(04-09-2014, 10:34 AM)Naunet Wrote: [quote pid=83344 dateline=1397048960]
Not sure that's essential to modern gaming.
What's nonessential to you is clearly of high importance to many. While I maintain my earlier stance that a game which over-markets its graphics might be hiding an extremely thin gameplay experience, I do think that character customization is important. These are our personas, not just some pixels but characters we play often for years. For a roleplayer, the connection is arguably even deeper, and many of us appreciate the opportunity to modify our character to get them as close as possible to what we imagine in our heads.
I for one spend absurd amounts of time looking at my character and others'. xD
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As a roleplayer who had to imagine what characters look like in book games for years before we got MMORPGs, I'd much rather the game spend its resources making the world interesting, variable, and the AI more realistic than making sure we can crook our noses ever-so-slightly to the left.
I can imagine someone broke your character's nose five years back and it healed crooked, but I can't imagine that the endgame combat is more interesting than it actually is. Â In the grand scheme of limited resources, character customization is probably not where the games industry is missing most of its opportunities. Â When we have a game where the world is truly engrossing, the combat is truly exciting, the story is truly captivating, and the enemies are blisteringly difficult, and they have a little bit of space left over before the median system starts to graphically chug and some time to implement it, then we can have the nose slider.
It seems like focusing on graphics and highly specific character customization in your MMORPG is a little bit like paying very close and detailed attention to the interior stitching on the upholstery in a car whose engine runs like crap and dies after two years. Â It doesn't matter how nice the interior is if nobody's driving the car anymore.
Personal opinion.