Square Enix apologises for messing up hairstyle competition winner's submission in Final Fantasy 14 'due to limitations such as the polygon count'

pcgamer.com:

Final Fantasy 14's 7.1 patch is live—and while it's got plenty to look forward to, including improved toes and a much-needed fix to portraits, it's also the bearer of bad news for one fan artist.

For the uninitiated: occasionally, Square Enix will host competitions for players to submit designs for weapons, furnishing items, and—most relevant to the current irking—hairstyles. The selected 'do for the 2023 contest's winner this time around was, at least at first, intended to be artist madqueenmomo's submission «natural curls».

The design here is honestly real pretty—and some uncovered ground in terms of representation for hairstyles in FF14. In case you're not aware, this is a bit of a universal problem in gaming that only a few select titles actually address. Given I'm both white and also completely bald, making me a doubly poor authority on this topic, I'm gonna point you in the direction of this great breakdown by Kinda Funny Games.

Unfortunately, the version that's making it in-game today, «Doing the Wave», is a far cry from the original concept. It sort of looks like these poor adventurers have had a big bucket of grease dunked on their head—maybe a good look for certain aesthetics, but there's nothing curly about them.

Madqueenmomo proceeded to have a pretty understandably upset response on Bluesky: «What have they done to you??? … I really mean no offence to the team that have to make hair, but I'm just like…I have seen curly texture in highlander hair. We have a graphical update. I even [made] the curls [be thinner] and looser to not only work with non-poc characters with curly hair, but also hopefully easier to make.»

She then later apologised for her impassioned response, adding: «It looked wet and oily and I understood that the devs probably were going to edit the hair, but seeing this hair that I had made with love and respect basically be not only edited beyond [recognition] but also in low quality, I just wanted to yell out 'it wasn’t supposed to look