Character Modernisation Panic on the PTS

I mentioned in my post about the 7.6 livestream that the devs revealed that they're also working on updating NPCs and player characters with new textures, shaders and more. They emphasised that they were aware of how important it was that your character still felt like your character afterwards, and the examples they showed in their previews looked very good.

I didn't expect them to also push this update onto the PTS immediately afterwards, but they did... and I found out about it because there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. Well, actually, the first time I heard about it was when Intisar showed me a before and after screenshot of his main and commented that his Jedi suddenly looked old enough to be her own mother, which just made me laugh. However, as I heard more reports and saw a couple of honestly kind of appalling-looking screenshots, I got curious - something was clearly wrong here.

So I updated the PTS myself to have a look and... honestly, at first I didn't get what the fuss was about, as both my Republic and Imperial main (who are a body type four cyborg/human respectively) pretty much looked fine to me. But then I loaded up some alts and yeah, I could see that things looked rough. Doing my own before and after shots for my Chiss agent and Mirialan smuggler, they both appeared to have aged about twenty years each.

I figured that obviously couldn't be right, considering that it went completely against what had been said and shown on the livestream, so I was still more amused than worried. I posted some feedback on the PTS forums, but in what I thought was a kind of playful tone - you might want to review some settings on these, guys! I also took further heart from seeing posts like this one from someone who has some knowledge about 3D models and textures and showed that a lot of the issues people were seeing could indeed feasibly just be caused by one slider basically being set to the wrong number.

However, the SWTOR community loves a good freak-out and I still saw many posts that weren't just pointing out that something was wrong, but whose authors were seriously upset, threatening to unsubscribe forever over this, and so on and so forth. As someone who's 41 in real life, I was honestly a bit offended by some of the comments that claimed that the changes made their characters look 70 years old. Have you ever seen a 70-year-old in real life, kiddo?! I'll admit that some of the memes people came up with were amusing, but all in all I found the whole thing a bit tiring, considering that it seemed so obvious to me that it was simply a bug on the PTS, which exists specifically so people can find bugs before go-live.

Fortunately the latest PTS update has improved things and the worst of the panic seems to have subsided... though I'm still seeing some criticisms in the new PTS feedback thread, the most poignant of which to me was the one pointing out that the new faces look a lot worse on low graphics settings than the old faces, which I agree is definitely something that should be looked into.

I also had a kind of strange experience when checking out the new update myself, as I basically logged into the PTS, clicked through my characters on the character selection screen one by one and thought "yep, these all look great". However, after I took a few more screenshots for comparison purposes, I lined them up next to the "buggy" faces and they... actually didn't look all that different? As in, there are still some pretty noticeable differences compared to the old faces, and I can still see more wrinkles than I'd necessarily like to on my idealised video game heroines, but at the same time - it didn't bother me at all while in game, only when staring intensely at the close-up shots, which is not something I would usually do while playing.

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

My conclusion for now is that I'll be fine and will be happy with my characters getting updated, but I also feel like I have no clue how the majority of players will react to these changes. As mentioned, there are still plenty of complaints being raised in the feedback thread, some of which I can kind of see, but others just make me feel like Pam from The Office, going "They're the same picture" (meaning I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about).

And maybe that makes you think that my eyesight is lacking and obviously everyone will still hate this update, to which I'd respond: Will they though? Because I've also spoken to people who saw that very first, bugged update and genuinely thought it was fine too, going "sure, my character looks a bit older than before, but so what". My hunch is that most players will probably be fine, because even if you do notice differences between old and new that you don't like in the direct comparison shots, I reckon most players don't actually spend that much time staring intently at their character's nostrils in everyday play if you get what I mean. I don't think the differences will be as noticeable when you're actually playing the game normally and not glaring at your character like they're about to have their police mugshot taken.

All in all, I guess this goes to prove once again that player character updates in MMOs are a tricky thing. I remember when I briefly resubbed to World of Warcraft in late 2013 after having been away from the game for more than a year, the low-resolution old character models that I'd always liked before suddenly appalled me, as I'd gotten too used to SWTOR's much better-looking avatars. When WoW then updated its models in 2014, I logged in once just to check out my characters' new looks, and while I thought Blizzard did a decent job with the upgrades overall, I also noted at the time that many characters looked older and angrier than before, and ten years later I'm still not over what they did to female tauren. So this kind of thing is always a bit of a gamble, but remembering my own reaction to WoW's old character models in 2013, it's probably also a necessary one if the game is supposed to continue attracting new players.

If you have any doubts about this update yourself, I can only recommend downloading the PTS, copying over some of your characters, and giving feedback in the relevant forum thread. If you've already seen your characters' updated looks, how do you feel about them?