Harmonixer

Of all people, I should be fully in support of the idea of transforming into demons/monster and what have you. But I'm willing to be it has absolutely nothing to do with that, and is unlikely that it would ever happen. Not to mention, you don't need to be au ra to make any sort of void related transformations. Temptations are available to all races when you consider things like Haukke Manor's lore. Even then, the change that happens there is pretty conditional. It's possible to pick up more 'demon-like' traits I should think- in terms of personality and mannerisms. Like some miqotes that purr or whatever. There are plenty of fighters out there that have animal traits, mostly in namesake and in costume. OP is right, it is for some interesting discussion but I don't think it's ever going to be a thing. Sans the examples I listed, and those are extremely conditional. It's early to still, but I really hope they don't go this rate. If you think the rage about their race being introduced to the game in the first place is loud, wait till people who don't play them find out they may be super snowflakes.

It was an amusing mental image of a incredibly burly au ra male cowering behind Erik while a Lala was screaming at him. Someone should draw that. And @Taki'a_Venn We are at as much of a loss as you are on the subject. There's not much to work with at the moment. Perhaps once we get naming conventions later next month! Your best bet is the Benchmark character creator and official websites.

I'd have to dig up the dev post, but this is true. SE won't do it because of VRAM limitations, particularly on consoles. Ah, that's a serious bummer. Another thing to add to the list for 4.0 then! Personally I found that recoloring all of my chatbox text and making specific chat windows for everything to be quite helpful. I also tend to fiddle with my posts in notepad. Making notes and writing down things I find important so I don't lose my place. It's more multi tasking, but breaking up the info into smaller bits could work.

I'm mostly fine with everything. I don't think I cause trouble intentionally. My only gripe is censoring myself. I understand it's out of respect for other posters and I'll dial it back if it can be helped but I don't think bad words are that harmful and shouldn't be treated as such. I like to think most people here can handle it and I'll likely speak here how I would speak to my own blood. Obviously I won't be replacing my vocabulary exclusively with profanity but the occasional one here and there shouldn't raise any eyebrows I hope.

If I'm guessing right this will be a very different title in a few years. Which, is a blanket statement of sorts but... It seems like they have a lot in mind for this, it's just a matter of manpower and hardware. They are clearly ambitious and want this to grow and I have every reason to believe they will do it given the time needed. It's fairing a lot better than other titles are, that's for sure. I'm guessing the next installment after Heavensward is going to be system improvements, existing world expansion and mostly what will be called a 'filler' expansion, but actually work out better in the long run. Lots of lore, lots of quality of life changes but lacking in 'new' content.

I voted an auto-pruning system. But come to think of it, a 'ticker' of some kind could be pretty awesome and pretty helpful. I admit, a fair amount of the threads and things I look at come from stuff on quick bars. A way to find fast to the point RP in progress would be really nice. Is there going to be a tag system in place? In case we have an overflow. Be nice to tag things a certain way to know what to expect. Things like rolling, casual, plot etc. Just a thought! I don't know what will work and what won't. Eitherway I like the start of this.

It's truly a crime. More hair options would be amazing. I'm still trying to figure out why we wear sandals everywhere tho. If this was ment in any seriousness, I think it's something to do with how the models are rigged. They are always in some kind of 'shoe' and unable to be rendered otherwise. The texture would stretch out and look weird over a foot mesh. It bugs the hell out of me too, but like I said- pretty sure it's the model itself being a problem. I know there is probably a really good reason for it, but I miss being able to go bare foot. I would love to see a pair of shoes in the game that lets you appear to be barefoot, but I don't know if that's possible. Technically, there is. It's possible to make a 'barefoot' shoe. The problem is, it would have to equipable. Then you couldn't wear anything on the bottom, plus possible stretching textures and seams where the 'shoe' ends. I strongly believe it's easier for the modelers to have a 'shoe' on at all times because of (coming full circle now) PS3. It's part shortcut, part hardware. Unrelated, but related. I have reason to believe the Au Ra males use male Miqote bones for their rigging. It's eerily similar in the videos I've seen. I hope it changes, it's the only thing I don't like. Very bouncy and sort of out of place considering their frame is so large. If it is, again it would be a shortcut because they wouldn't have to build a new model completely. At this rate, they are just really burly stretched out cats for the males. But I like to think there's some more than that. We'll see though.

