Character Creation: Assessment and Critique

[Warren Castille]

Attempting to give the heated conversation from the Au Ra thread a proper home, since the derail is more about what the character creator offers / doesn't offer.

 

I'll start with a rebuttal to a point not made here: Since the original alpha/beta of 1.0, XIV's character options have not changed at all since 2010. There aren't sliders, there probably won't be sliders. That would require redoing all of the existing models, and since SE's shown that there's a large discrepancy in who's playing what in what numbers, I doubt that amount of effort will be put forward any time soon.

 

Complaining that the game doesn't have features that other, less successful games do seems like a fool point to me. WoW's character creator is as bare-bones as they come, for example. Do people want more? Yes. Is it a high priority? No. Did they lose subs because of it? Maybe, but what's a couple thousand to several million?

[Dravus]

One major point to note is that when a new race is added to the game every single piece of equipment needs to be adjusted to fit them. Therefore it makes more sense to add something that a large portion of players will invest in rather than one that will only appeal to a tiny minority of players.

 

In terms of additional character customisation options for the existing races I'm all for more variety though I think there's just enough to appease all sorts of different tastes at the moment. WoW didn't have a whole lot of options but that didn't mean I couldn't make my character stand out and look distinct if I put some effort in. I feel the same way about FFXIV - which, funnily enough, has more options that WoW does even after WoW updated the original character models.

[Desu Nee]

I don't see any massive problem with the character creation. I'm not looking for a Dark Souls, extremely detailed character creation method. I find it fine, functional and good as it is, and frankly the fact the earlier discussion got locked because of this baffles me.

[Warren Castille]

I think it largely comes down to needing adjustments and improvements to be uniform across all races and genders. People pitched a fit when the Setzer coat was male only initially. People complained when hair would get added but only for certain races. People complain that not everyone has a muscle slider. There's no butt slider. There's no junk slider. If there were, there'd be the inevitable argument that my miqo can't have an ass like a roe can or that how come lalafell junk can't be the same as highlander junk because .

 

If you update the popular races, you neglect the few playing the unpopular which would further drive a wedge between them. If you update the unpopular ones first, you're basically wasting resources. Do them all at once and you're taking away from content development.

 

The game wasn't designed with super-in-depth character rendering. Maybe once we drop PS3 from the supported hardware we can handle processing that many unique characters, but as is? Go play something else if you need to create a perfect avatar, because XIV is not and has not ever pretended to offer that.

 

Tangent: People want to play cool things, that's why even single player games like Soul Calibur and have in-depth options. Wrestling games have tons of pieces to make nearly anyone from anything. It's done to show off your creations, I think, or to complete a roster, or to just go wild for your own amusement. Character creation in those games becomes its own minigame. XIV's focus isn't on that, it's on what you do with that character.

[Zyrusticae]

I still do not understand why people insist on justifying these things monetarily. Look, Square Enix's finances are not your or my problem. They can handle that side; it's their ball to roll. Justifying decisions "because capitalism" is only an after-the-fact explanation for how things are, not a justification for why we can't have nice things.

 

We don't know how much things cost. Unless someone among us is one of the higher-ups in a video game development company that is making a game in a relevant genre, none of us can know how much any of these things cost. Therefore it is a pointless tack to take when discussing ideas for what we, as players, want that is not in the game currently.

 

All we know is that all things take time and effort to produce. We can decide what to prioritize because we know not everything can be prioritized, but simply taking things out of consideration because you think they'd be too expensive when you don't have any facts on expenses is foolhardy to me.

 

But since the point was brought up already: Phantasy Star Online 2. It's one of SEGA's most successful franchise operations in ages, and it's purely because of the character creation and the dress-up. Believe it or not, there is a huge potential revenue stream there and I do not believe SE is sufficiently tapping into that as of now. Not that that matters to me. I just want better character creation purely for selfish reasons.

 

I'm not looking for a Dark Souls, extremely detailed character creation method.

