Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
How far away from humanoid would you stray?
Foomerang
Member UncommonPosts: 5,628
The majority of MMOs have us choose a bipedal humanoid type avatar and we usually get the choice of male or female. Im sure the reasoning is that the majority of people out there want a character they create to be someone they can identify with more easily.
That said, who is to say appearance is the only factor to identifying with ones avatar? What about people who identify as queer or non gendered? Would you play a character that had multiple limbs or no discernible facial features? Would you play a blob or slug like creature? Would you play an asexual entity?
If there were more robust RP mechanics like a complex emote system and improved social animations would that help to make you identify with your character more than just looks?
Does backstory matter when making your character?
I know thats a lot of questions to mull over heh.
Basically, what types of no humanoid characters would you want to play, or along side in an mmo?
I would love to see some completely alien entities with perhaps no limbs at all, asexual, maybe floating, I dont know. I like the idea of having a non sexualized character because it frees me of any expectations other players may about my character.
Comments
nah .. i will just play a human .. or something close enough.
I have to play humanoid-
I can only play (in an RPG) something I can actually relate to... I undertstand others like to RP unique beings but I am too unimaginative.
I have trouble playing orcs and goblins- Elf is about as far as I can go =P
How about a deer-like creature?
Endless Forest
i would play non humanoid races any day. However, i wont play it as a main character. My main usually is a non human race that is still humanoid.
With that said, I would totally play a centaur race as a main character (centaur, not minotaur)
EDIT: i would love to have a lore twist in GW2 and have a group of centaurs betray their kin due to some major event and unlock them as playable race. Maybe a major conflict between the Harathi and the Tamini centaurs so one of them joins the heroes as playable race.
Well the horse thing was a joke. I tried Endless Forest once, didn't get the point, uninstalled.
What about a Sha'tar type race from WoW's Burning Crusade expansion? Perhaps embellish light shards to indicate status or gear?
Well, I don't know. There are many directions in which to "stray", many of which I like, but they don't all play nice with each other in my head and many of them come with significant caveats.
Blob: Maybe. I can't see getting into a D&D slime or gelatinous cube, because there's... nothing to them. But in the sci-fi RPG Eclipse Phase, the one known living alien species is evolved from something akin to a slime mold, and they're fascinating. Most of their appeal, though, is their mystery, and it would be difficult to capitalize on that if they were playable. (For sort of the same reason, I'm very interested in a fantasy MMO that prominently features elves but does not make them playable. I kind of think that's when elves may be at their best.)
Genderless: I like this so long as they actually appear to be androgynous to us. I'm not so fond of when I read "genderless" but I see a stone fat man or a fluffy-boobed bunny girl. I especially like the notion of ungendered "artificial" or non-physical characters, like robots, golems, spirits and the like. I'd really like to have some of that. I really had hoped WildStar's Mechari would turn out that way, but it quickly became obvious that wasn't the case.
At the same time, I'm also interested in races that are highly sexualized having that explained in their lore. I find it really funny that many of the races we currently see visually depicted as very sexualized are actually written as highly stodgy and uptight. If there was some lore that actually explained that kind of appearance, that'd be nice. Just throwing in the words "hedonistic" or "passionate" doesn't really accomplish much, honestly, especially when it seems to contradict other things about them without explanation. Why are they that way? How does it radiate through their culture? How do the other races feel about it? Worldbuild, dagnabbit!
No, no blobs or weird looking genderless crystals or even a Hanar or Elcor from Mass Effect
may be the Drell and Turian but I had difficulty even playing Tauren female and the udder jokes we no help.
Mass Effect races http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Races
yeah that is the reason why i would only playe them as alt and not as my main character, with the exception of centaurs.
I think Gish was awesome game:
When I roleplay, I find that non human characters are easier to play then human characters. They just have a lot more hooks for you to hang ideas off of and they offer a lot more opportunities to do something imaginative or creative. The big kicker though Is I tend not to roleplay in mmos. They really don't feel suited to it.
A bit more on topic, I would love to see something like a star control or FTL mmo where you can pick form a selection of very different races. Actually why didn't EVE do that? When eve first came out, you only had a picture of your character so it would have been crazy easy to fill the game with all kinds of strange alien races.
Let me play as a penicillin resistant super bacteria whose mission is to wipe out the human race.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
with the option to /hide helmet.
lol ...
I had fun once, it was terrible.
i never played the Warforged race in DDO
animated robots have no appeal to me
EQ2 fan sites
Anyone remember the part of the Starcraft 1 singleplayer campaign where you are a Zerg Overmind? I think that was a big win as far a taking the role of a non-humanoid alien goes.
Personally I'm interested in romance, and would mainly want to roleplay a character who might plausibly be in a romance, and had the biological drive to reproduce as a reason for taking an interest in romance. (That excludes most robots but could include something like transformers if they happened to reproduce by breeding rather than being created asexually.) I also really prefer to roleplay something that has hands or something equivalent with which to manipulate the world around them (psionics, pseudopods, tentacles, whatever), and builds buildings and appliances and other technology (low tech or magic tech are fine). So, even though I love horses, I wouldn't want to control a realistic horse, I'd much prefer an anthro horse or centaur. A dragon or hippogriff or griffin with hand-like forefeet would be ok.
The reason why MMORPGs usually make all playable races roughly the same shape is that it makes art much simpler, not that they think that's all that players would want to play. If all races have two arms, two legs, and a head roughly in the same relative places, then they can all share the same armor graphics. If you want such a character to wear a shirt and a pair of pants and make the textures once, it's pretty obvious how to stretch them over the various races and not unduly hard to do.
But what happens if you want a horse to wear that shirt and pair of pants? How about an eagle? A spider? A fish? If you want to have a bunch of different looking armors available to every character and have to make completely independent armors for every single race, that greatly bloats the art budget. You can get around this by letting every race wear the same armors with common artwork used for all of them. You can also get around it by having one armor available to each race so that everyone of a particular race wears the same clothing. Given the choice, which would you prefer?