It's truly a crime. More hair options would be amazing. I'm still trying to figure out why we wear sandals everywhere tho. If this was ment in any seriousness, I think it's something to do with how the models are rigged. They are always in some kind of 'shoe' and unable to be rendered otherwise. The texture would stretch out and look weird over a foot mesh. It bugs the hell out of me too, but like I said- pretty sure it's the model itself being a problem.

But that's the rub -- for the Au Ra I wanted something tough and rugged. I don't normally play cutesy or small, I normally play big buff warrior women who can handle themselves, or at the least are old and washed up but can still bring it when needed. The idea that the proliferation of miqo'te are discouraging the devs from creating more races like roes or highlanders makes me cringe, because that's what I typically enjoy playing. That's what I would have preferred for my Au Ra. Zhi works, for what I made her for. But that's not the only type of character I want to play, aesthetically. Ahh, I see now. Now, that makes me wonder... How the Au Ra age. For males, there's the one face that suggests some age. The placement of the horns and nose, eyes etc. For females, there flat out isn't one. I think you'd have to do something with the facepaint. But yes, you are flat out lacking the options to depict such a thing for females. In that regard, I understand. Hmm, now I'm wondering if they age like other races. So much lore stuff that needs to be explained to me. I mean, their demon-like right? Guuaaah. I'm going to be thinking about this all day.

My hope is that if Heavensward does really really well maybe the next xpac will have more breathing room in terms of art direction. Though, really, I suppose it might be grounds for a "keep doing what you're doing" mindset. Argh. It's frustrating to me because I picked catgirl because I wanted a runty street kid. And I like cats. And it was something that was very different from what I normally played: tall, muscular badasses (WoW troll 4 lyfe!). I was inches away from picking a roe, but in the end they were too big for what I wanted to do with this character. It pains me that Zhi is part of the problem. And now with the xaela being nomads, I'm being hooked for them. I think I'm gonna have to make a highlander or roe to even out my character creation karma. :< See, in my last post I said mean things but I don't want it to be remembered as something so cut and dry. I don't want people to feel guilty for playing what they like. I want people to realize it's okay to like something and it's especially okay to continue to do so. Don't try to sabotage something for yourself in favor of change or variance in something you wouldn't have played anyway. You had something in mind, you went with it. It's something I say allllll the time: "It's about the presentation." Plenty of people here have pretty 'typical' characters. I'm pretty sure even I contribute to this. But it's always coming down to presentation. Be it color schemes or slight differences in height, whatever. It's about how you present it to others. It's that whole thing where you try to be unique and you end up like everyone else in the process. So what? We're all pink on the inside and we have a whole bunch of other shit that overlaps. Go on, rock a cat. From what I've gathered you have something that works well with you and is well accepted by others. Don't feel guilty for it. Just present it differently and embrace what you love.