:surprise:

 

I'm sorry. This is just... incomprehensible to me. Dark Souls is your benchmark for an "extremely detailed character creation method"?

 

Look up Dragon's Dogma. That is an extremely detailed character creation method.

[g0ne]

I don't see any massive problem with the character creation. I'm not looking for a Dark Souls, extremely detailed character creation method. I find it fine, functional and good as it is, and frankly the fact the earlier discussion got locked because of this baffles me.

 

Pff...

 

I'm baffled it baffles you, considering all the aggression lately.

 

But, let's not derail the thread. Warren tried to salvage the other thread (thank you very much, Warren) by making this thread, but it didn't work. But let's not let the same happen here. For Warren! (Says this like 'For Narnia!' :3)

 

Sure, I wouldn't mind more customization options. I'd love them, to be honest. But I don't have issues with the current creator either. It gets the job done nicely.  

 

I mean, I'm super happy with how Eleni turned out. :3

[Unnamed Mercenary]

I won't lie when I say I was irked when I came from games with tons of sliders to customize a character's appearance (Perfect World and Aion come to mind).

 

I'm not exactly pleased with the amount of actual options available. (How come SE can add in 10 new hairstyles since the release, but putting in some eyebrows for Highlanders or a new facial hair option is "impossible to implement due certain limitations"?)

 

The FFXIV character creator kinda sucks when it's compared to other ones that offer more options. But you know what we get out of it? Better looking characters. Ones that work well with motion capture. And I like that.

 

Sure, there's still the armor/hair clipping. But please show me an MMO that allowed for more diverse characters that doesn't have that issue, AND rivals FFXIV in terms of players and lore. I don't think one exists. And certainly not as a cross-platform game between the PS3, PS4 and PC.

[Warren Castille]

Nobody brought up money. I referenced resources but I'm talking manpower and time-between-patches-not-spent-on-new-armor-or-dungeons-or-whatever.

 

Warcraft spent an entire expansion cycle redesigning the old world to be consistent with new standards. That expansion was considered to be severely lacking on arrival by the fanbase.

 

Then Warcraft redesigned the existing character models to make them all hi-res. That expansion was missing an entire raid tier compared to previous models. People complained.

 

I understand wanting more options. I miss Warren's ass, and I like people having options. Bitching that it doesn't meet the standards of the incredibly-competitive Korean MMO cycle is... misguided, I'd say.

[FreelanceWizard]

So, I have to say, compared to CoH, CO, EQ2, and to some degree TSW, I'd prefer a more detailed character generator. I'd like to have more control over each race, so it's not vexing to make a non-cutesy au ra or miqo'te female (or, conversely, a cutesy roegadyn female) or outright impossible to create a muscled miqo'te male or a flabby roegadyn male. Playing virtual dress-up doll is a big part of my MMO experience.

 

With that in mind, though, I recognize that the devs in this game have a vision for what they want. In CoH, the vision was, "anything in any superhero comic, you can make." In EQ2, it was, "here are the races, but you've got a fair amount of control in appearance." XIV's vision seems to be, "here are the races, their lore says they're like this, so that's what you can make." Miqo'te are all lithe, so they don't get a muscle slider. Lalafell women aren't shapely. The parameters of the character generator are tied to that dev vision, and I certainly don't want to say, "hey, your vision is wrong." It might not be to my taste -- which is why I don't play lalafell, for instance -- but it's their artistic vision, and they have a right to it.

 

One wrinkle in all of this is knowing that the au ra female design was heavily informed by gameplay data. I have to say, I'm not a big fan of a dev's vision being "whatever is likely to get a lot of players." I'm a believer in the school of thought that says you should create what you want, not what you think others want to see. That the au ra female design was informed by people wanting to play characters of that body style, as opposed to some strong lore reason or even just Yoshi-P thinking that's cool, irks me. It feels like a cash grab, which really rubs me the wrong way.

