link to the forum post: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/458235-New-hrothgar-hairstyles-are-really-bad.
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Nah I was on the Hrothgar players' side until Yoshi-P said that he already said the ears would be covered before. Now I'm on their side. At that point you should've known what you signed up for.
Why doesn’t Yoshi-P just straight up hire furry astists to do the actual job for those who can’t do it 😂 He shouldn’t underestimate the power of dedicated fans.
I feel their response was pretty good, they acknowledged players didn't like what they did, but they are saying that the players could choose if through feedback:
1 more hairstyles
2 Better shaped hairstyles
Easy to pick Better hairstyles, but you don´t really know how many less it could be.
But I believe that making hairstyles could be pretty hard, there are a lot of little things that people don´t recognise why it would be hard to make, such as the boundries with what they can work with – geometry, clipping (with armor pieces, headshapes, emotes headshapes), the physics (or fake physics) and so on + the stated fact that the race's faceshape is not conventional.
And in the end it is all about money, not only how much people will pay for it, but how much they have to invest doing it.
It’d probably be best to give them unique bangs and maybe sideburns as the Hroth hairstyles. I see what the problem is-the back of the head is also the neck so they look like they have giant mops on their heads. Bangs and sideburns would let ears stick out freely and look a lot better. I’d bet this is the issue they are running into with femgars although I doubt they are being designed hunched over like the males (at least I hope not 🤨)
How are modders doing a better job than them when it comes to viera/hrothgar wearing hairstyles/hats? Make it make sense.
Fun fact: The ears are NOT part of the head, as mined by modders. The same modders able to create and fix hairstyles within a weak of their appearance in the game despite devs insisting the difficulty.
Also nobody asked for Hrothgar. What was asked was Viera. Hrothgar was added because Yoshi had a passing fancy for wanting more beast PCs in the game, so them passing the buck to the players like this looks REALLY BAD for anyone who follows LL's.
It's… getting harder and harder not to assume the devs are just getting lazy.
Delete hrothgar.
I think what Yoshi P is saying is hair for the other races generally only needs to be made once and modified to fit the other races. For Hrothgar, the hair needs to be made, from scratch, exclusively for them. That means everyone else will get less. There is always a trade off with resource entensive things.
And for the record, there are sets that the tail doesn't show and many where they clip badly. I just avoid anything with a cloak on my Miqote cause it looks terrible. Honestly, with how much of a technical issue this is turning out to be, I suspect part of Yoshi P is regretting doing something so outside the box at this point as it has made things a lot more complicated and difficult to accomidate with his resource schedule.
imagine how the female Wrothgar would look like
So I've worked on a live game. Not FFXIV, but I can sympathize with the devs here.
I think the thing people are just not considering is that when working on a game like this – you're constantly working on everything coming in the future, usually years ahead. And there aren't dedicated teams usually that are like 'Hey we make the next expansion, and you guys work on the next patch, and you guys work on the quality of life stuff!' Segmenting teams like that can very quickly lead to completely inconsistent styles, or things made without any consideration for other things being added to the game. Normally, the budget allows for a number of artists. Let's say you have 20 character artists. They're working on a huge number of things. New races, new gender options, new armor sets, new hairstyles for all races, new weapons, new NPCs, new looks for the scions, new enemies, new minions, new features (like islands, anyone?), etc, etc. The normal workday is usually working on a huge amount of content. Most likely they're already getting things to work on for the next expansion, let alone all the patches coming between.
So when you see the work of a modder that releases something in a couple months, well, that's because they were dedicating themselves to it for that time – and they had 0 followup processes they needed to go through. 0 meetings from designers, 0 input from a team, 0 real testing needed, they'll be forgiven for any bugs caused, etc. Give that same modder a full work schedule and they'd struggle to release it quickly without dropping quality, or maybe even cutting something else to save time.
Basically, for most live games, bandwidth is spread pretty thin between the teams. You might say, 'hire more artists then!' but that more often increases the volume of work you can do in the amount of time you do it – rather than getting someone that can now dedicate themselves to hairstyles, now you have 21 artists, and that means that, hey, maybe we can add that armor set now that we were about to cut! Along with that, it causes pipeline problems, too. The more content there is, the more QA you need to look at it, etc. Realistically, companies are budgeting teams what they need to be efficient. Stuff like this, that's purely quality of life/player health issues need to be prioritized based on what you as the dev feel players want the most vs the least.
What Yoshi-P is saying isn't 'Yeah we totally could do this! It might just take a bit longer!' He's saying 'Well, we could do this… but at our current bandwidth, that means we're gonna end up getting less than half the hairstyles done at quality in the same amount of time — and we thought that might be even more disappointing.' And the other answer might be 'Well, we could PRIORITIZE this, but it would come at the cost of every other race getting any new hairstyles in coming patches.'
