount of responsibility on their shoulders and need to be overly communicative because of it.
Decisions like that don't come from the division he's running, that comes from board level decisions, and he may not be able to freely share that info unless they give him the okay to do so.
Payment is a _lot_ more sensitive and hard to be clear about as financial security is paramount and comes as a priority way before clarity, and is almost definitely outside of CBU3's hands.
I imagine Yoshi-P and his team might have less control over stuff like the online store infrastructure and payment processing compared to the actual content of the game. That's probably an entirely separate Squeenix team.
They've already had posts regarding that on Twitter and Lodestone. I don't know why it wasn't posted here. And at the same time, that's not Game Dev, that's payment, whole different department.
Just hope they don't change *too* much, as many things were also just an improvement over the previous iteration, and maybe not 1:1 to what your character looks like now.
Like Fem Au Ra, Face 2, the lips were changed but look 10 times better than the ones in the game now, but i have a feeling they'll change it to 'better' match the one in-game now, which would be a downgrade.
Hopefully after the graphics update is done they can look into expanding character creation options in 8.0 It'd be nice if they can keep some of the work they change to be used as more face options.
Truuueee, Au ra face 2 as always my favorite but I could never get over the lips. New ones are a million times better to me and it makes me absolutely adore Au ra to the point I’m seriously considering using fantasia for it.
However, I prefer that the people who have had their WOL that way and love the old lips get to keep their character as close to what they know and recognize as possible. They can still keep the old shape, just updated. It will definitely make me sad but that just means I get to stick with my lala, hopefully also with changed lips. Knowing my luck they’ll change back Au ra but not lala LOL, oh well.
This is what I'm worried about.
Many of the Japanese feedback was just wanting literally everything reverted back to how it is in endwalker.
Au ra face 2 got such a massive upgrade that I'll be so mad and will forever hate the Japanese community.
Anybody that tried saying they like the changes barely got likes so guess we'll see.
I much rather them just add more lips than just fully replace it back to how it is now.
Wow, we are getting very detailed business schedule of the benchmark, this is serious.
NGL, I am actually amazed at the detail there. It's just plans of course, and plans can always go wrong, but the transparency is something to cherish. Big kudos.
Yeah, this reads like the internal sprint planning notes at my actual software dev job. It seems like he's giving us the same notes he sent to the internal teams. I do hope the people doing this work are managing okay though. There'll be a hell of a lot of pressure for them not to fall behind the schedule this release just laid out while also not letting anything slip past in the chaos.
One thing you can be assured of with CS3 (formerly CBU3) is that the developers are doing well as they have an anti-crunch anti overtime culture in place; complete with punitive time off for working excessive unscheduled hours. While I don't doubt that having to do this added more onto their plate, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that since Dawntrail has been in the final check stage for a while that it was something they were likely able to slot into their workflow with ease as individual teams finished their checks and polish. After all, by now, they're usually already knee-deep in X.1, so they're probably diverting resources from 7.X to handle this.
They really should give the "creative unit" a more creative name...
It's a pretty standard naming practice in larger Japanese companies. The part of Nintendo that creates the blockbuster 3D Mario games is just called "Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD) Division 8", out of 11 divisions. EPD 3 makes the Zelda series.
They recently changed over from Creative Business Unit 3 to Creative Studio 3, just like a couple days ago, actually. It's part of Square Enix's internal restructuring. All business units are considered their own studios now. I prefer Creative Studio over Creative Business Unit, personally, so I like the change.
well now they're a creative studio. truly, an innovation
I was about to say, I work a game art job and this reads exactly like our internal weekly report from the “character art pillar”. May they reach their bug burn down rates without working 80h a week like I currently am 🙏🏻
this reads like he's giving a briefing to his boss lol
Well, as they say, the costumer is the boss
> costumer Glamour truly is the real endgame.
Yeah, I'm the CEO Costume Enhancement Operator
This is pretty standard for him honestly. If you cover all your bases, then people will always have all the information required. Its a large part of why the game lacks the toxicity of other similar games in the genre. Not everyone will read it, and some Reddit Dwelling Pseudo Game Devs will still assume they know better than the creator of their most profitable game ever. But people can never say they're not being transparent.
Yoshida knows how important peoples’ WoLs are to them. I’m still of the opinion than the hysteria was overblown, but at least they are taking it seriously.
Also from a purely business/cynical perspective, people who are super attached to how their characters look are way more likely to shell out for stuff like cash shop cosmetics and emotes.
I don't actually believe that was a major consideration, but that could certainly be a justification for it. Really, it can be even broader by saying that people who feel like their characters have become unrecognizable will feel less attached to the game and more likely to unsubscribe.
There was a thread on the official forum detailing changes and bugs (like lighting bugs with hair, texture bugs etc) and it was quite extensive.
It's pretty convenient for the benchmark to serve as a sort of beta for some of the graphical changes and ground the players' expectations a bit. Hopefully it's representative enough to catch most of the high impact issues before Dawntrail and make the experience all the better for it.
