(05-06-2014, 03:53 PM)Ildur Wrote: They are as bad as Blade & Soul and Lineage 2 walking animations, though: more fit for supermodels than for soldiers.To be fair to Blade & Soul, the Wuxia movies it takes influence from most certainly do NOT treat their female characters as "soldiers". I can be more forgiving of such things when they're very obviously not trying to be realistic in any form or fashion.
That doesn't excuse them for not, say, giving more options for walking and running animations and the like. I'd really like to see more games provide something like that. After all, how someone moves can say a LOT about their personality or what they're after.
(05-06-2014, 04:15 PM)Naunet Wrote:I don't know what you mean by "no one else does either". Aion & Blade & Soul both support some pretty crazy body proportions. Likewise with PSO2 (for example...). Or what about EVE Online? Even Saints Row III & IV are good for this, though they really need to separate muscle tone from muscle mass.
And then there's Dragon's Dogma. Oh, lordy, Dragon's Dogma... you can literally create a female character that is completely indistinguishable from a man as well as a stereotypically buxom fem fatale and anything in-between (I personally went for an androgynous, muscley teenager). And that's a Japanese game! Bloody amazing work, I say. (Just wish they made a PC version, but I digress.)
So, yeah. With all these other options on the market with decent-to-great character creation I feel entirely justified in ragging on them for limiting the range of possibilities in their own character creation.
(05-06-2014, 04:49 PM)Ignacius Wrote: While we might like more character customization, we roleplayers who care a lot about such things are a very, very small minority in games.Sorry to cut this out of a much larger post, but this is a completely unfounded assertion.
Just look at PSO2 for one very, very prominent example - the game is built almost entirely around its deep character customization and an ever-increasing trove of cosmetic options. Its economic success can be attributed pretty much specifically to just that and that alone. The actual gameplay is barely even monetized - if you pay the premium subscription fee, buy inventory slots, and buy skill trees, that's basically it as far as things you can pay for that affect your actual gameplay. Everything else is cosmetics, cosmetics, cosmetics, cosmetics. The number of people who care deeply about their characters' appearance is clearly not a small or insignificant minority. They may not be roleplayers but they definitely like to play dress-up.
Furthermore, look at how many games on the market already have extremely robust character creation options (like the games I listed above). They wouldn't invest so much time and effort into such options if they didn't contribute significantly to a game's appeal.
Even if I personally don't roleplay in a game (I don't really do much of that in Dragon's Dogma or PSO2, for example) I still have a difficult time getting into an RPG if I don't feel attached to my character, if I don't feel some level of connection to them. There are exceptions, naturally, but generally speaking if a game gives me character creation it should be good character creation or I'm just not going to give it a second glance. It's just that high on my list of priorities. If it's not there you're just not even going to get my foot in the door. I know for a fact that I am not alone in this.
Of course the game itself needs to be good to hold a player's attention over the long haul, but that is an almost entirely separate concern from the character creation, as I've noted before. The team building the art assets and the systems for character creation are generally not the same people working on systems design. You can have both. The problem is getting there.
