Bilei
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As requested, I'm reposting this here as a revised, even more image heavy edition for further exposure. Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback to the first version!
This thread about the most crucial gameplay feature: character appearances. Here are some of my observations and thoughts, feel free to add your opinion.
Even if you don't read all of it, please do tell parts you liked or disagreed with!
Without body sliders, hair is the biggest difference in character’s shape. Having unique hairstyles is a good and a bad thing, they are distinctive but when you see the same hairstyle for nth time it gets really old, really fast. For some races there are only few hairstyles that are used a lot leaving all the rest forgotten. If you stumble upon someone with same hairstyle and similar palette it gives off an instant clone vibe. Here’s 2 easy fixes:
1. Full-blown RGB palette (Ã la Aion)
If you’ve ever seen a makeover show you know this alone can make a big difference. Even High Elves have few dark hairstyles, rest are all light and not too far from each other, the in-between options are either few or non-existent. Bright red hair color has been requested few times and I can’t think of a race it doesn’t fit. Not to mention other colors, when players could choose the exact color they want and not the closest alike, it would bring a bit more colourfulness.
2. More hairstyles
As obvious as it sounds. If you can get statistics of most used hairstyles per race and gender, use it. Take the most popular ones, look at them, study them, compare them with other choices and ask the community. Ask, what made us choose that one from all the other choices, what we liked and disliked. Add a bunch of hairstyles to suit the popular demand and few that doesn’t, this way majority will have more to choose from and those who want something different will be catered too.
Elin ear / Castanic horn separation from hairstyles
…has been requested a million times and while I’m sure devs has heard the request I have no idea how difficult it would be to execute. But I, too, am hoping it will happen.
My biggest disappointment when creating an Elin for the first time was that I couldn’t change the ear and tail color. I wanted to make an arctic fox and though there are 2 fox ear + tail sets (and supposedly one red wolf but to me that looks enough fox-ish), they’re all yellow or red. Having all big eared and fluffy tailed in such similar colors feels weird to me. Not all cats are black, rabbits white or wolves/foxes red. If you want to make this a truly amazing feature, add few versions with patterns too (stripes, spots, brindle, merle) that will be shown in ear and tail.
^Psst, this would work for Popori too.
As for separating ear and tail choice, I see no sense in giving tail separation to Elin just because Popori has it. Popori doesn't have hair or ear selection and their tails aren't as species specific as Elins; there's few fantasy ones and most of the tails suit most of the heads. For Elin there’s pretty much only 1 option and I just don’t see the point of mixing e.g. bunny ears and cat tail. IF we get more specific customization for Elin with ear separation and possibly coloring them too, that would be more than most races get and IMO sufficent. Put it into perspective, think of the poor Barakas! What extra customization would they have?
And what about other races? Do you think Amani females should be able to mix and match dreads/ponytails to short/base hairstyles? Should Amani males be allowed to control their horn size? I think so!
Updos and clipping
First of all, I’m really glad something is finally done to the clipping issue! Secondly, I’m sure you’ve heard the criticism that came with it and are adding this to the list of many that needs an on / off toggle.
It’s a funny thing when the updo is forced even on armor - which I believe was designed in a way - where the collar would cause minimum clipping possible. Some people would be content having the hair down with some clipping, especially if the hairstyle is so big and fluffy it would hide most of the issues. All this, while semi-long hairstyles are allowed to clip away with no control at all. Outrageous!
I gathered some updos or short hairstyles that could work as updos and there was surprisingly many. I couldn’t even fit all of them here but you get the idea.
1. We have that one default updo, that’s fine, just add the toggle.
2. Add barbershop. Let us buy additional updos and don't make them race specific. For the sake of keeping this feature simple, we could choose to use only 1 updo at a time and when we want to change it we would simply visit the barbershop. If you want to make them outrageously expensive, let us keep the styles we have bought and change between them. If you want to make them cost less than a house, have us pay every time we change style, even to something we have used previously. Biggest gold sink ever or what?
About facial hair color
When the beard is attached to the hairstyle it changes color but when it’s an adornment it’s fixed color. Either make it change color too or add at least a dark version too, most of the thicker adornment beards are all white or blond sets.
1. Choosing a face shape and type, as it is right now.
2. Choosing features of the face; eye-color, minor make-up, facial hair.
3. All adornments: earrings, tattoos, distinctive make-up, war paint, bits of plate armor, masks, scars… should be here and available for all faces of that race and sex.
To have that cool scar across your face, you have only 1 option. If you want that specific face/make-up but it comes with a scar, you have only 1 option. Either way, that scar becomes associated with that face and when you see it few times, it gets old, fast.