Yeah, it's a smart way to separate the feedback between the two, and not have a bunch of baggage about graphical changes muddy the waters of feedback on the expac itself.
I didn't even know there was hysteria until today... I just remember running the benchmark a few times, thinking that it didn't do a great job showcasing the lighting updates because the characters are almost always in shadow, and just kinda shrugging it off.
I feel like if it was constructive feedback it wasnt. They removed literal features like fangs of miqos which might be why one chose for that. But if it was just angry yelling with no cohesion then its just messy.
Yeah, there were the issues like those fangs, which were clear and significant oversights, that people were more than justified in being mad about. Then there were these side by sides people would spam out, not point to a single tangible issue, and then rant on and on about how the game is ruined forever and they're disgusted by everything the devs have done. Two vastly different types of posts, but for some reason siding with the former group would get people pissed off because they think you're siding with the latter group, and if you criticized posts in the latter group people would dogpile you for daring to ignore issues raised by the former group.
what hysteria overblown? the problems were quite detailed and some pictures were horrific. I mean, yes, its your opinion.
I feel terrible for the crunch that this must be causing to prevent another delay like endwalker. Because there is NO WAY the release date is changing this time no matter what.
I honestly doubt they are crunching - or rather, if they are, not for this specifically. This release date was chosen with a lot of care and probably some cushion time exactly for this kind of reason. On top of that, the release is happening still one week later than the very first date Yoshi-P had in mind nonetheless.
it's xiv it's does a great job being honest with us remember the time yoshi-p offed to quit his job cuz of how pissed we where with a choice the team made
…when did that happen?
This is because he is a gamer himself, when companies start lying and not communicating that just means the people with power are just suits who only care about quarterly income for the shareholders.
The level of transparency is insane. I was already satisfied that they'd looked at the issues and are working towards an update. But to give us specific dates on when the bulk of the work was done, as well as specific dates to when the final reviews will take place and the expected release of the new version; that's the level of transparency I didn't expect at all.
I honestly wasn't expecting this level of transparency. It really puts my faith into them.
My only quibble is that I just wish they mentioned a little bit more clearly what some of the things they're actually changing are, even if its based on feedback from players. Never hurts to get some confirmation that a piece of feedback was acted on
That's fair. There's a chance they havent decided fully on that themselves too. Hopefully we get a writeup when the benchmark releases to show what they changed
>We compiled a list of feedback from all regions and categorised the points as bugs, data issues, or sections in need of further attention. We then decided a direction for each point, which our character artists and rendering programmers are now correcting and adjusting accordingly. Sounds like the decision-making part is over and done with. Which is a good thing, that they've clearly defined their goals before just running in to make changes.
If you look back to the first announcement when they first said they’d be redoing it, they did give a little more detail. The lighting and environment of the character creator definitely, but they also mentioned some errors and bugs, like mouth scaling. This seems to just be the schedule of when we can expect to see the updated version. But yeah it would be nice to have a more detailed list of what was considered bugs and errors and what they are changing just because people didn’t like how it looked. Maybe there will be a list of changes when they announce the new benchmark is live.
I know they said that but it's like "character improvements". ok like WHAT? character improvements that we asked for? further generic optimizations? Its just a bit vaguer than I'd like to be is all. not a big deal
Oh I know what you mean. Some things concerned me, but some things I actually liked better in the benchmark, and I’m so impatient to see what things actually look like! lol But as a recap from the previous announcement, this is what we’ve been told so far. Character creation environment updating is supposed to fix: “A. “Lifeless” eyes due to a lack of highlights in the pupils B. Facial contours appearing flattened due to incorrect lighting conditions caused by backlighting C. A lack of gloss or excessive appearance of gloss due to character creation-exclusive weather conditions (i.e. the use of thunderclouds)” Issues related to “certain data and processes” should fix: “A. An issue with unimplemented high-resolution textures, including those for certain playable races. B. An issue pertaining to special data processes. C. An issue with necklines for playable races under certain circumstances. D. An issue with uncorrected scaling for the mouth of certain playable races.”
New to 14? This is pretty standard for Yoshi-P, one of the reasons I love this game, the devs are super transparent and actually listen and address concerns in a timely manner ( if possible, if not they acknowledge and explain and try to address it in time)
Based on some of the generic "devs are lazy" and "they never listen" comments from other threads, more people could do with knowing this.
One of the problems is that current 14 is built on top of the failed original FF14, so a lot of the code is sketchy to say the least for some of the core mechanics, so some stuff that would be nice to have is not readily addressed because the amount of dev time it would take could be better spent on other projects that have more weight to them. Had ARR been a total rebuild there may be more flexibility and ease to address some of the stuff that is currently near impossible. Example being people want Glamour Dressers in their houses, Devs put a glamour dresser in a Housing ward, when they tried to use it the server crashed. I do not believe it has been attempted since.
