Updated player race models

[Werevixen.1352]

First off, if this is a commonly posted thread, I didn't see it on the first 4 pages of this section, nor did any forum- or Google searches net any similar results.

I can understand that some things in the game still look very 2012, but it feels like the player race models have run their course. They look horribly dated, especially when sitting on one of the much more modern, fancy mounts we have nowadays. I'd really love it, and it would make the game more pleasant to look at day-to-day, if maybe the four player races received a newer model with higher detail and polygon counts for people with the hardware beef to handle it? Since all models are a base upon which textures and features (hair, faces, etc) are applied, I feel like this would be a moderately-sized undertaking at most which could have a decent effect on staying power for new players- as graphics aren't the end-all and be-all of a game, but this is a character we are looking at for 99% of the time in some capacity.

A total of 8 models, updated but identically proportioned to make them match armour and helmets and the like, maybe? Or am I underestimating the scope of a task like this? Regardless, seems like nothing bad could come of it.

[Blocki.4931]

If anything looks outdated it would be old armor sets. Player models are perfectly fine.

[Einsof.1457]

This game is gorgeous. I'd rather anet focus on actual meaningful content than this sort of trivial thing.

[Tommo Chocolate.5870]

Four player races? Eight models? I think you might have forgotten someone...

I think this is a reasonable suggestion, but Ihave no idea how much work it would be. I don't think it would affect me much, since I have a pretty old computer, and I play zoomed out as far as possible most of the time.

[Werevixen.1352]

@Tommo Chocolate.5870 said:Four player races? Eight models? I think you might have forgotten someone...

I think this is a reasonable suggestion, but Ihave no idea how much work it would be. I don't think it would affect me much, since I have a pretty old computer, and I play zoomed out as far as possible most of the time.

I forgot about plant human.

[Tanner Blackfeather.6509]

In general, people do not take kindly to involountary changes to their player characters' looks. ANet did that once in GW1 to make lip/mouth movement during cutscenes possible (it apparently wasn't at launch) - there was a lot of unhappy players feeling their character's looks were destroyed.

Also, I'm curious which race you're forgetting...

[Werevixen.1352]

@"Tanner Blackfeather.6509" said:In general, people do not take kindly to involountary changes to their player characters' looks. ANet did that once in GW1 to make lip/mouth movement during cutscenes possible (it apparently wasn't at launch) - there was a lot of unhappy players feeling their character's looks were destroyed.

Also, I'm curious which race you're forgetting...

I'm not talking "changes", I'm talking polying up the models. It can be done just fine without a director that wants to go all SOGA on beloved models and risk the company money.

[LucianDK.8615]

player models seriously needs to be upgraded to be high definition. They really show their age.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Werevixen.1352 said:

@"Tanner Blackfeather.6509" said:In general, people do

not

take kindly to involountary changes to their player characters' looks. ANet did that once in GW1 to make lip/mouth movement during cutscenes possible (it apparently wasn't at launch) - there was

a lot

of unhappy players feeling their character's looks were destroyed.

Also, I'm curious which race you're forgetting...

I'm not talking "changes", I'm talking polying up the models. It can be done just fine without a director that wants to go all SOGA on beloved models and risk the company money.

If "polying up" models doesn't make them look different, why would ANet do it? (And why would anyone want that?) And if it does make them look different, some players will be annoyed. Personally, I think that's a storm worth weathering, but only if ANet does more than "poly up" models.

More important to me: what other changes will we have to give up to give them time to focus on updating the looks? What sort of hit to performance will this create?

The OP hasn't made a compelling argument that this change is worth prioritizing over other artwork changes.

[Werevixen.1352]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Werevixen.1352 said:

@"Tanner Blackfeather.6509" said:In general, people do

not

take kindly to involountary changes to their player characters' looks. ANet did that once in GW1 to make lip/mouth movement during cutscenes possible (it apparently wasn't at launch) - there was

a lot

of unhappy players feeling their character's looks were destroyed.

Also, I'm curious which race you're forgetting...

I'm not talking "changes", I'm talking polying up the models. It can be done just fine without a director that wants to go all SOGA on beloved models and risk the company money.

If "polying up" models doesn't make them look different, why would ANet do it? (And why would anyone want that?) And if it does make them look different, some players will be annoyed. Personally, I think that's a storm worth weathering, but only if ANet does more than "poly up" models.