That’s why I think all the distinctive adornments should be chosen differently. With mix-and-match system there still might be a chance to run into clones but the chances of that happening would be reduced significantly. For example take the earrings/earpieces Castanics, Humans and High Elves have. Some Castanic and High Elf ears are different shapes and adjust differently with sliders, but I don’t remember seeing an ear piece that couldn’t be added to all of them. Especially with humans, why only some have the option to choose earrings when it could be given to every face quite easily?
Both female and male Castanics share exactly the same palette but that's not the case for Amani. While male Amani can have vivid and dark skintones (even black) all the female Aman equivalents are very bland. Here’s a little comparison:
Blue and golden are the most vibrant female Aman skin tones (males also get a nice red). Now, I understand why you would want to limit certain tones to certain races (green High Elf, anyone?) but it would be nice to have some more control over it. Put on your surprised face as I’ve made a mock-up of how to add more tones with fewer swatches and more sliders:
Now that I think about it, you could even scrap the last slider. Pretty much every race has normal (read: human) skin tones available, all you would need to do is add uncommon swatches (blue, green) to races which already have them (Aman, Baraka, Popori) and tune the sliders to fit the race (High Elf can’t be near as dark as Aman, allow bright tones for races with uncommon swatches). The examples above are crude due to my lack of skills but I have seen several requests for a tan/brown skinned Elin and despite High Elves having a ‘fair and beautiful’ thing going on I think they could still pull off tan/sand skin.
Take away all restrictions from remodeling. I don’t mean taking away type restrictions to remodel cloth over plate, but everything else. I want to have the freedom to put the skin of my lvl 2 armor on the +9 I have at lvl 60. Or work my butt off at the battlegrounds so I can get a nice skin for my alt’s low level armor. I want to be able to find a nice skin, apply expensive rare dye on it and use it over and over again on the armors I acquire until I find something better or decide otherwise. If you want to keep it as an expensive gold sink, raise prices for remodeling with skins that weren’t bought from the remodeling NPC. Easy as that.
Something to boost effectives of crafting is to make all crafted dyes permanent. I have not found a lot info about crafting dyes so correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the process consumes a lot of rare gatherables and the results are pretty much the same you can buy from the NPC? The price of the dyes is pocket change and having to go through that much effort for a similar result in crafting… I just don’t see why anyone should or would bother with it. Making crafted dyes permanent, even if the results are close to regular dyes sold by NPC, would make it a bit more worth the effort and possibly even profitable. If someone wants their armor to be blue when they know they’ll be stuck with it for a longer while, they might be willing to pay some extra for a permanent one if they don’t want to shed the money for an expensive any-color-rare-dye.
In-game barbershop and lightweight plastic surgery for in-game money
Barbershop speaks for itself, at least hair color change preferably also hair style change. And the updo idea mentioned earlier.
Korean Tera is selling race/sex/face/name change tickets for real money, it doesn’t mean we will get them too but it’s definitely a possibility. For now, I assume we will get them too.
If you wanted to do further changes you would have to buy a ticket, for everything else there’s in-game gold. By lightweight plastic surgery I mean sticking with the face you have chosen but adjusting sliders and adornments. It would give a refreshing change to the character without complete make over. And sometimes there’s little adjustments you’d like to make but noticed a little too late, how the mouth goes all funny during emotes, how you should have set the eyes a little higher after all... I don’t think it should be cheap, nor should barbershop, and for bigger changes in character appearance like skin tone, changing face, etc. you would need the plastic surgery ticket.
Argon Armor (and Weaponry)
Okay not exactly Argon Armor - it just has a nice ring to it - read it as ‘Everything non-player and non-friendly-NPC Armor’.
I can’t be the only one thinking these could look really nice on characters too. Here are just couple examples from the early instances.
I think any of these would fit any class, even the plate versions look very light compared to player plate armor so even a cloth user wouldn’t look awkward with them on.
They could drop as a special lvl 1 armor which you could remodel over every armor type. Because what usually happens is the armor you want isn’t available for your type or if some monster with the style you’re looking for doesn’t drop for your type or gender but does for someone else. There’s rarely humanoid monsters with both sexes and all armor types presented so limiting them to one armor type would - simply - suck.
