Initially scheduled for release on May 30 or 31, the second edition of Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail’s official benchmark has been delayed by three days to June 3.
Delay and Reasons
The re-release targets lighting issues that caused issues like “lifeless eyes” in the character creator and was estimated for the end of May, as revealed by director and producer Naoki Yoshida during the most recent Letter from the Producer LIVE. However, in the early hours of May 31, Yoshida announced players won’t be seeing the new benchmark until June 3.
According to his official statement, the delay is due to a combination of technical issues and unfortunate coincidence. The FF14 dev team was initially on track to release the official Dawntrail benchmark on time until the final review revealed a bug within the software. Apparently, they’ve patched the issue and are “currently doing the final review from scratch,” which would have postponed the release by only a day at most. However, the delay coincides with a mandatory building inspection that shuts down their offices over the weekend, and they won’t be able to finalize and release the software until Monday, June 3.
Changes in Lighting and Backgrounds
In his statement, Yoshida went on to highlight a few of the changes that players would have otherwise been seeing today. As promised, the persistently inaccurate lighting conditions in the main character creator have finally been supplemented with a brighter option available in the Aetherial Background. Players will be able to switch between the original blue-tinted lighting and a brighter, more neutral, and head-on lighting configuration using the “time of day” toggle in the backgrounds options.
While the lighting for the other backgrounds have unfortunately gone untouched, the vignette effect has been removed from all of them for better clarity and color perception. Overall, it seems the character creator will finally be able to showcase what characters will look like under most in-game conditions before players finalize their appearances.
Other Improvements
Other changes include but are not limited to:
- Enhanced highlight and gloss rendering for eyes and lips
- Lighting and texture adjustments for smoother facial expressions and contours
- Fixes to low-resolution portions of hair textures
- Adjustments to self-shadowing processes for a more streamlined look across hairstyles
- Overall environmental lighting adjustments and improvements.
All changes implemented in the benchmark software will be present in the game itself. While a third benchmark before the official launch is highly improbable, don’t despair if the new benchmark still isn’t quite what you were hoping: Yoshida confirmed that the dev team is still keeping their eyes out for player feedback to implement right up until the release of Dawntrail and even afterwards.