Yesterday saw Star Wars: The Old Republic developer Broadsword release the first part of its modernisation plan, boosting the fidelity of several planets and tweaking player character models with new textures and ocular specularity (eyeball highlights), as well as lighting and shader improvements. The effect was meant to be subtle, so as to not dramatically change the appearance of characters which some players have been rolling with for over a decade. The reaction has been… mixed.
In a lot of cases, the impact is—as was promised—minimal. If you take a look at my Smuggler, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the difference. His face is maybe 1% more weathered—ever so slightly more like a real person. If I didn't have the side-by-side comparison to look at, I probably wouldn't have noticed.
The same goes for my Trooper. She has smile lines now, but other than that the differences are too subtle to really stand out. There's just a broad sense, to me, that she looks a little bit more like a believable human being now. That's it.
But there's certainly a more noticeable difference when it comes to the aliens and their more varied skin colours. My blue chiss, for example, had flawless skin before (sadly I don't have a screenshot), whereas now he looks incredibly patchy. Like he's had an allergic reaction to some space nibbles, or maybe just skipped his shower after running around on Tattooine.
It's even more obvious on characters that flaunt a bit of skin, and in combination with lighter, non-human skin tones, the result is something pretty corpse-like. That might be a good look for a corrupted Sith Sorcerer, but those sorts of decisions should really be left up to the individual players.
Over on the SWTOR subreddit, the response to the update runs the gamut from folks who barely notice the changes, to people who feel like their characters have been ruined. It's a particularly rough time for players who've been roleplaying beefcakes. "Look how they massacred my boy," says one of them mourning the loss of their big lad's well-defined abs.
With a lot of the changes, I can see what Broadsword was going for, and broadly approve of them making the characters look a bit more like the newer NPC character models. Faces are more textured and realistic now, shedding some of their former uncanniness. But not every player wants their characters to look textured and realistic. If you've spent a decade running around as a Sith Assassin with completely flawless skin, and suddenly you're getting forehead wrinkles and smile lines, then yeah, you're probably not going to be pleased.
In some cases, we're absolutely seeing the effects of stuff not working as intended. Like, I cannot imagine the patchy, dirty look was what Broadsword was aiming for. Similarly, there's no reason I can imagine for the developer to give characters extra makeup.
Some—though not all—of the issues have been noted by Broadsword. The ab reduction, for instance, was due to Broadsword needing to tone down the face lines, which looked much more severe in the PTR. This had the knock-on effect of reducing muscle definition. Broadsword plans to tackle this by replacing "overall programmatic softening with a more targeted, artist controlled softening of facial features while keeping definition in other areas".
This should also fix the texture oddities on chiss and other species with more vibrant skin tones. So the dirty look should, hopefully, get resolved. Players have also noticed a more obvious neckline seam on their characters (though this was always evident on some species, like twi'leks and cathar) and this is being investigated by Broadsword.
A broad change like this was always going to spit out some issues, and while few of my characters have been impacted (especially since most of them are usually decked out head-to-toe in armour), the frustration among those whose roster of heroes and villains have undergone an unwanted transformation is understandable.
