Curious. Not just cos I think they’d be the coolest and most impactful additions to character customisation, but because I also want to understand the process more.
Would be lovely if the CMs could forward this to the art dev team for comment. What’s involved, is it a realistic possibliity?
From 6.0, so much work went into faces to give expressions, but it doesn’t feel like the player has really reaped the rewards of this. Setting expression in character creation and via emote once logged in would fix that.
Curiosities
Age sliders - some races (especially nightborne/Night elf males - ould really love this, but in theory all human looking races (human, elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, trolls, goblins)
Expression Sliders: - i remember the gnome complaints back in the 6.0, couldn’t players choose their expression instead in CC? Then change them with a /emote once in game?
Did they ever consider live portraits? You character does all these cool expressions while attacking or casting, being hit etc, but you never get to see it cos you view the back. But if there was a live option for portraits that reflected your characters face in real time - that would be significant.
Body sliders - what’s the deal here? Huge request are they that hard to do?
I noticed humans have large (kul’tiran), normal and thin options in NPcs.
Night elves have normal and skinny option (via the Nightborne).
Trolls have skinny (the norm), bulkier (amani/ice trolls) and massive (beserkers) - is this too difficult to give to players?
Face types: Notice humans got this toggle, alters the bone structure. would be nice if more races got this, I’m thinking Elves and dwarves, trolls and orcs mainly. Gnomes are too tiny. Maybe a 3 setting:
Skinny, Angular, Round? I know I’d certainly appreciate it.
Well, any answers would be nice, if you are also curious, or would like some of these? Please reply
Body Size
Just as a start, how hard is it to have the races vary their body size. Kul’tirans at least can have the normal human size option? Nightborne can at least have the night elf body size option (void elvs got blood elf skin/hair tones - I’m sure some have puton some weight now they’re eating real food, and surely the Arcan’dor has helped that too - maybe night elves can get skinny option for a Highborne customisation.)
The Amani/Ice troll models really just look like a bulkider version of the troll model, is it so hard to have this slider available?
Couldn’t hte slider just swap the model - at least for those 3 races who already seem to have size variations in game.
Expressions
Some races would have a larger range than others, furries like Worgen, Tauren, Vulpera are quite limited, Pandas have a bit ore flexibility. But the skin humanoids could all potentially have this.
Age
Oh, can’t wait to have this on the Nightborne and Night elf toons, especially the males, but also across the board.
Any idea if wow has limitations on that? They’ve changed so much over the eyars, would it be veyr hard to do now, or much easier?
I personally think it’s definitely worth doing, but they have to decide.
Considering how they made Kul Tirans an allied race I would say that it’s set up not to allow hitboxes and all the other stuff to me morphed for differing sizes.
All the transmogs have to be reskinned to allow all of those sliders. It’s not a trivial task, and considering the number of transmogs there are… mission impossible.
Basic percentage model size sliders could’ve been in the game in 2004. The technology is in the engine already and demonstrated regularly. You’d just have to limit it within reason so that you don’t get 8ft humans and 5ft tauren.
If so, couldn’t at teh very least Kul’tirans get normal human, and both human and kul’tiran get thin humans (forsaken rig?)
Also coudln’t both night elves and Nightborne get each others’ body sizes as that work is already done?
i’d like to have the Amani and Ice troll physique, it’s clearly in the game, , but as it’s not playable i guess thexmog adjustment hasn’t been done yet.
So maybe not every race can get it at first.
But surely expression and age sliders should be possible???
Honestly, it shouldn’t be hard. Let’s say 8 settings are available. 8 new pieces of integer data to carry with each character. Short integers, even, since there won’t be more than 256 choices of waist size. So 8 bytes of metadata - or 64 bits, if you will. That is it as far as network load goes, and it only has to be sent at the point a player first becomes visible.
After that, it’s all down to the client. You’re in Stormwind. There are 50 players around you, each of them with 8 bytes of metadata. 400 bytes of data. And from that, your local game client can work out how tall, wide, scarred or tattooed they are.