I feel a bit safer speaking up on the subject now that this is a thread dedicated to such, so thank you for providing that. Unless I'm mistaken, the primary reason we don't have customization is because of the PS3. There's simply not enough space and power behind the system to handle all of that, while also providing the MMO we play today. Plenty of features are 'dumbed' down in the game to compensate for this and it's almost daily that I find myself going 'man I can't wait till they drop that goddamn console'. In a way, I feel bad because I know plenty of people still play on PS3s and I even have friends that do because they have no way to upgrade for the time being. But it really holds back what this game could be. Another point I want to bring up, and this might be somewhat of an unpopular opinion in these parts but 1.0 was what I consider to be a 'bad' game. It was rich with story and thematic elements and ambition, but absolutely the most unengaging pile of pixels I've encountered in a long time. It did however have some merits that are messing from the current version. Some animations are just gone, or baked into other skills, yet toned down, the list goes on and on. In order to make it into what it is today, some things had to go because again, PS3. Space, power, all that stuff. Onto the character creator itself: Someone mentioned this in another thread, but there is a slight 'issue' with a fully open character creator. That being that people just straight up aren't very fucking creative. It's rude, I'm aware, but let's look at Guild Wars 2. You've prolly seen this image I'm about to reference, but it's a collection of people, all different races and classes ALL with greatswords, and the color scheme of black and red. All of them. There are literally hundreds of these people with black and red, and greatswords. Casters, Melee, all of them are almost identical. I saw this on ever server, (when we actually had those) without fail you could throw a rock into a crowd and hit at least one of them. Even I was a scumbag and had a human 'main'. My charr and sylvari never panned out, I tried though. Didn't enjoy the classes as much as Guardian. PSO2, which Zyru likes to bring up often, is another game in which creativity is actually more of the same. You'll likely see hundreds of lolis, all featuring the same outfit, haircut, voice and weapon pallet. They do tend to vary a bit, but generally speaking they tend to be more of the same. People love smaller characters with huge tits in that game, slap on the biggest weapon and you've got money raining from the sky for SEGA. This is not to say that there isn't people who make genuinely interesting looking (bias, I know) or different characters. They can and sometimes do vary greatly! You see some fantastically put together sets and color schemes with some really cool characters but it doesn't change the fact that a large amount of it is the same. My point is, even when given choice it's very likely that people will make the same things. In TERA I only saw the same 3 elin and humans running around. Just copy pasted everywhere. Sprinkle in a few castanics and 1 aman for every 30 or so elin and human and even less for female aman. Which is a shame, because female amani were really cool looking! I only met 2 of the stonemen race. Popos were always people who thought they were funny. Now I'm just repeating myself at this point. I would like to see people actually follow through with 'unpopular races and combos' themselves before saying something about how there isn't this and this and this and that doesn't look like this and that. It seems counter productive to say things like 'I don't like how this ended up like this' and then proceed to be very similar to what everyone else is playing. I do not, by any means think this somehow makes you less of a person, or ment as an attack. But it certainly makes me think you might be somewhat less creative then the rest, since you are so strongly crying out for change. I would also like to point out, that with somewhat less options people tend to make more stand out characters. It happens in Phantasy Star Online 1, Phantasy Star Universe, this game too! I can list a few other examples but it's unneeded. I've seen some really cool characters on this game! Plenty of people even make cats and highlanders that look different from their peers but it's super rare. All of my non RP friends are absolutely elated to play Au Ra. Nearly all of them played cats, or humans. I think one of them played a female roe and is going to make a male au ra. I heard repeatedly 'Omg, the females are so elegant and pretty! And like, a little mysterious? I loveeee i!' I couldn't help but laugh when I heard it. Not a single one of them said 'ew why are they so short, that's gross!' or 'wow how come they can't look like huge monsters?'. At least we have some sliders, and face options. We have nicely rigged hairs, which a lot of games don't have. We have INSANELY detailed armor. We have actual meshes and not just textures. Weapons bounce at our sides, books and vials. OUR BOOKS OPEN FOR FUCKSSAKE. We have animations for ALL of our skills. Stuff that wouldn't get much more than an aura in other games gets a full on effect here. There's a fair amount less recycled here. So yeah, we 'suffer' a little when it comes to sliders, but I'm willing to be there wouldn't be a whole lot of variation anyway because people straight up don't bother when given the choice.

One of my favorite authors does that, which I've somewhat adopted myself. I enjoy dialogue quite a bit and pride myself on it. Action is sometimes boring to read for myself unless it's done a certain way, I do love the smash cut to after when both characters are on the ground bleeding, unable to fight but having a deep introspective on just how much they hate each other while complimenting on how good the wounds they got were. It tends to be far more engaging for RP as well! It's not fun to listen to one person do fight things while everyone stands arounds and waits for them to stop being cool. I guess it's a matter of presentation though.

For the life of me, I cannot play good guys. I've tried on multiple occasions to make a purely well functioning, well meaning characters that have a final goal of being protagonists. But I always end up making them into something of the opposite. It's really typical, nice guy on the outside- complete nutjob on the inside. Edit: I often end up talking to people about some of my characters years later, when I tell them what they 'really' were they are generally quite surprised. It's somewhat in line with morally gray characters, because it's relatively self serving and I don't believe in being bad, just to be bad. It needs to be functional, and purposeful. Also tall characters, I tried to make a short character in recent years! I really did! To make up for his size, I ended up making him one of my most vile characters in my own RP history. Maybe I can break that trend here. Maybe.

Same, actually. Looking forwards to Amnesia. Also, sometimes I still listen to Pitbull.

Some people might find this pretty interesting. I find this particular uploader to be much better than a lot of general click-bait news. Take it as you will, but it should help with anyone still having doubts on the subject. I was very unhappy to hear Silent Hills isn't coming out. It was only a few hours later that I heard some more details and then realized it was going to be a fair amount worse than just that. It's really unfortunate, I've had some great memories from their games and hope they find a way to survive the fallout. I've largely distanced myself from the MGS series recently. I'm not as bad a fan as I was, I think Peace Walker was where I felt satisfied with it last. MGS3 was simply a fantastic game and I highly doubt anything will ever reach it's level of perfection for me. I feel pretty strongly about Castlevania too, but it's latest entries have really left me hollow. Especially that horror show that was Lords of Shadow 2. It was a painful game for me to play, riddled with QTEs and whole segments of useless filler gameplay, it was just a shame. So yeah, rip Konami.

