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

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 like that! It was supposed to be cute!' So I posted what it was supposed to look like.

"I made this hair for my friends and those who really needed this type of hair," madqueenmomo adds, feeling like she'd let them down.

Square Enix did, afterwards, post a response on the game's forums, which reads: "Thank you for all your feedback on the hairstyle that will be implemented in Patch 7.1. We would like to apologise for the major confusion we have caused. For this patch, we started work to implement 'Natural Curls' from the winning entries of the Hairstyle Design Contest … However, as the development work progressed, the light, delicate, and voluminous curls required for Natural Curls could not be implemented perfectly, despite implementation of the recent graphical update in FFXIV, due to limitations such as the polygon count.

"Therefore, the finished result is a hairstyle that has not been implemented as Natural Curls, but as a wavy bob hairstyle, which is called 'Doing the Wave' in-game. However, since we did use the winning entry as a reference in the development process, we included a statement to that effect in the patch notes. We are deeply sorry that this has resulted in a great deal of confusion and concern."

The post also states that the team would "persevere" in its efforts to "look for other ways to implement this hairstyle."

For what it's worth, I'm willing to take that at face value—I'm not a 3D modeller, and while the game's latest graphics update was huge, there's only so thick a coat of paint you can slap on an 11-year-old MMO. Hair might look prettier now, but I doubt the underlying tech has changed much, if at all. On the other hand, I think the critique levelled at Square here is fair enough—there are plenty of tricks developers use to achieve certain effects, and it probably would've been better to delay the release while the team tried to figure it out. Bare minimum, give the artist a heads up so they aren't ambushed by it.

In response, madqueenmomo added that she was glad the team "won't give up on trying to make curly hair … I was afraid they would stop trying after this," also drawing another lovely bit of art to encourage them not to lose hope:

This is an admirable amount of grace to show Square Enix, which clearly did a bit of a gaff, here—but I'm similarly glad to hear Creative Studio 3 isn't giving up on adding a bigger variety of hairstyles. Even if you're not invested in representation, doing better is an "everybody wins" situation, more choices are always a plus.