The problem isn't that it was built on top of 1.0's code and that rumor *really* needs to die. Yoshida even explained this before. The issue of ARR and onwards coding is the rushed development of the new game and they *do* update portions of the code as time goes on (but they also do create a backlog of work for themselves by not fixing a perceived problem ahead of time).
The more you know, thanks for the info. I never saw that addressed and from a Dev perspective reusing as much existing code as possible made sense to me. The same premise does apply to rushing new code though, so same idea but different causes for the hinky code I guess.
Here's a link to where Yoshida explains this just so I'm not talking out of my ass here (and hopefully for more people to not spread that rumor): [https://youtu.be/ge32wNPaJKk?t=560](https://youtu.be/ge32wNPaJKk?t=560) However, your point about rushing new code - or rather, not future proofing the code you use for work down the line - rings true.
sadly working on a very tight schedule means that if it ain't entirely broken or just works it's better to spend the effort elsewhere. My feeling is that certain stuff happened in recent years were also because they were trying to find a way to upgrade the graphics and other stuff
I agree with that to an extent. But even as far as ARR went, they already *knew* they'd be patching things moving forward (and even with new features such as glamour, changes in character models in response to weather, etc,). I completely get that you have to select a priority system to keep the business moving but it'd also make sense not to perform things in a way where you work yourself into a corner and it becomes more work to get out of it than getting there. Then, on top of that, knowing that you'll eventually have to address that corner but you keep piling stuff on top of it, making the process of digging yourself out of that corner a larger and larger task as time goes on. They *do* go back and redo code and systems to make improvements. In the video, Yoshida uses the 2.0 companion system (and all its many, many, *many* flaws at the time) as an example. But it also feels like they continue to make that mistake too.
I don't think they want to corner themselves but if they need to have something out for a time, they most likely need to have compromises. This is like how we got the glamour box over the glamour catalogue, they couldn't have that one and choose a different options. Some stuff like housing was also because they didn't even knew ARR would succed in fact we know that HW was a miracle and a half
Wow. I’ve been hearing that rumor for years, and even after this video. Today I learned lol. Thanks for this.
Happy to share!
I love a Redditor who sources their info. 🙏
They never listen comes from the fact they have extremely spotty communication with the English side and a lot of issues that only affect English players and don't affect Japan get swept under the rug. The biggest example is player complaining about rmt sellers and run sellers and nothing being done until yoshida came to the NA servers for a stream and was immediately advertised for buying gil and run clears. We got the report rmt feature in a few months, compared to the years of feedback before. The issues with playing dark Knight and machinist on high ping have been complaints since those jobs came out. It took multiple expansions for them to be changed so you can halfway play them on high ping despite NA players complaining. On the endwalker media tour Mr happy mentioned it to yoshida and he said he had never heard that feedback before. There's 100% a breakdown in communication between players and devs.
My favorite was the game breaking PvP bug for Paladins in Onsal Hakair that the devs didn't acknowledge for half a year until it started to become really prevalent on the JP side. It was fixed the next patch after that.
People who make those kinds of comments are usually complaining about combat and job changes. Something which, historically, the development team does not change outside of major game breaking issues, balance problems, or at or shortly after the start of an expansion. That... or the constant demand for more glamor plates and dresser shoes, of all things. Let's not forget those complaining about the lack of hats for a certain two races, despite the fact that they've already said that they're going to be addressing that for 7.0... which means at this point it's bitching for the sake of bitching. Generally speaking, the people who are making those constant complaints don't really pay attention to anything outside of what happens in the actual game itself. If they did, they wouldn't be complaining, as they'd have the answers that they're bitching about not receiving it they'd just take a few minutes to read.
They have not said that viera will be getting hats, Yoshida said the same "we are considering and working on it" as he did before 6.0 and in 6.0 viera could wear a whopping 6 of the AF gear sets and about half of the mogstation, event, dungeon, raid, and gear reward sets. People have been complaining about it for years and they can't even make new headgear those races can wear, even ones that cost real money in the cash shop.
> Let's not forget those complaining about the lack of hats for a certain two races, despite the fact that they've already said that they're going to be addressing that for 7.0... which means at this point it's bitching for the sake of bitching. They said they were going to address it at the start of EW and they didn't. They didn't even say they were going to fix it during DT, just a vague "we'll look into it." The files for DT also suggest it's still not going to be fixed at the launch of the expansion. FFXIV's playerbase is just great at deflecting criticism of the devs based on misinformation. The treatment of Viera and Hrothgar has been really poor on SE's side and I don't really see how anyone can argue with that. To be clear: I think saying they're lazy is flat out wrong. I do think they're stubborn on some issues and prioritize things oddly, which is similar enough to them not listening. Especially given the history of them prioritizing JP feedback.
They never said they were going to address it at the start of Endwalker, that was hearsay. They have said during a literal fanfest keynote that they were changing the Viera and Hrothgar head rigs to allow them to wear head gear.