I’m not generally a fan of body sliders. You either get a game filled to the brim with hideous bimbos, or a game where in order to avoid those, the sliders are so restricted that it deletes their importance.
I think in terms of personalization WoW is pretty good. 99% of what you see is the armor, and transmog does indeed help you define your character.
If the game wasn’t built up from the beginning to support dynamic rigs, it’s a huge undertaking to implement them later on. It’ll require basically rebuilding the entire character creation. Yeah, different body types exist, but those are all premade, nothing is dynamic.
Aren’t those supposed to be different faces? Sometimes i like the nose and cheekbone shape of a face, and would like to make it younger or older depending on what i’m going for.
Also expression too, unless it’s the one face that they are giving in different modes as expression and age…
Checked, it isn’t some faces are clearly different, different cheekbone structure, lips, nose. The new human variations also give something.
TBH, why do you want a head customization at all?
You play with yout character far-far away with scrow, just like HotS or Dota. You dont see your character face at all And most of the time you use helmets. Its just a stupid customization , IMO.
Its useful only for RP.
I never saw anyones face for years in BGs. They all wear helmets. I see only the eyes.
Admittedly, I am quite disappointed at the customization we are getting. I kinda expected more?
I’m annoyed at the lack of scars, tattoos, hairstyles, different face types etc.
We’re still ALL going to look very alike and we’ll still be seeing duplicates of one another, simply because customization is still very, very limited.
I truly hope this won’t stop them and that they’ll continue expanding it.
White Worgen? Pretty sure more than 60% playerbase will go white worgen. Faces are quite literally almost all the same minus the eye color, so again, you’ll be seeing many duplicates, with mog being the only distinctive feature.
What about more hairstyles/mane-styles for Worgen?
Humans are getting it quite diversive with different face types now at least, but male humans are still pretty bleh imo, you still can’t make a human like Arthas, Turalyon, Anduin etc…let alone a human similar to Wrathion lol.
Draenei males are suffering from horrid build as always, they feel like refrigerators and look horrid in any armor type. All faces have same expression, there’s no diversity in facial features at all. Can we have a face that is NOT frowning for once?
Well, I don’t RP, and how my character’s face looks is it’s most important feature, and I never wear helms.
it’s the selfie age
Tbh, some do seem a lot less complete than others, some people have like 3 variations of each eye colour, others only 1, some have scars others don’t etc.
I can only hope that they’ll fill in more options in time.
Game won’t get sliders unless they’ll rebuild it on a new engine. Best you could hope for now is several body types to select from and more face variety.
This is what I really hope expression sliders and face shape sliders would alleviate.
Same face syndrome can be helped significantly. Humans now have option to change the face structure in 9.0
I would love to see a slim, angular, round option added to the 3 alterations humans get for all the human-like races - i.e. elves, draenei, orcs, trolls, dwarves, goblins
I think it would be a significant and very impactful upgrade, more so than nearly all of the new options we got. But tha’ts just me.
This should easily be possible right? If you have the grpahics power for it, - either a cmaera mero set on your face
Or a duplicate character mirror that’s just a head
I would think they can do this, and should want to.
Its not hard at all if the game is designed that way but as wow is so old and has so many armor sets and pieces most armor/weapons would clip even more than they do now and everything that would have been created before sliders would probably look just like the armor looks on pandaren.
It is always difficult to retrofit features that game wasn’t designed with in mind. Having sliders for age or expression would be possible but would require pelnty of changes to how animations are done.
For body sliders, each body type has to be a completely brand new character model with full rig, brand new skin color textures, brand new face textures, brand new meshes for hairstyles and other customizations. It is as much work as making a whole new playable race.
Lastly Face Shape for humans is done in a very primitive way. They are completley different head submodels. So it clearly shows there are some limitation to how this kind of slight body modifications can be made.
And most of the time you use helmets. Its just a stupid customization , IMO.