Transforming even 1 armor to 11 completely different race and sex combinations is not a small task. They could start out with just one set with a male and female outfit. For example the Vampire outfits, they would make a nice addition to leveling late 20's ...as long as they don't drop exclusively from Sinestral Manor bosses. With somewhat low drop rates it wouldn't be fun rolling for something everyone in the party can use, you don't have that many chances for killing a boss there anyways because you outlevel the instance fairly quick. There's some vampires in the Manor and tons more outside that use exactly the same model and clothes, expand it to all of those with a reasonable drop rate. Or how about a spy quest? Blend in with the enemy, get the outfit along the questline or as a final reward for your own remodeling purposes.
One ‘fault’ most game companies fall into when the costumes are brought in is making most costumes female exclusive. Always provide equally for every woman, man and Baraka!
Same idea works for weapons. We get to fight enemies same classes as us, who move like us and use same weapon types as us. I’m certainly no expert but I would imagine it would be relatively easy to modify the textures/models for player characters too since weapons look the same on every race.
Author's note: I would sacrifice so many Lumbertown bunnies for that glowing witch outfit.
For example, an enemy using a staff. You fight few of these and suddenly a white staff drops. The drop rate is usual to normal monsters randomly dropping whites but when this specific mob drops a weapon it's a staff with the same skin the monster was using. You could remodel it onto another staff or sell it. Voilà !
Obviously weapons need to be type specific and stuffing monsters with 8 different weapon types into one place can be a little difficult. These wouldn't have to be sets like the armors, just choose a few best pieces of each weapon type from monsters and have them drop those, so that during the journey from level 1 to 60 there's equal amount of skins for every class.
If nothing else, at least the helmets! Here’s few examples I quickly grabbed from screenshots:
I have fought many monsters with nice hats or masks wishing I could get one too, and there’s never enough vanity hats. Something like Karascha’s mask or Sorcha’s hat would make excellent quest rewards.
Pouches
All the fashionable ladies (and some men and Baraka) in Arborea travel with extra pockets on their waist! Now that would be nice, additional inventory space on the go and some of them are so small I’m sure they wouldn’t get too much in the way of combat (animations).
Pets
I was going to save this for non-appearance feedback but guess this belongs here too, after the possibility of pet shops returning as vanity pets. Whether they should be full fluff or have small functions too, that discussion is best suited for another thread. As for the appearance… there’s so much where you simply can’t go wrong.
First 2 rows are some of the NPC animals I found. I have seen a lot of people praise the bunny and say how cute it is, I bet that one would be a successful pet.
Then there’s the small critters which you can kill, like the scorpion, lizard and frog which would be perfect size and the not-fluffy-pet option.
And last, but not least, minions. My first thought of seeing mutated Elin was: “I want this as a pet†and on the top of my head I can’t think of a minion which wouldn’t work as a pet. Depending what functions and emotes pets would have, you could always make a full fluff special pet which can transform into any minion you come across. All of them can run and have an attack or two but animating every other possible pet function for all minions just because someone might want it as a pet is obviously out of the question, so that’s why it’s only job would be follow the player around and look good/cute/creepy.
- It’s difficult to see actual eye color in character creator (excluding Elin’s big eyes) due to lightning.
- Eye color changes with skin color. Apparently eyes are part of the skin texture above skin color and they’re affected with rest of the skin. It’s not just the iris, but sclera (white of the eye) too. You can see it especially well in this screenshot taken by Roda. Nobody wants to look like a liver failure patient 24/7, you might want to do something about it.
- ...and while you’re at it - separating eyes from rest of the skin textures - why not add eye color option too?
- I know you have that body slider suggestion by Capricorn from the old forums somewhere safe. I’m seconding that one, again.
When someone even mentions body sliders the reactions are always saying something about hitboxes or remembering the horrors of Aion. Now hear me out, I think you could add some body type and height differences without it affecting hitboxes. They don't match the models as they are even now, Baraka having smaller box than the actual model and Elin having a bigger one. - Don’t forget Barakas! There’s not much I could suggest to them as they do not have hair, horns, ears or tails and with cosmetic headgear introduced adornments like the pipe on Popori seem a little outdated. For every feature you might add to other races, add a bunch of new faces for Barakas!
- If you ever give character creation a complete revamp and happen to introduce veteran rewards, remember to add plastic surgery ticket somewhere there.
- One of my biggest pet peeves: why there are no stockings or boots or anything but regular high heels for High Elf females in cloth armor?! There's a fabulous NPC who proves clothies can rock them too!
For example, if there were 3 different heights to choose from, the difference between the middle option and tall or short wouldn't seem much but when tallest and shortest of the same race were standing next to each other you could see the difference. Now multiply this with every other race and sex and 3 body type options, even small differences are enough to create diversity from the default mold.
Edited by: Bilei
about 1 year ago
- Reason: BBcode is being a @#!"$%!!