I don't think he's flat-out saying yes or no here. More just that this is a complicated problem – far more complicated than the community thinks it is – and they're trying to gauge what they should do about it. It might be the case that they have to make a decision whether or not Hrothgar hair is more important than supporting head pieces for them, or more important than Viera hair, for example. There's for sure a solution, but there might not be a good solution when applied to the scope of the whole game.
It's most likely not that they "don't" want to do it, but that they don't have infinite resources and can do so much at a time.
As consumers, our responses are "So just hire more people 4Head", but people with the required experience and skills are reeeeally hard to find.
It's good to critisize and to ask for more, but with this thing (and that's my opinion, you can have yours, we don't have to agree), the community is acting like a spoiled brat that asked for a red toy boat for christmas, got a green one and is now outraged at it's parents for not getting the color right. Yes, we are paying customers. Yes, we have the right to complain and demand improvements.
But holy shit, they are always delivering more that what they had originally promised, and now it's come to a point that we are outraging over them not getting that "more" 100% right.
It makes you wonder if they should stop trying to deliver more, if people end up bitching about every little thing and shit on their hard work when they don't really understand the limitations they're working with (irl and technical), even when they explicitly state them.
This response was basically "We could possibly do it, but it would take much dev time from other things that you wouldn't want time taken out of" and we're here saying "IDC DO IT"
If they do it, and we get less content because they're working on fuckin hair, then we'll outrage because the content isn't exactly on par with what they've been delivering, or cry about possible delays.
To summarize, please chill the f out. It's painfully obvious that they are aware, let them distribute their worktime and deliver as they always do.
zepla is completely missing what hes saying about the hair/face thing. its not just taking 2b hair and attach to all four faces. its literally custom rigging four hair styles for each base "styles". so any hair they add would be 4x the work. essentially making the 2b hair on all four faces would be about the same amount of work as making an entirely new hair on each face. it doesnt matter that the 2b hair already exists, they would have to majorly alter them for each face due to the way they built the characters.
the real mistake was introducing hrothgar and viera in the first place. like they alway taking about reaching their limit of what they can do. i know they did it out of love for the community and to give people something they wanted. but adding two completely unique races that require WAY more work then the normal races when they are already "reaching their limit" was just a bad move.
like on one hand i feel for the team. they did literally everything they could. they knew it was impossible but they wanted to do it for us anyway and now we are shitting all over them because enough isnt enough for them. if people could just be happy they did something impossible to the best they could, it would be fine
but at the same time, they KNEW it wasnt possible and did it anyway and released these half complete monstrosities that are clear to all that, yea…it wasnt possible to do it right. so they kinda had it coming…
It seems like a small thing, but hair is pretty difficult to animate and rig. Especially since their rig is different to every other character. It's honestly a downfall to beast type races in most games out. The Charr from GW2 are another race that comes to mind that has a ton of issues when it comes to stuff clipping and looking off. Heck in GW2 most times you put on a hat it makes you bald.
They don't care because barely anyone plays the race, that's it lol It took modders less than a week to fix it so the ears were visible so it's pretty obvious that the team just don't care enough
I am a Hrothgar player, and despite being a really huge simp for Yoshi-P, I admit that this is really disappointing. I mean I know how difficult development can be. I get it, but all this time passed, and that's it? I wasn't even that mad about the ears. I just opened the Aestician, noticed 10 hairstyle options, and none looked better to me than what I currently had, so I stayed with what I had. So it's like "Oh wow, I finally don't need to use a Fantasia to change hairstyles! ……… I still have no reason to change hairstyles, cause they're really ugly, but …….. emmm cool?"
I'll play the game as it is , but I am shaking my head at this update. I expected a lot more
love comments being like "oh hrothgar have 4 unique heads its so much work" when a) no modders have died in the so perilous attempt at making hair or hats work for their heads and b) THEY ARE THE ONES WHO DESIGNED THEM dont you think the people who make the game should work on the things in said game? They found time this patch to make new parasol emotes, add new cutscenes to 10 year old arr content, completely RECONSTRUCT arr dungeons to account for trusts, surely one or two people at the office who is being paid to work on hrothgar hairs could actually make a real effort.
I think one thing to consider about the "6 hairstyles after this amount of time" is that it was probably a tasked they assigned to themselves as less important, so we were likely to see more in "close future" patches. Of course now with the changes they will be changed so we will see how long it takes.
It’s a bit weird because they could just use the same head meshes with the ears, slap the hairstyle on top of it and adjust it and call it a day. That’s what mods do, clipping doesn’t matter there and it’s fine.
Didnt the modders have the ears for the new hair fixed before the patch was even updated, they might clip, but at least they work. Like less than 24hrs for a fix..
Zepla, please stop copying Asmongolds Eyebrow push and behaviour. are you insane?