SWTOR
- Thread starter Shonuff
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Well, maintence is over and character slots are 600 cartel coins each, also have Brand new Flavor of the week cartel pack for sale.
I always saw the point of view from day one that if they were too lazy to take advantage of the awesomeness of Star Wars races, then they were going about creating the game entirely in the wrong way. It shows laziness, and not just towards races, but the entire game. The same was obvious from simple things being taken out as well, like no swimming or day/night cycles. I couldn't really give a shit about those things, but it shows a lack of development effort.
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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I'm not particularly fond of this game or EA, but from a character model perspective, if they used unified character bodys, it's supposed to let them design gear faster. So if they make a new set of armor, it automatically fits all character models.
The alternative would be to have 12-20 races with different shapes and models. Every piece of gear would need to be designed for 12-20 races x however many sizes of height. That is tedious and time consuming from a developer point of view. It becomes a huge barrier to putting new gear in the game. Lessons learned from EQ2
The alternative would be to have 12-20 races with different shapes and models. Every piece of gear would need to be designed for 12-20 races x however many sizes of height. That is tedious and time consuming from a developer point of view. It becomes a huge barrier to putting new gear in the game. Lessons learned from EQ2
TOR came up with an elegant solution, they made gear so ugly an un-starwarsy that no one wore it. Best looking skins for many classes was first tier oranges.
sakkath
Trakanon Raider
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Best looking skin is the republic dancer outfit ^.^
Wish I could get it on my sith juggernaut, the empire dancer outfit looks terrible.
Sterling
El Presidente
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Can get it on Nar Shadaa at social 2 at the cantina. Slave dancer outfit it's very slightly different colored from the pub dancer one but whatever.
Cantatus
Lord Nagafen Raider
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GW2 has 5 fairly unique looking races with Norn and Human being the most similar looking, but still distinct enough to be able to tell a difference from a reasonable distance away. So, there are 10 race/gender combos. However, they designed the races in a way where they only needfourvariations needed for each item of armor armor added: Human/Norn/Sylvari Males, Human/Norn/Sylvari Females, Charr Males/Females, and Asura Males/Females.
My point? You can have distinct looking races while still cutting the corners enough to not need unique armor for every race/gender combo. Hell, way back when, even EverQuest did a decent job at this.
sakkath
Trakanon Raider
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Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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I didnt say its not possible. Its one of those early designs of a game that needs to be planned for. If not, you get what I described above.
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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And they probably have papedoll designs that allow the artists to only design 1 set of armor that scale to anybody size...just like I said. That is the way it has to be done in order to put out gear at a decent pace. But even still, all wow models are humanoid. They dont have any models in the shapes of some of the aliens in star wars.
moontayle
Golden Squire
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I would be surprised if, by this point, they didn't have a tool created which allows them to make a single set of armor for humans that then shifts size based upon preset values to fit every other race. At least, that's what I would expect a game that's 9 years old to operate.
Cantatus
Lord Nagafen Raider
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ToR currently has 2 race/gender armor types. Adding a few more to make there be some diversity wouldn't create what you describe. It wouldn't jump from 2 to "12-20", but likely far less. I mean, at most, any additional race would just add two to the existing number (one for male, one for female), but like I pointed out, there are many other ways to cut corners than just going with one body structure for each gender (like just altering the head in the case of Bothans or the heads, hands, and feet for a race like Selkath).
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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Way to miss the point of what I actually said. I didnt claim SWTOR had 12-20 character models. Im talking about why they have humanoid character models. And I am also making a point about gear design in MMOs in general.
To reiterate, you can do one of 2 things with gear design:
1. Make all your characters have a similar paperdoll frame that allows you to create one piece of gear for any character or height. Games that do this are Rift, VG, TSW, and I suspect WoW and SWTOR.
or
2. Make the same piece of armor individually for every race/class/height combo in the game. This way is long and tedious. The only game I know that does it this way for sure is EQ2. That's why they don't get any truly unique armor very often. It's usually just retinting of the same armors.