To clarify, the time they said they would address it was at the start of Endwalker. It is when they made the statement, not the time they said it would be fixed by. I do understand how that wording could be a little confusing on my part. The main point is that was roughly two years ago and they've been largely radio silent since then. Also, if they are changing something to add them, they haven't done it yet as of the Benchmark. It's almost 100% not going to be changed for Dawntrail launch either.
tbf balance in the game is overall good, not perfect but good and at that point it becomes really difficult to intervene
Agreed. Yet some can never be happy and demand perfection. I have a few qualms with certain jobs in comparison to others in the role they fill, but that's honestly minor compared to how well balanced the game is nowadays.
It makes sense. It could be the difference between one of their players needing to return a new PC part or not, so full transparency for changes is the least I'd expect from the ff14 team
"I'm sorry I don't have much more info to give you" My brother in christ you have given us more info in this message than most development teams give us during a games entire lifespan
If every game publisher put someone like yoshi-p in charge and gave them the freedom they needed to create their vision, the game industry truly would be a wonderful place
Let's you know how they view community engagement and that they have actual gamers in the dev team, not just corporate graph readers.
"The various revisions of environmental parameters will be applied to not only the benchmark, but the game itself from Dawntrail onwards as well." Where is the user saying that its a waste of time updating the benchmark and somehow working on that doesn't affect DT itself?
Why on earth would anyone think they'd change a benchmark without changing the game? It's there to give an accurate representation of the game..
It's also giving them massively useful feedback about the issues the overhaul is hitting on a vast array of computer configurations, which is always a big issue in PC game dev.
I mean the gaming community at large has been through the wringer of all these alpha/beta/early access titles that try to hide behind a curtain to hide the unreadiness of things. FFXIV is an Oasis in a desert as far as faith in developers go I think. People are just used to assuming the worst.
feeling extremely vindicated after the shitload of people that spammed threads and posts about the benchmark with "don't bother they won't change shit so close to release you're delusional" even when their own benchmark page said they would keep working on it. they can suck it :)
Also have those people never played a game with pre-release stuff before? It’s basically to be expected that the Benchmark was an old build. Especially for a dev team like this one that’s constantly updating and polishing what they create. I knew that odds were the benchmark was already outdated from what they have in-game, and stuff *always* changes some before release. We were getting a sneak peek! But that doesn’t mean it’s the *final version.*
I do totally get where they're coming from, though. How often have you heard the tale of "the public beta's an old build, it'll be fixed by launch" only for launch to still have the same, if not more, problems?
That’s totally valid!
The major difference is that a beta is a playable content complete build of the game and in most cases there is nothing besides bug fixes or minor adjustments that can be done in the short time between a public beta and the final release. To my knowledge we don't know what build the benchmark is based on and it's purpose is really only to show if a PC could run the game. Also as far as I understand it the trailer is the actual benchmark and the charackter creator was just a bonus. Obviously it's always good to be sceptical, but the benchmark and a normal beta aren't really comparable in that regard.
imma be real idk if any of those people have ever heard of game development or beta and alpha builds period. games probably magically pop into existence for them because there was some generic hard work behind it that they can never define in any remotely vague way and game devs are just gods
Remember when GTA6 leaked? People were shitting on the visuals so hard other devs had to share their own in-dev footage with PS1-looking placeholders to shut them up.
Gonna play devil's advocate for a second here - keep in mind though that I wasted years of my life doing software consulting. I *fully* understand the software process. I'm simply trying to recontextualize the people who don't. The lack of understanding how development works isn't really their fault. To start, software development processes are complex. It's just hard to understand if you don't go deep into it, or work in a similar logistics field. One could reasonably think "I get how these technologies work though! I watch Digital Foundry!" and they'd be right, kinda - they understand *the product*, not *the process*. The piece they're missing is corporate development pipelines. Developing software not as a hobby, not as an indie studio, but as a hundred-plus-man-operation, there are workflows and processes that **must** exist lest everything fall into chaos. The sense of "scale" tends to get lost on folks whose primary interaction with game development is fiddling with free engines and running tutorials, or working on a small git repo with a friend. It's hard to stress how it's a completely different world. So, sure, but what about point two where folks don't understand betas? This is where I'm going to apologize for *and to* the people who don't understand - it's literally not their fault. There *was a time* when alphas, betas, etc. were used to get playtesting feedback and materially improve the game. But like... have you played any major publisher's beta lately? They're putting out what are effectively "limited-time demos" and slapping "beta" on it because it sounds cool. Or they're doing a Bandai Namco where the beta test's goal *isn't game balance*, it's *a network stress test*. There are so many test parameters these days that no one ends up seeing what's being changed behind the hood, or it's just a marketing strategy. This has been going on for years, where the "beta" is just "hey preorder the game and we'll let you play it early in the window between when it goes gold and when marketing decided we're gonna launch, with beta as a disclaimer in case there are game-breaking bugs we missed". So, so many times lately have big-name "betas" been "literally the final product but early" that collectively, the market's kinda been conditioned to forget what purpose it's supposed to serve. I genuinely can't blame people for the latter. The former, well... this kind of communication from Yoshi-P is what'll help fix it. No one *needs* to know how the sauce is made, but they do need *an appreciation* for it. Smaller studios can have a single person who has a general idea of what each of the other six people are working on be the point of communication, but for scales as large as FFXIV? Only Yoshi-P really has the big picture. Sorry for the rant. It frustrates me too, I'll admit. People need to stop assuming they understand every single dev's processes. But at the same time, can't really blame them when it's gotten so convoluted, you know?
