FFXIV – Yoshida Responds to Dawntrail Benchmark Troubles

The Dawntrail Benchmark has been out for about a week and players are already up and arms about it. After much discussion, Yoshida responds and promises swift corrections.

The release of the Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail Benchmark quickly turned from excitement to genuine horror by large parts of the community. While everyone was more than happy with the graphical updates to the critically acclaimed MMORPG, the new graphics now visible in the character creator have players up in arms.

Naturally with increased polygon counts, new lighting, and textures our characters will look a little different. But side-by-side comparisons in the Benchmark by players who noticed their characters are a little off confirm that this is more than just a simple high-rez graphics update and some aren’t happy.

Image: Square Enix
Naoki Yoshida Responds to the Dawntrail Benchmark Complaints
As complaints about the changes to character look mounted, director and producer Naoki Yoshida finally responded and gave, as usual, a breakdown of what was happening from the developer side.

He explained that one of the main culprits was the Character Creator which is the same since A Realm Reborn Launched over 10 years ago. And while character textures and shaders have been updated, the character creator itself features lighting and environments that don’t represent the look of the actual game.

If you take your Benchmark created character into the actual benchmark, the difference is night and day. The outdated character creator should be responsible for the “lifeless” eyes, faces looking flat, and textures not reflecting the light properly.

Image: Square Enix
After some investigation from the developer side, there seem to be some other issues regarding the Benchmark, mostly in the character creator regarding textures not being probably implemented, data not being processed correctly, and models clipping and tearing in places they shouldn’t.

The Male Viera seemed to be the worst offender in this regard, but female Miqo’te and Roegadyn didn’t get off easy either. There are some other issues that aren’t just textures not rendering correctly. Some have noticed that character faces have now almost double the polygon count and feature additional bones to display a wider range of emotions.

Image: Square Enix
Naoki Yoshida offered a formal apology in a recent blog post and proposed the following. The system is wildly outdated and for now, they have prioritized working on graphical updates in the actual game, with the character creator being just an afterthought. This is why they proposed the following:

In order to resolve the points outlined in 1 and 2, we are planning for a replacement of the benchmark software. As we require some time to investigate the issues and reconstruct the benchmark environment, the timing and further details of the replacement will be announced later.

We will also continue to make adjustments which will incorporate as much of your feedback as possible into the revision of the benchmark, as well as the release version of Dawntrail.

(Due to different release dates, however, there are likely to be some differences between the benchmark software and the release version.)

This means they hope to release a new and updated version of the Benchmark sometime between now and the release of Dawntrail on July 2, 2024. For more information regarding this, keep an eye on Final Fantasy XIV’s social media channels in the Loadstone and we’ll of course have the latest news here.

For more on Dawntrail, the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV expansion make sure to check out our detailed breakdown of the last Letter from the Producer Live that explained everything you need to know about the graphics update. As well as our summary of the Fan Fest Keynote from earlier this year.

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