Thursday, September 24, 2009

MMOs...the way we look

Humans in MMOs have often been somewhat odd. The men have too many muscles and the women have too many boobs (thats a problem??!!?? Buh duh duh). Some people want to play with these kinds of characters. Others probably dont. Birdfall has been talking a lot about customization lately and for me thinking. We need more customization in MMOS.

This is specifically for our characters. We shouldnt have to have a musclebound mage or priest.....especially when they have 40 strength. You should be able to create a skinny mage if you want....or a fat priest. Sure there are the other races that are already ugly, but you should be able to make your human avatar as ugly as you are :)

For a warrior toon, I would probably ideally make a male character that would be ugly as sin. Tatoos across his body, a perpetually broken nose, scar running down his face. Perhaps an eye missing. They are warriors and have been in many many battles. They should be ugly. I would also make mine with a beer gut. He would fight hard and drink harder. These little customizations are what make a character that much more fleshed out. In WoW, you can basically choose skin color and hair style. Gear will make you look a bit different, but many end-game characters are identical because they want the same gear.

The second part of customization should be your gear. You should be able to change the color, add spikes, effects, etc. It would be awesome to make your own gear that looks like your own gear. You may want to wear a pink leather gimp suit. You may want to wear a suit of spike clad plate mail. You should have the choice.

Warhammer had some of the things I wanted as far as customization....just not enough. And the gameplay sucked. If we could get a character creator that would let us drag things to places we wanted and expand them or shrink them. You could have a three inch scar on your face...or a 3 foot scar down your leg.

I love WoW as a game. Unfortunately the customization is really at the bottom of the MMO heap. Maybe it will change a bit more with future expansions. They already added the barber shop and perhaps a dance studio in the future. Maybe we will be getting more customization as well....and will be able to make ourselves ugly without stooping to the Hulk Hogan hair cut.

6 comments:

Tarsus said...

Fully agree with you on the Humans bit - they could use some sliders.

I will say, however, that increasing levels of customization will also increase the power of the machine needed to run the game. How much, and what kind of customization would determine the price. One of WoW's strengths thus far has been it's system requirements are modest by comparison to other MMOs.

Darraxus said...

That is true. That is the very reason I can play WoW with my wife on our crappy old computer. The graphic requirements arent incredibly steep.

Arioch said...

I only want this level of customization if they can fix the character creation screen.

The colors and lighting are way off from in-game appearance and you can't zoom in on the face to see what you're doing.

Spruce up that interface and it's golden.

thedoctor said...

" He would fight hard and drink harder."

Spoken like a true dwarf. I love it.

Fish said...

I've been picking races for chars for the longest time based on what they look like. I avoid taurens because I think they look dumb, I do agree BE paladins should be more buff than human priests. . .

What's my main Again? said...

I agree I would love to see this kind of customization in a game... but I also understand how complicated it is.

As it is every piece of gear... numbering into the thousands has to be designed to be worn by 20 body types (10 races, 2 sexes).

It would be impossible to individually customize each piece of gear to match the changes suggested. To have the calculations be done by the game itself would require a much newer graphics engine and as a result a more powerful machine.

I've always hated the human models the most out of all of the races... well and dwarfs.