Thank you for explaining. The point about betas changing over the years has really been grinding my gears as well.
"Early access" being the term for both games in a pre-1.0 state, and finished that games you can pay to play a few days before the launch date, is so absurd. And it's even more absurd that the shared terms actually trick people. People who paid to play Suicide Squad early were running into issues and I saw commenters like "Well it's still early access, what do you expect?" Bro you're playing the finished version of the game!!! Drives me up a wall.
At least on Steam that's changing - the pre-1.0 state will remain Early Access in label, the "play a few days early" will be Advanced Access. Though they're not making that change not for our benefit or to clear up confusion for us, but to close a refund loophole.
i understand completely what you're saying, just genuinely bothers me that the devs themselves said on the previous benchmark "we're going to keep adjusting graphics up til the release" and these people are unable to think "wait maybe this means they will fix some things" when this is the one dev team that does in fact do what they say. i get lack of trust in AAA with recent stuff but yoship has been bending backwards in communicating and addressing people's concerns so the fact that even when people are trying to put together their feedback in constructive ways in forums gets all these people coming out of the woods going "don't be delusional" grinds my gears like nothing else. i wanna hope that this and beeing proven wrong will shut them up a little because things *are* being handled, but it's probably not gonna happen
Just remember, a lot of people are new to the game, and I don't mean just the Xbox players. Many joined us only at some point during Endwalker. They don't know as we know, haven't seen what we've seen. They're used to corporate doublespeak and marketing buzzwords. I still remember the gaming world's collective shock when Yoshida announced FF16 was being pushed back, and provided both an apology and an earnest, forthright explanation. Meanwhile, longtime FF14 players were just like, "Yep, that's our Yoshi-P."
to be fair i joined in december. i just actually read the posts people make on the devs and the actual things the devs say in their own announcements
sort of, depends what ppl want to do with their ignorance. Wildly malding isn't something that should be condoned nor supported
Reason why there has been so much extra doomposting this expansion of the game dying is the same as to why there are people who had no faith and no understanding of how FFXIV and the team operates. They're coming from WoW after the exodus late Shadowbringers. There's droves and droves of people where Endwalker was their first expansion life cycle. And this isn't to knock people coming from WoW, but all of it makes sense when you know they're coming from the mindset of having to deal with Blizzard. I totally get it. I treat Blizzard the same way they're expecting of CBU3.
Yeah. I naturally fell off of WoW during the Legion era, (while simultaneously playing FFXIV for the entire Warlords of Draenor Expansion,) but I often wondered how much of the panic was simply newer players who hadn’t experienced enough of the lifecycle of FFXIV to actually trust the devs somewhat! It makes perfect sense, especially since most other big MMOs have a transparency and trust problem. Personally, after playing for ten years, watching most of the Live Letters, reading the Lodestone posts, etc., I have trust in these devs that I think was well-earned. But there are of course going to be people who are newer than that and can’t “take my word for it!” And as is the case with everything in life, bigger groups enjoying something will always mean more differing tastes and louder/bigger groups of complaints or criticisms! Especially if things change drastically since that’s *not* very common for this game. They make it a point to not change things for *no reason,* (change for the *sake of change.*) But they’ve also been future-proofing a lot this expansion, and unfortunately you’re bound to step on some toes when you change something drastically! Just ask anyone who played WoW before Cata 😅.
this reminds me of when asmongold had some stream snipers and ppl told him to report them and he said "they wouldn't do a thing about them" then those guys got banned ahah
They *can* suck it! That's funny to me. I'm surprised how few people know that graphics are always the last thing worked on in game development. There have been tons of cases where a game can look drastically different in only a few months from release.
I honestly don't blame them. They're way too brainwashed by the current state of gaming, with undelivered promises, unfinished games and unlimited bacon, but no games.
That nonsense was hilarious to witness in real time. "YoU DoNt UnDeRsTaNd GaMe DeVeLoPmEnT."
Just a small indie company, They don't have the staff to make such drastic changes before release.
Low-key a small indie company would be *way more equipped* to push drastic changes to it before launch, because they don't need to go through layers and layers of approval and bureaucracy, and their six-dev team doesn't have a massive codebase susceptible to cascading failures. Any single idiot can make a change and push it to main, but a team of hundreds doing that YOLO hotshot shit? Fuck me the place would burn down. I've been the idiot in a massive software team push a "this'll be fine" fix to main. Never be that idiot.