Despite being excited about playing one myself, I can't see my current IC character being terribly pleased with their sudden appearance. It may have to do with him being a duskie, but I think it's more him being extremely irritated with new work and having to learn new burial rites for them, should they let him. If they refuse, I'm sure he'd be quite offended. I'll say this too: If everyone went into this with open arms, it would hardly be roleplay. I certainly don't expect you to be an OOC dickface to be, but I'll be hardly surprised when my au ra is met with some resistance. All parties involved will need to be patient and have to do their best to make this work. It's a really fun opportunity I think. Let's not fuck this up with short sided opinions from either side. I see plenty of au ra RPers claiming they will openly seek conflict for OOC reasons. It's stupid, and it's only going to end poorly.

We'll need a moment of silence for your soul. I uhm, I don't have one right now. I'm sure there's something though.

This is the kind of stuff I love reading about! For some reason, I'm inclined to believe I knew some of it already though. I just couldn't place where exactly. Eitherway, still a fun read!

After realizing my capture software does not work with the benchmark client. Two or more hours later, a lot of cursing and some death threats- I finally decided between two designs. Originally, I considered the swept back horns. The face is a bit older. My Au Ra is going to around age 34. What? Don't look at me like that, older fellows can look handsome at that age. This is a game dammit. Anyway, please keep in mind this shade of blue is going to be much darker on the final product. More like this color. I left it unspoiled because reasons. Closer to this color. It's harder to tell in this, since it's darker. But I promise he's a shade of 'blue'. And the brown version. I asked him what he was looking at. He didn't answer. I really love this set. Here's the album, with some others I didn't post and extras for anyone interested. or wanted to offer opinions. I'm trying to decide between brown, or blue? Feedback would be appreciated! http://imgur.com/a/dmzft#0

The moment I saw that face, I thought to myself: 'Well, I found out what the Judge is going to use.' I think he looks good, more or less what I expected. The mustache couldn't be more perfect. I'm still working on it myself. Can't decide on a color scheme. Stuck between dark blue or brown. It doesn't help that I had a bunch of stuff to do today. I should be working on it right now but... distracted. Loving these still! Hope to see more.

Looking excellent so far guys! I'll decide on mine in a few hours likely. I take my time when it comes to this, since I know I'll be changing my mind constantly. The females look a lot better than I expected. The eye customization is kinda cool. Sad the horns are tried to faces, but so far it's been pretty decent. I fuckin' love their backs tho. The spinal scale is pretty badass. For once, I might not mind having a character that doesn't always display helms! Edit: dicked around a bit more with the cc. Holy BALLS captain do they look good in armors. It's nearly a perfect silhouette for my personal tastes. I might have to make him one of them fancy Flames fellows just for the armor!

We have plenty of protagonist hair already. I don't think all of the Au Ra hair is bad, but that one in particular is what I consider to be the worst offender. It's just... too much somehow. Which is odd, because a lot of other things are really understated in this game. I get what they are going for, and it's a business after all. It is what it is, I won't lose any sleep over it at the end of the day. Definitely not going to stand around and argue about it, that's for sure. Tomorrow I'll be able to mess with the CC. So I'm quite happy with that at least!

As someone who's still looking forward to the race being playable... that hair is straight up fuckin' stupid looking and really out of place. Can't wait for it to be the most original punch line EVER.

I prefer a healthy mix of both. Plot is excellent stuff to be part of, but I find too much of it can be a little mentally taxing for myself. I'm fortunate that my friends enjoy humor as much as myself. Even when my characters are doing absolutely vile things, I like to inject a tiny bit of silliness here and there. I like useless dialogue inbetween my character building. It's a good exercise and sometimes allows something new ideas to bloom. Most of the time, I let whoever I'm RPing with lead, unless requested. I don't mind. But plot is always good, and very welcome. Just not all the time. Is there such thing as RP chaffing? It's that, for me.

I'd have to look again. I always thought they were kinda wimpy looking when it came to size. Does size matter? (stop laughing) I recall one of the Aion summons being xbox sized at one point.