Final Fantasy XIV lead producer and director Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida has released a detailed response following a mixed reception to the Dawntrail Benchmark. In a blog post released the morning, Yoshi-P highlighted many of the issues prospective FFXIV: Dawntrail users had found when using the benchmark, as well as a promise to fix these issues and publish an additional benchmark.
When the FFXIV: Dawntrail Benchmark released on April 13, players quickly found that under some circumstances, their characters looked extremely different, or just flat out worse than they did in the existing game. Many player characters, especially Viera, Elezen and Au Ra, appeared to have issues. Players took to Twitter/X and official forums to share screenshots of their characters, with many stating they preferred the older appearance of their Warriors of Light. These issues mainly affected characters within the character creator, rather than in the benchmark itself, but it was still a big enough issue to be addressed.
This was obviously bad news for FFXIV’s development team and Yoshi-P, with the latter having spent much of the last several public appearances hyping up the coming graphical update for Dawntrail. However, in today’s blog post, Yoshida addressed concerns and detailed many reasons as to why players found characters seemingly looked worse in the benchmark.
The first issue detailed was lighting within the character creator, an issue players had correctly identified. In some situations, player characters would look over glossed, or under glossed. Others would be missing shadows and shading. Yoshida explained that this was due to unique lighting and weather conditions within the character creator that didn’t appear during the main benchmark process, and stated this will be fixed in an updated version.
Secondly, Yoshi-P pointed to issues around the development team’s processes that had lead to certain new textures for faces and necklines being unimplemented. Additionally, scaling of certain character’s mouths was incorrect. This revelation likely explains why several races seemed more affected by the character creator render issues than others. Yoshida promised these issues will be fixed for the release of Dawntrail.
Finally, the FFXIV director detailed that a new version of the benchmark would be released in the future, but was unable to give a time. He also stated that due to the rapidly approaching release date of Dawntrail “there are likely to be some differences between the benchmark software and the release version.”
Yoshida closed with an apology: “My apologies for asking you to bear with us as we address the points of concern. The team and I will continue doing our best for the graphical update and Dawntrail's release, and we would appreciate your continued support!”
With players naturally concerned about what seemed like a misstep with the graphical update for FFXIV, this blog post comes at the perfect time to reassure a fanbase eager to be excited about Dawntrail. Square Enix will now have the difficult task of living up to the high standards expected by their dedicated players.
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