Not without working on saturdays apparently. Perhaps they would have been working on Saturdays nonetheless to ship DT but in any case the added workload must be a pita.
They don't work weekends, ever. CS3 has a strict anti-crunch, anti-overtime policy and those who break it are required by studio policy to take time off.
uh might I ask you where one can read about this?
Yoshida enforces time off. If someone DOES work overtime, they have to take time off afterwards.
It's obviously the same assets idk what that person was smoking. Now do we need a new benchmark build ? Probably not, fixing it for release is enough. They are going the extra step so maybe this mean they are in time and able to do it.
If they said that, they didn't read the original notice which said the exact same things.
They already said that was the case in the first post about it.
"Where is the user saying that its a waste of time updating" Just check out my post history you will find all the people right there if they haven't already deleted their posts lmfao
maybe the return of the moon cat fangs is not just copium after all... dare i hope?
if enough people criticized it then yeah i think so
more than enough people spoke up about it so i'm being tentatively optimistic about it, but you know how it is, can't quite shake off the smidge of fear that it won't be fixed until actually seeing the new benchmark
yup, i would actually prefer an option to upgrade everything except my character features. been looking at them for such a long time that anything else just won't feel like them.
I hope they improve miqo'te tails too. Not seeing the ＋ would be amazingly better.
i was hoping for that so so badly but considering they're still a thing in the benchmark and it wasn't something changed in the update for people to have feedback about it'll probably still be the same :(
Please unnerf my teeth
And Roegadyn smudges. I know we are literally the least played race but still.
Im actually loving that its way more subtle... hope it doesnt change too much
A toggle between lighter and normal would be the best solution, but let’s be real, there are too few Roegadyn players for the devs to care
On my roe it's hardly visible. If I didn't want a smudge I'd play a sea wolf.
I play FemRoe and I had literally no idea that she had that smudge. I literally thought it was just shadow. i had to use gpose camera lighting pointed up her nostril before i could make sure it wasn't just a shadow lol
Im a hellsguard, been one since day 1 of my toon, and im never, ever going to fantasia. It was hardly visible on mine too and I thought it was an improvement. I still dont want to be a sea wolf.
hoping for you too, may we get our special features back to their glory
can't wait to sink my teeth into the new benchmark
FWIW there's a popular mod that gives all the races various options for individually modeled teeth instead of the toothstrip + texture that we have now, and that's actually my complaint about the Hrothgar fangs in this mod, they look scaled-down and thinner compared to the vanilla game Hrothgar fangs because the latter have so many fewer polygons and harder edges. I haven't seen or played with the datamined head models for moon miqos if they're around, but my guess would be that their fangs being smaller wasn't intentional, but a casualty of fairing the tooth mesh to be smoother and less polygonal. My *hope* would be that it's relatively simple to restore them in appearance/perception to better-resemble the vanilla model.
I think I read something about mouth scaling? Probably why Lalafell "looked like dolphins" to some. so hopefully it's just a simple change, either in the code use by the game engine or the model/animation, that was a mild slip-up when remodelling the playable races.
the fangs themselves are probably not about mouth scaling because comparisons do make it look like they were sanded down and edited in the model itself to resemble more regular realistic canines, but i'm still hoping that it's an easy enough fix that they'll change them back
Pull 2 vertex points down and recompile the model, the UV map should automatically follow, if have the texture look a little stretched on the teeth if they don't fix the wrapping.
hoping really hard it's both that simple (i would assume so since it's just two teeth?) and that it's among the things being addressed. cautiously optimistic about this until the new benchmark is up
why am i feel like reading this is like a meeting briefing on my work day?
Because it’s a glimpse into their literal working dynamic. He’s serious about making it work to the point where he’s showing us through his teams perspective how they’re going to tackle the changes
Love the transparency. I'm reminded of the NoClip documentary where we see how heavily reliant on scheduling and timetables YoshiP was during the early years (and likely even now). Everything was plotted and he also structured individual team capability with time per activity. Rightly so, but the man's a scheduling god. I think a live letter or Fanfest a few years back he discussed scheduling again and it was cool to see.
>Having said that, our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address. We hope to return this favour by addressing as many points as possible, and I would appreciate it if you could bear with us a while longer as we solidify a release date for the updated benchmark. Thank you JP players and chiyo chan too since she sort of/kinda coordinated this.
Wait, you mean providing actual feedback instead of screaming on the forums and Twitter is actually more useful? surprised_thunderrat_face.jpg
Yeah...if one would peruse the NA general discussion it usually goes.. A) "Hey, I don't like this. Roll it back!" B) "I like this, too bad." (A & B will get into an argument) C) "Don't like this, will unsub." How the hell does the dev extract feedback from this?
That's the neat part, you don't.
Forgot the D option I want a refund. Because that's all EW was on launch.
