Naoki Yoshida Says Final Fantasy 14 Update Will Fix Dawntrail’s Dead, ‘Lifeless Eyes’

Last week, Square Enix unveiled the official PC benchmark and accompanying trailer for the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Dawntrail. The trailer gave fans glimpses of new in-game areas, enemies, and combat upgrades. While that all went over rather well, the game’s decade-old character creation engine is drawing ire this time and the eyes of character models, in particular.

Now, we’ll admit to not being experts on the exact pixel count of character models in the game, but some are, and we’ll defer in this case. Alongside Dawntrail, Final Fantasy XIV fans on all platforms will get the game’s first major graphical update, but it seems someone forgot about the character creator. Fans kicked up a stink, enough to get game director Naoki Yoshida to comment on the situation and on the supposedly “lifeless” eyes of characters, which is due to a lack of highlights in the pupil:

“The character creation environment should have been updated but was overlooked as we prioritized the development of Dawntrail and tuning the graphical update in the actual game, for which I would like to apologize. We are currently expediting a rework of the environments and light sources of character creation for both the actual game and the benchmark; once that is complete, the current benchmark will be replaced.”