More important to me: what other changes will we have to give up to give them time to focus on updating the looks? What sort of hit to performance will this create?

The OP hasn't made a compelling argument that this change is worth prioritizing over other artwork changes.

Now you're splitting hairs. Of course it would make them look different from the current ones, it's obvious I meant that it wouldn't alter how they look beyond increasing model quality. Seriously, why would this bother you? It's not like they'd force a better model on you- there's already an option to switch to an even crummier model to help those Russian coal-powered Compaqs.

It's good on you that you don't feel like a better-looking model would help, but throwing the people that do want some eye candy under the bus out of fear of (ideally, incredibly minor) change is just ridiculous. And what other changes are you waiting on right now specifically? And if you pick the low-poly model right now, does that still impact your performance if other people have a choice (the answer is "no")?

I did make a compelling argument, that we are looking at these characters an awful lot of our time player. Almost all of our time playing, you could say, and a game looking outdated can definitely hurt its appeal to new players, as many, many old MMOs can attest to, because their gameplay is still bangin'.

[Batel.9206]

@"Tanner Blackfeather.6509" said:In general, people do not take kindly to involountary changes to their player characters' looks.

[still steaming over the cathar skin color fiasco in SWTOR] Yeah... *

Anyway, I think GW2 player models are fine, but I agree with Blocki: some of the old armor models need updated textures. They look blocky and pixellated, especially when compared to the newer, detailed armor we've been getting lately. The player models, however, seem great; they all look clearly defined - nothing is pixellated or "fuzzy" - and the textures in the hair and faces are really nice, especially with charr fur and sylvari leaves.

*For those curious (extremely long, tangential, and most likely pointless rant):

! SWTOR has a race known as cathar. They are basically cat-humans. Think humans with somewhat feline-like faces, pointed ears, and cat-like eyes. And fangs. And fur. They look pretty cool, actually...but a glitch was introduced in 5.0 - two years ago come December - that made all female cathar's heads colored differently than their bodies. The brown-tinted fur options had much more orange in the face colors, and the white/gray/black options were far paler than the body fur color. My cathar gal, with medium brown fur, now suddenly looked like her face was the color of a sunburnt carrot. She looked hideous. For an entire year, I campaigned on the forums and provided examples of how it should be - that the head color should be changed BACK TO the body color, NOT the other way 'round. A few devs even responded to me, assuring me that they'd sent my thread, with its specific examples, on to the bug-fix team! ...for an entire YEAR AND A HALF, nothing got fixed. I pleaded with the devs. I outright begged them. I sent a PM to one of them and was ignored. I gave up.! And then, a year and a half after the bug was first introduced, it got fixed! .....so that the body colors are now the hideous new head colors. Exactly the opposite of what should have happened.! So now my cathar lady looks like a sunburnt carrot all over.! HURRAY FOR SWTOR'S BUG-FIXING/LISTENING SKILLS. And since only a tiny handful of people have even noticed this (cathar isn't a terribly popular race, from what I understand), clearly it will never be fixed.

! Another involuntary change disaster was attempting to "update" the eye texture across all PC's and NPC's. The new eye textures looked like someone was liberally applying anime sparklies directly to the poor characters' eyeballs. It was SO sparkly, that you couldn't actually see their eye colors in some cases! (I still have screenshots saved from that...) Thanks to a furious outcry all over the forums, it was fixed! ...with new, incredibly dull/discolored eye colors, and no option to revert back to the "old' non-sparkly ones! And most characters' eyes looked horribly jaundiced. Eww... More fixes very quickly followed, and it eventually settled on eye colors/textures that are still discolored, but not as noticeably. :/ They still look worse than the old, perfectly suitable textures, in my opinion.

So! All that ranting to say...involuntary changes to characters' looks, with no option to change back to what it was (or opt out of the change entirely), is not a good idea. (And those are just two examples from one single game...I'm sure there are dozens, if not hundreds other examples from other games.)

[Edit: Quoted the wrong person! Sorry.]

[Yargesh.4965]

People don't get a little upset by even minor changes, they go bat shit crazy. You can still see people on this forum complaining about relatively minor things 5 or 6 years after the fact. Changing the character models would be more than a minor change as well.

[BlueJin.4127]

I think the models look great. Then again, I’m comparing it to WoW, which looks like garbage, IMO. GW2’s human models make WoW’s new human models look like primitive apes.