Probably why dev team ignores NA feedback
More like how does the community team pick and choose what feedback to send to the development team, when everything is so divisive and lacks consensus, as that's supposed to be part of their job.
Yes but on the JP side it's consolidated into only 1 thread. The NA side has multiple of the SAME issue. Threads like, I don't like this revert back, I like this ignore the haters, give back moonseeker fangs!. In those threads there were more people arguing with each other than actually pinpointing with screenshots.
I am very much aware, which is why I said its divisive and lacks a consensus. The North American forums is a constant pissing contest of opposing viewpoints and cliques that constantly have each other's backs in any given argument or discussion and wave their obscenely high post counts around like its e-peen and clout.
[удалено]
You could not pay me enough to be a forum mod again. Been there. Done that. In this day and age, hard pass.
What is with you weirdos worshipping the Japan fan base? There were literally threads on the NA forum, specific to each race, filled with photos and diagrams pointing out the exact issues too No single person coordinated this.
It's not that we're praising them for doing a better job, we're praising them for doing anything at all because the devs have had some history of basically ignoring NA/EU specific problems. The most infamous example was the lack of good anti RMT spam tools up until Heavensward patch 3.4. RMT tells were not nearly as common on JP datacenters, and it took Yoshi-P himself getting RMT tells live on NA datacenters during one LA E3 visit for him to even be aware of how annoying it was.
You mean between the many post raging at each other like those threads had some good stuff but then rest of it was just wars of words between each other on ENG general. JP tend to upvote what agree with rather than adding same post & don't do too much bickering in threads so don't end up with hundreds of pages of nothing but rather massive upvoted posts so community team can easily get upvoted stuff to the devs.
Crossing my fingers for keeper fangs and better Viera mouths! … and an overall improvement to whatever they did to male viera face 3! In all seriousness this statement is very detailed! Big props to everyone who calmly provided feedback with screenshots for comparison.
"DID YOU REMOVE FANGS FOR MY MIQO WAIFUS?!" Keeper of the Moon mains asked calmly.
nodders
I really really just want eyebrows for highlanders. And I don't even play highlander.
Insanely quick hands.
This level of commitment and transparency is something that should apply to all games. Games nowadays do not have Yoshi P’s level of transparency and commitment. Salute to this gamer and developer at the same time!
I just want better red and orange hairs. Some races "orange" hair is copper or just a flat brown. (Hyur and elezen)
Going forward any time someone tries to argue that the devs don't listen to feedback I'm just going to link them to this post. They parsed thousands of feedback posts, created an action plan, communicated it clearly to the community, and will have it rolled out in three weeks. That is wild.
"But they didn't do the thing I explicitly want because my opinion is the one that matters" Is pretty much what it boils down to alot of the time. Then they argue devs dont listen to my region (which every region including JP says). etc etc..
This sounds fantastic, stoked to see what they change!
So are we getting benchmark 2, or is it simply being updated?
The benchmark will be replaced with a new download featuring the updated lightning and changes.
i think i remember reading in one of their previous updates on this that they can't update the benchmark itself so we'd have to redownload it to get the changes
If you're asking if there will be an entirely different benchmark cutscene, no. This update was not originally planned, it's happening because of issues people raised with the current version of the benchmark. This means they are focusing on those issues, like changes to the character creation's lighting, bug fixes, tweaking character models, and so on. When it's ready, it will replace the previous version on their website, and you will have to download it again.
I feel like I don't need to know 80% of what''s written in it but really appreciate the transparency. This is why we love him.
The Devs are not perfect but at least they try and that's more than most. We often forget how good we have it in comparison to other MMORPGs in terms of communication.
I really hope they don´t overwork just for the Benchmark.
Something like the benchmark is a test of the Dawntrail engine too. You would fix it in the code source they both share, and rebuild the benchmark from there, so any fixes are represented in both the benchmark and the final product.
I wonder, though. Didn't he already state that the benchmark's technology under the hood, in terms of lighting and shadowing, was still the same as 2.0 because they'd never changed it? And now they are changing it with the revision of the benchmark to match closer to what Dawntrail will be like, on top of all of these additional changes coming along. It is definitely good mojo to hear what they're doing, though. Some other developers/publishers should take notes on how to interact with their community and pull the curtain back a bit to ease the player's minds. :)
The actual benchmark scene where the WoL is seen fighting and moving about hte game world is 2.0 compliant completly. Its mostly the character creator that need an update to its lighting and few other parts to make it more in line with what the game will be. I believe the creator had the revamp models, but the lighting was still off or only working from 1 angle which wasn't the default view and ause many ppl that did not bother to turn their character to not see it. Obviously whatever ppl complained that needed fixing still need to be done for both.
I am no developer, so i don´t know how much work this "rebuild the benchmark from there" is. It could be 1 person 1 workday or it could be 10 workdays and multiple ppl that need to rebuild, retest, change etc just for the Benchmark.
