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Why the difference in character creation with MMOs
ElizabethAnne
Member Posts: 5
Rift had a good system and Aion had a great system allowing for a lot of variables. Secret World? not really. SWTOR? Four body types and limited makeup/haircolor. Black Desert looks like it is so variable I'll be able to make a toon that looks exactly like (uncanny valley) me
So why is that? The game engine used (I'm assuming the game engine does the character creation)? The demand on rendering fluidly? Choices made on distributing resourses during development? Something else?
Comments
MMOs should not be cardboard copies of eachother and therefore they put their developers time at different things.
Sure, character customization is great, but so is player housing and player owned stores, good animations, art and much more.
But I do think that many Asian games cheap out a bit too much and therefore you look like amny others in the same clothes when you play.
I think you answered it yourself.
Game engine and how it is utilized sets some limits.
Will the game need to support 6, 12, 24 or hundreds of players in the same place. Should the game work on certain consoles with limited set of resources, or high end pc's, mobile.
How important is it to the devs vs other things.. Optimizing this stuff takes alot of time and sometimes tech choices in the beginning puts a limit to what is possible. These things need to be planned from the start.
I bet character personalization options are often scheduled for the end of the project, and therefore often cut. Game projects never finish on schedule, and often this means wrapping up and cutting off all non vital, to get the game out on time or even at all.
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The best character creation systems have been Champions and City of Heroes; both super hero games. While those are/were heavily instanced, you could still have lots of players on the same screen with different looks and textures.
I wish more games would allow for such customization. I spent hours making my character before I actually played.
Luckily for me, I was in betas for both, so I had a good idea what I was going to do ahead of time...
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
There are a whole lot of different philosophies on character creation. From Archtypes, to skill based to something else. No one is best, it's just a matter of opinion. I generally prefer more skil based options, but there are some class based ones that I like also.
On an aside, I liked TSW. You could choose from a lott of different skillsets. For me there was a good deal of choices.
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Character Creation and Character Customization are two different things. He is talking creation, you're talking customization.
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
There are a lot of trade-offs, as in every other area of game design, ranging from budget to design philosophy. Some should be obvious, such as that devoting more resources to developing options in a character creator lets you have a more versatile character creator.
But some of the trade-offs aren't as obvious. For example:
When a character equips armor, do you want that to visibly alter the character's appearance, so that you can see him wearing the armor and see what the armor looks like? If you answer "yes" to that, then that sharply restricts what you can do in a character creator. Any armor has to be able to go with anything that anyone could ever come up with in a character creator. You can make every armor in the game have two or three different models, but that's cost++; If the gear you equip doesn't affect your appearance, you're free to do a lot wilder stuff in the character creator.
How many characters do you want to be able to draw on the screen at a time? If you figure that you'll never need to draw more than five, then you can go nuts with highly detailed characters and make every character completely independent from every other. If you want to draw a hundred at a time, that sharply restricts what you can do without completely killing your frame rate.
The single-threaded CPU bottleneck of games is largely (though not entirely) a matter that you can only switch textures so many times per frame. For this purpose, drawing ten completely independent characters will be much more of a load on the CPU than drawing twenty copies of any one of the characters. (Naturally, the GPU load is reversed, simply because 20 is more than 10, unless video memory capacity is the problem.) That particular bottleneck is going to go away in coming years; the API calls to relieve it are already out via AMD Mantle and certain extensions to OpenGL 4.4 or later. In the meantime, if two random characters will tend to have a random 20% of their textures in common, you can draw a lot more characters at once--but you have to restrict things in the character creator to make that tend to happen.
Your profile says that you are a 20 year old male from Phoenix AZ.
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Black Dessert is not a good comparison to the rest. Last I heard it will have a minimum requi of i7 and most likely use DX11.
The other games, it's about the engine but the DirectX plays more in to what an engine can do in terms of taxing your GPU. I think you will find any game built on DX11 or up is going to be a new level of graphics and character creation that makes everything before it look 8 bit.
I'm sorry...Rift had a good system?
I must have been playing a different Rift than you were.
What ?!? Nope. Really primitive.
Nope. Really, really not. Aion was hella simple, compared for example to the precedessor Lineage 2.
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OH MY GOD. YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT *LOOKS* !!!
... nevermind ...