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(12-21-2014, 05:17 AM)Ashren Snow Wrote:(12-21-2014, 05:10 AM)Oli! Wrote:No game comes to mind that had beast races that didn't have them from the start. TESO for example had the Khajit and Argonian from the start, EQ same deal, WoW as well. All of these games had the luxury of starting development for armor with the idea that they needed to develop different sets of gear for different body types and what have you. It is a lot different when you take a game where all races use the same exact models and then add in a race that now uses an entirely different model, because you have to then spend extra man hours to redesign old gear sets.(12-21-2014, 04:34 AM)Ashren Snow Wrote: As far as a beast or alien race, one thing you really have to consider is how much work that requires. It's not as simple as just making the new race and throwing it into the game, if they have a different body type or head shape than the other races then they now have to go through and edit every single piece of gear in the game to fit that new shape, as well as make sure that every new piece of gear they design has two versions that can fit all the other races, and that race.
Because of that I can say with relative certainty to never expect a new race to come out that doesn't fit the Human+ mold.
Yeah, I thought about that side of it, but generally when it comes to that sort of thing, the counter-argument would be pointing to all the games that buckle down and do that anyway. Which are quite numerous, really. Add into that fact that there are increasing numbers of dev-tools that are capable of reformatting geometry based on character models (yes, those exist), and the technical limitations shrink as well.
I think it's more of an aesthetic choice as opposed to a technical design one.
While it's likely part of the decision is aesthetics like you said, I think the root of the decision and ultimately the main reason is technology and time required.
WoW's Worgen had body structures that were vastly different from anything else that was playable / wore a lot of armor at the time. That definitely counts as something that was added since the start of the game, and a similar argument could be made for the Pandaren. In a similar vein, EQ had the Froglok, which despite existing earlier on, only became playable (and thus required lots of armor to be made and reformatted for them) after a patch later on in the game's life.
Although one could still make the argument that these games had the general idea that there might be more beast races, I think that that pre-planning is easily balanced by the fact that a lot of the tools that could be used to smooth the process along did not exist, and everything had to be done manually anyway.