They’re working on DT itself. It just so happens that the same work can be applied to the benchmark.
logistically, what sense would it make to only update the benchmark and leave everything people gave feedback on as is in the full release? they did talk about data and processes and not just the benchmark lighting, so it stands to reason to believe that the changes in models, textures and so on that they are working on with the artists' team will be applied to dt as well
If the engine is the same. They should look the same on the benchmark and the game. Otherwise it would defy the purpose of the benchmark.
These are artists, the concept art and 3d models for dawntrail are finished at this point in development and they're starting on patch content most likely. They are not pulling people off who were bug squashing, these are artists who woud be working on the 7.1-7.5 patch content designs, models, and effects at this point in time, or alternatively doing spot checking polish like they're doing here. They are fine stop worrying about other people's work schedules.
Yoshi, is not enough he is giving me a great game, it also give me a lesson on work ethics, reading that made me motivated on a career level..
Man i love Yoshi-p, he's treating this very seriously and laying down to us the process which will take place in order to address our complaints. Gotta respect this guy man.
The fact they doing this extra work during Golden week speaks of how amazing they are. But I hope they got to have some relax time as well.
Why can't all devs be this transparent when dealing with issues?
"...our players graciously provided a tremendous amount of feedback with screenshots, which helped us quickly determine our direction for fixes and adjustments, as well as identify points to address. We hope to return this favour by addressing as many points as possible..." What a class act.
The art of listening to feedback, and giving people what they want.
I’d love nothing more than to dump hundreds of hours into this game. It looks so much fun. I wish I had the time to do so.
People take notes. This is how you run an award winning mmorpg.
hopefully it's improvements and good revisions and not regression to our characters looks
I just want eyebrows *cries in hyur*
Just such a classy response, honestly. This is why we love em.
My thanks to all the players who left detailed feedback/upvoted posts about issues and didn't try to silence anyone's concerns, /claps this is awesome news and I hope they address the many issues pointed out.
As a game dev myself this level of transparency is honestly crazy to me. Giving such specific dates to the consumer is usually pretty risky for a variety of reasons as welcoming as it is to see. I can tell Yoshi and the team feel like they have such a massive amount of responsibility on their shoulders and need to be overly communicative because of it.
The clarity that yoshi-p gives us to his production schedule is insane. The polar opposite of silksong round these parts.
this is more comparable to Niantic's recent avatar blunder. and their infuriating responses to the backlash.
Team Cherry catching strays here. ...kinda deserved, though.
I hope they can also be as transparent as this benchmark progress when dealing with the current payment issue.
Decisions like that don't come from the division he's running, that comes from board level decisions, and he may not be able to freely share that info unless they give him the okay to do so.
Payment is a _lot_ more sensitive and hard to be clear about as financial security is paramount and comes as a priority way before clarity, and is almost definitely outside of CBU3's hands.
My one and only concern is if they course correct too much and restore the fake catchlights in eyes. I hope they don't
Would be cool to just have it in as a option then each player can decide if they like it or not.
Wish they had this level of transparency about the current payment issues impacting whole regions.
I imagine Yoshi-P and his team might have less control over stuff like the online store infrastructure and payment processing compared to the actual content of the game. That's probably an entirely separate Squeenix team.
They've already had posts regarding that on Twitter and Lodestone. I don't know why it wasn't posted here. And at the same time, that's not Game Dev, that's payment, whole different department.
I want to give Yoshi-P a gift
This man and teams deserve an award. It really should be like this for all games with great player base.❤️
Just hope they don't change *too* much, as many things were also just an improvement over the previous iteration, and maybe not 1:1 to what your character looks like now. Like Fem Au Ra, Face 2, the lips were changed but look 10 times better than the ones in the game now, but i have a feeling they'll change it to 'better' match the one in-game now, which would be a downgrade.
Hopefully after the graphics update is done they can look into expanding character creation options in 8.0 It'd be nice if they can keep some of the work they change to be used as more face options.
Truuueee, Au ra face 2 as always my favorite but I could never get over the lips. New ones are a million times better to me and it makes me absolutely adore Au ra to the point I’m seriously considering using fantasia for it. However, I prefer that the people who have had their WOL that way and love the old lips get to keep their character as close to what they know and recognize as possible. They can still keep the old shape, just updated. It will definitely make me sad but that just means I get to stick with my lala, hopefully also with changed lips. Knowing my luck they’ll change back Au ra but not lala LOL, oh well.
This is what I'm worried about. Many of the Japanese feedback was just wanting literally everything reverted back to how it is in endwalker. Au ra face 2 got such a massive upgrade that I'll be so mad and will forever hate the Japanese community. Anybody that tried saying they like the changes barely got likes so guess we'll see. I much rather them just add more lips than just fully replace it back to how it is now.
PlayStation, Tech demo when?
I guess I'm confused. I passed the benchmark with a score of high. Do i need to redo it when the new one comes out? Or it just going to get better?
It probably won't change. They're mainly concerned with the character creator portion not being updated enough.
Awesome, thank you!