Regardless, any visual upgrades are always welcome. One way to upgrade without causing an uproar, is add more customization options that don’t replace old ones. And hey, imagine the money this would bring in for Anet from all the makeover kits players will buy. ^^

I do really wish Charr would get updated, though, Their textures, in particular, look kind of muddy.

[Werevixen.1352]

@BlueJin.4127 said:I think the models look great. Then again, I’m comparing it to WoW, which looks like garbage, IMO. GW2’s human models make WoW’s new human models look like primitive apes.

Regardless, any visual upgrades are always welcome. One way to upgrade without causing an uproar, is add more customization options that don’t replace old ones. And hey, imagine the money this would bring in for Anet from all the makeover kits players will buy. ^^

I do really wish Charr would get updated, though, Their textures, in particular, look kind of muddy.

I mean, having a poly'd-up model wouldn't be something you could put into a creation kit. And comparing any MMORPG to WoW is a bit unfair, because Minecraft stands to win in the looks department against WoW.

But Charr and Asura in particular, which often have more exposed skin than other races, suffer most under the current outdated models, sitting on a raptor as a Charr makes the difference in age between models so sickeningly unsightly.

[Danikat.8537]

@Werevixen.1352 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Werevixen.1352 said:

@"Tanner Blackfeather.6509" said:In general, people do

not

take kindly to involountary changes to their player characters' looks. ANet did that once in GW1 to make lip/mouth movement during cutscenes possible (it apparently wasn't at launch) - there was

a lot

of unhappy players feeling their character's looks were destroyed.

Also, I'm curious which race you're forgetting...

I'm not talking "changes", I'm talking polying up the models. It can be done just fine without a director that wants to go all SOGA on beloved models and risk the company money.

If "polying up" models doesn't make them look different, why would ANet do it? (And why would anyone want that?) And if it does make them look different, some players will be annoyed. Personally, I think that's a storm worth weathering, but only if ANet does more than "poly up" models.

More important to me: what other changes will we have to give up to give them time to focus on updating the looks? What sort of hit to performance will this create?

The OP hasn't made a compelling argument that this change is worth prioritizing over other artwork changes.

Now you're splitting hairs. Of course it would make them look different from the current ones, it's obvious I meant that it wouldn't alter how they look beyond increasing model quality. Seriously, why would this bother you? It's not like they'd force a better model on you- there's already an option to switch to an even crummier model to help those Russian coal-powered Compaqs.

It's good on you that you don't feel like a better-looking model would help, but throwing the people that do want some eye candy under the bus out of fear of (ideally, incredibly minor) change is just ridiculous. And what other changes are you waiting on right now specifically? And if you pick the low-poly model right now, does that still impact your performance if other people have a choice (the answer is "no")?

I did make a compelling argument, that we are looking at these characters an awful lot of our time player. Almost all of our time playing, you could say, and a game looking outdated can definitely hurt its appeal to new players, as many, many old MMOs can attest to, because their gameplay is still bangin'.

As other people have said any change to player characters will bother some people. If you change how the models look, especially increasing the level of detail, it will affect how the sliders and other customisation choices look. Maybe my characters eyes look fine now, but increasing the polygon count changes the sharp edges to curves and now they look droopy, which makes her look half asleep all the time. That would be a horrible change, even if it is technically an improvement because there are more polygons in the model than there were before.

That's not necessarily a reason not to do it - but I think they'd have to give players plenty of notice of the changes and at least 1 free total makeover kit per character or ideally a week or so of free changes. Otherwise the whole thing will come across as a way to force sales of total makeover kits to fix "improvements" forced on players against their will.

If they gave us a way to fix our characters after they're changed I wouldn't mind it, although as other people have said I think the original armour sets are looking more dated than the characters themselves. But it's certainly not a big deal to me and if it takes time away from...pretty much anything else, especially new releases, I'd prefer Anet didn't do it.

Admittedly graphics don't bother me in general. If I can see what's going on then it's fine with me. I've been replaying Baldur's Gate recently and I don't mind at all that it's a fuzzy top-down view with the bare minimum of animation, because the game is fun anyway. If a game look pretty that's a bonus, but I don't think it has to have the latest attempt at hyper-realistic graphics to look pretty, and that can actually be a negative because then it starts to look dated much faster than games that take a more artistic approach, like GW2 does. (If you look out for them you can see brush strokes on a lot of the textures.)