This is our opportunity!

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So many of us here are veteran players, and have experienced all sorts of character creation. Along with that comes our new gamers, who are just getting their feet wet with the different varieties of gaming that exist. Well, here we all are, watching as a stunning game is coming to life. This Dev Team is amazing, and seems to genuinely want to know what we want as a player base. Let’s let them know!

For me, character creation can be one of the biggest reasons I even touch a game. Sure, there are much more major aspects tied to a great game, but I have to want to play the character I have created. In some games, we have options with body sliders, to give them their unique feel, while others try to offer many static options to keep the game simple still. Both of these work in their respective games, but I do not think I want body sliders here.

To go into further detail, I will reference a couple other games just to offer up an idea. It has already been mentioned that races will be a thing, letting us pick from whatever neat ideas have been given life in the world of Oort. With that, I fear that offering body sliders will take things from immersive to just ridiculous. Sure, these are my own opinions, but that’s what I want us to do here: Share our thoughts and values on the matter.

Now, World of Warcraft and Wildstar are quite different from a game like Oort Online, but the characters can still be just as important, if not more so. In those games, you create a character and design them based on set options within the game. No sliders are offered, yet both have major fan-followings. If one of the races is Avian, which I hope it is, look for ways to offer customization aside from how tall or small the character can be made. Instead look at feather patterns and colors, beak shapes and sizes, or maybe even the type of bird represented (owl, hawk, parrot, ect). Wildstar did this with things like the Aurin. Instead of forcing everyone to have a cat or rabbit, they allowed players to choose from a variety of ears. This offered a great way to show off a characters style and personality, without letting things get out of hand.

I’m not against body sliders, and love them in games like the Elder Scrolls series. However, I feel like this one could benefit much more from offering us set options, which could be added to over the course of time, rather than letting players get too crazy with sliders.

Thanks for reading all of this, as I see it was long. I feel very strongly about this subject, and want the Developers to know what we want, don’t want, and think would help things along.

4 Likes
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Thanks for sharing this, helpful to know.

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nothing, bothers me more, than not having a proper character creation, that i agree with, but i want to be able to customize to my liking, i want options so i can look unique, even if there are 1 million players i am me, i wont have a clone running around, that is why i love sliders and thing they are needed.

in this game i can imagine it being kinda hard though because of collision with blocks and the like, but still. character customization needs to make me feel like i can look how i want,

that means customizing colors, sizes, body types and the like, i use ALOT of time on customization and styling, and i am going to use alot of time on looking at my character ingame and admire armor, so if they make it like wow which you think is good, then they need many many options or it just feels cheap. nothing turns me more off from a game than ‘‘you have 2 body types, 3 skin colors, 3 hair styles and 2 hair colors… enjoy’’ if i see that, i will uninstall INSTANTLY.

I do like how wildstar did it, the biggest problem was just that only 1 body style looked proper, but again you use it as an example and it is kinda bad, cause although not as excessive as things like APB, wildstar still does have sliders.

this is something i am really really passionate about, it is one of the make or breaks for the game, if i can get a fair option of options to customize my look like GW2 or wildstar and then have a dye system and the ability to choose how my armor looks i will be happy. cause i feel different, i can express myself, i have an entire post about dyes and i give examples on how different even 1 character, with 1 armor set can look because of the massive amount of dyes.

@ben please do not rush this part like most games does now a days -.-’

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I doubt they’ll rush it, the look of their world is quite stunning already, they wouldn’t want to ruin that. I love customization too, like my friends are like “meh hair, make em buff, now where do I kill stuff”, but I even spend time customizing my character in Dark Souls and considering how often my character is ever human or how often I see his face that sounds ridiculous.

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I would be ok with it if they just added something like:

  • 4-6 base forms for every race.
  • 10-15 different types ears/horns/hairtype/crowns/facial features/that sort of things
  • A few different skin patterns
  • 50-100 colors to custemise feather/skin/scales.

This would give a huge amount of different looks available

If we go with a bare minimum of this that would mean

4 base forms with 3 different categories of smaller features that have 10 variations each * 10 * 10 * 10 * 4 skin/feather patterns with 3 different customizable colored part of said pattern * 50 * 50 * 50

That is 12.000 different versions of the race before coloring and 1.500.000.000 different looks for a single race after coloring the patterns.

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I just want to be a blue eyed blonde haired red scaled human with hooves a tail a big long beard and an small golden earring with an eyepatch and pirate hat

Not to much to ask for right?

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Eye color is quite reasonable

Hair/feather/horn changes is reasonable too

This is a quite big change to a race though and probably not something you should expect before the time have a lot of time to do such things

We are not going to have the classic races

The ability to add a tail is actually quite cool and the same counts for adding other types of feet :slight_smile:

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Feel like I’ve said this before but: It’s not about rushing – we’re not trying to cut corners or intentionally make something unappealing. It’s completely about balance and clever design – finding the customisations that give us the biggest difference for the most efficient cost. We could spend all of our time making the worlds coolest, richest most expressive character creator, but then we wouldn’t have time to make Protectors, creatures, Titans, Beacons, props, shops, currency, trading, GUI etc. There’s not point having a cool character you can’t do anything with. We’re not Wildstar, that’s a project that cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

We’re not going to be offering hundreds of completely unique heads, bodies and skins in the first version. But we know it’s important – it’s very important to us as we’ve said before – trust us to find the right balance.

1 Like
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But all races are humanoid 2 legs 2 arms pair of eyes some fleshy meat bone structure and some organs
Cant deny :grinning:

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There is quite a bug difference from a humanoid and a human though :slight_smile:

Even though the charr from Guild wars 2 are humanoids they are hardly humans:

"Charr_Group"_concept_art_2.jpg1024×558 87.8 KB

The same goes for goblins:

Goblin picture.jpg411×554 78.2 KB

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I dont need sliders to form my face. just give us components to add/change like the horns, feathers and stuff … the ability to change the color can be also very useful to get a unique look. If you let us have the option to not only chose one of x colors, but give the ability to mix the colors with sliders, there will be even more possibilities (and compared to sliders to form the faces this one would be easy to develop :wink: )

1 Like
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Problem about color sliders is that you can be sure that you are going to have people who make characters of one single color in the most ugly color they can find.

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This sounds wonderful to me! I think that’s why I brought up sliders as well. I know games like Wildstar were super expensive to make, and I wouldn’t want everything thrown into one area on this game. I don’t know enough about game design to really know what it takes to do one thing or another, but I remember people bringing up body sliders on that game. At one point, a developer mentioned how it would make things more difficult with sliders because of how it would affect the way every piece of gear looked or fitted on the characters.

I have full confidence in you all, as you have just amazed me thus far. We don’t need hundreds of options, just the right ones to fit the job. I can’t wait to see creatures in the game!

1 Like
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yeah, may be. but that would be their own problem. Not mine. In case of danger -> Close beacon ;D … If somebody want to look that style, let them. Cloths/armor may also be dyeable, so if they cant be ugly by skin, they will chose the second way :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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That’s why we kinda talked about a preset color pallet you can choose the colors from.