Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
[Column] General: Call It Shallow, But Looks Matter...at Least in Our Games
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
One of the first things that many, if not most, gamers look for when a new MMO is in development, is how much customization they will given for their characters. We look for body sliders, facial models, hairstyles, eye color varieties, racial models and many, many others. We want our characters, these pixelated extensions of ourselves, to mean something, to be a true in-game representation of how we see them 'alive' in the world. Looks certainly aren't all that matters, but customization often ranks very high high on players' MMO wishlists.
Read more of Suzie Ford's Call It Shallow, But Looks Matter...at Least in an MMO.
)
Comments
Agreed. And I was in a guild in CoH where we had a couple of folks that took that to extremes. I still wince when I think back to some of the most amazingly awful characters that abounded. "Deep Fryd Justice" with his assless chaps. <shudder>
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
LOL. I spend SO much time on character customization, it's pretty bad. :P
Mostly this. There are a few good games with customization, but CoH I think, still wins. I'd spend hours just creating the character, and then hardly play them lol.
I spend quite a bit of time on character customization because I always try to create a digital representation of my physical self... just more muscular lol.
Or people who are capable of recognizing and appreciating aesthetics.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Character customization is extremely important personally....Otherwise we might as well devolve to stick figures.
The poorer the character customization is in games that feature it, the better the gameplay has to be to keep me playing.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Keep art and style in the museum or on the runway where they belong.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
</3
That's a mini-maxer position. Though I applaud them for their obsessive focus, I'm not that interested in getting the last half a percent efficiency, especially if it means wearing an ugly diaper. I require a bit more immersion than that from the game world. Otherwise, it gets to be just another 'spreadsheet war'.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
I do try to make my character look a bit different from the standard sets but I dont really spend that much time on how my character looks because on most games you never actually see your character as he is covered in different bits of eqipment so spending hours maknig the perfect looking character is pointless.
This!
Character looks is half the game for me. If I can't look good I don't play. Very few games have a good character creator. But I do remember how glad I was the first time I played City of Heroes and Villains and Age of Conan. Other MMORPGS i played before had a very lacking character creation, and quite a few I player later did to. Sure I like the one in, for example TERA, but it's so limited when you can't change your body at all. On of the reasons I really fell in love with Saints Row 3. But if I really want to look exactly the way I prefer, I have to go outside the gaming world and look to modeler programs such as Daz3d or Poser...
This is why I have high hopes for Black Desert Online. Gorgeous character creation!
I'm one of those people who has to have good character customization to really enjoy the game I'm playing. I'm not one of those people who furiously mashes the spacebar through all quest dialogue and races to get top level gear.
I've found a couple of games with good character customization: EVE Online is one of the best currently, even if you never really interact with your avatar. Another favorite character creator of mine is the Age of Conan creator.
Age of Conan, for a 2008 game, had customization options that still weren't available in other titles as recently as 2014. Even if you didn't get the exact hair, or tattoo options that you wanted, then you could simply visit the other factions "stylist" and buy what you wanted as early as lvl 16. My first and favorite character in AoC was an extremely short and skinny, flat-chested female necromancer. I also spent a good hour customizing her facial structure exactly the way I wanted. I always felt like she was my own creation.
Two of the worst I've encountered in recent memory were Wildstar and SWTOR. Both were extremely limited in options leaving my characters looking just about the same as everyone else.
No matter what I tried to do in Wildstar, I seemed to look like everyone around me. Even when I picked one of the little rat dudes and made what I thought would be a unique looking character, I ran into a near facsimile of myself within an hour.
SWTOR's character creator was especially, and almost comically bad. The body size slider was Malnourished-Anorexic-Teenager, Disproportionately-Almost-Normal (Which 80% of the player base picked), Goliath-The-Beefcaek and Jabba-the-Humanoid. There was nothing in between. Simply pick one of four absurd body sizes and no detailed customization of facial features, height, weight or fine tuning of muscle size. I couldn't believe it when I first saw it in open beta. I thought to myself "Surely a 2012 game isn't going to release with 2002 era character creation options". Boy was I wrong.
I agree that aesthetics are important. I always spend a long time in character creation trying to perfect my toon, and when the options are too limited it puts a dampener on the game before I have even started. I dislike having to settle for a half-arsed toon due to poor customisation options.
I will also happily purchase (reasonably priced) aesthetic items from a cs.
I think SWTOR with its wide range of cosmetic items (and their take-up by the community) proves that there is a large market out there for people who like to perfect their characters aesthetically.
EQ1: Kuhnnyng L'Yngwyst - Half-Elf Bard
CoH: Diamond Spike - Scrapper
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I always thought it would be interesting to see a fantasy MMO employ a similar customization system to CoH.
Neverwinter being made by Cryptic, imagine if they had done that instead of the normal gear system? Oh man... that would have been crazy.
I spend hours in character creator depending on how much you can do with it. WoW character creation takes 5 minutes because you cant do anything with it, but for example in EvE online in it's current form it took me 5 hours to create a character and a name with a few rerolls because the ingame character did not look just like I wanted it. That's 5 hours in a game where you cant even play as a character but as a space ship.
However, more important is gear customization. All kinds of transmogs or swtor style custom gear is very important to me, with dyes if possible. I'm one of those players who likes to create the perfect gear set (looks wise) and then stick to it for a long time. Nothing is more frustrating than having to equip some ugly rainbow armor because it's upgrade and you have to. One of the reasons I quit raiding in WoW after vanilla (just one reason though, I would not have enough time these days and too casual attitude anyway).
Character creator was a huge downer in TSW. Sometimes I'd wish to create a melee bruiser character, but you lack the option for muscular character, so I have to pick ranged since it just feels stupid running around as some wimp with a 2h hammer.
How about the steroid casters in WoW? Even Blizzard thinks they are ridiculous, because in their cinematics the casters are never meat mountains, but try to create a human male (or orc etc) caster in WoW who does not lift half a ton. It just looks stupid there's no way around it.
If someone does not care about these things and only care about gameplay, well good for them, I envy them, but to me it means a lot and I cant help it. There would be much more games to play if they had proper character creators and gear customization options.
Currently, my favourite character creation is in ESO. Not only do you have plenty of options for the character's base appearance (face, body, fat, height, etc.), you also can wear any combination of armour of any of the racial styles in any dye you want (so long you've unlocked them). And dyes are awarded for any kind of gameplay even.