[Zhavi]

The mmo I spent the majority of my time playing was WoW. I dabbled in rp with it a little before I got serious about raiding, and one thing that you'd see is that just about every single female troll would have the same face: the pretty face. And, before the barbershop was added, most of them had the same hair.

 

Though I played Aion and spent huge amounts of time in the character creator, coming to FF I had about five minutes worth of disappointment in the beta when I saw that there were no sliders. But, even so, there was enough places to change things to be different enough. That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement -- every game has room for improvement over a broad array of areas. But it always seemed weird to me that people would complain the most about character creation. Maybe it's the years I spent as a semi-hardcore raider speaking, but the areas that always had the highest amount of concern for me was class balance (resto shammy in heroic firelands was one of the most miserable things -- the only time as a raider where no matter what I did, no matter how much theorycrafting or minmaxing I did, no matter how much I tweaked my stats or tried new methods, I was still only coming up with a small fraction of healing done compared to resto druid. This wasn't a matter of epeen; I genuinely felt I was letting the raid team down) and pve/raid encounters. Content mattered most.

 

While I've hung up my raiding hat, I think content still does matter more to me. I want the art team spending more time on the landscape, on emotes, on poses, on new pieces of gear, etc over too much bling in the character creator. However, things like more noses, jawlines, and eyes would be beyond welcome, and I don't think that would require much in the way of changes on gear.

 

And, actually, a dye system like what GW2 has would be omgamazing. I think I would actually prefer something like that implemented over changes done in the character creator. Times 1000. GW2's character creator is pretty decent to me, but in the short amount of time I played it, I spent way more time customizing each and every piece of gear that came my way and agonizing over what dye I could afford than I ever spent messing around with the sliders in their character creator.

[Warren Castille]

Disclosure: Au Ra never clicked with me, I'm not interested in rolling one.

 

I just saw Au Ra as icing on the cake. XIV doesn't have meaningful racial bonuses. There are no granted special cooldowns for playing one or the other. Endgame stats are shifted by single digits when we've got several hundred point scores. Au Ra are a cosmetic option just like every other race is a cosmetic option, and considering that SE's other MMO never got a new race in a decade plus of being live, I'd say that's telling.

 

"You guys like playing big strong guys, here's an option! You also like playing tiny dainty women, so here's some more of those, too!"

 

To make a poor analogy: Would you rather have someone bring you lunch from that place you really like? Or have them stop at that weird new joint you've never been to that smells kind of weird?

[Hyrist]

I'm sorry to say, but that sort of design is kind of intrinsic in all character/race design systematically in roleplaying games.

 

After all, if you don't, you don't appeal to your base and you hurt your bottom line. Games like Dark Souls get away with having more grotesque designs because they appeal to their player's niche. Bethesda has such widely variant design because it appeals to their more western targeted audience. Everyone makes targeted decisions on character design based on what they feel their target base feels appealing.

 

Then difference is that Yoshida went out and said it plainly, rather than cover it in some corporate PR distraction that waifs the scent of finely minced and measured feces.

[Steel Wolf]

Right, so yea, there are a few games that have done or are doing customization a LOT deeper...but this isn't news here. It wasn't during XI. It wasn't during 1.0, 2.0 and it damn sure shouldn't have been come 3.0. This is so old hat you could schedule prisoner feeding time around it.

 

Genuinely stunned this is a thing/topic of conversation or consternation...but I guess some will bitch about anything...

[Warren Castille]

doubleposting because reasons thanks Zhi

 

Anyone who played FFXI can attest: Mithra came in two flavors. 6A, and not 6A. 6A is the white-haired animuish looking one that's still in XIV (Galka get that hair too!). It was basically the only design anyone used.

 

 

[SessionZero]

I will echo Zhavi's sentiments and say I would much rather have a robust array of content to do over a super complex character creation system. But, that comes with the asterisk stating that I would consider myself a medium rper. I love creating characters and designing them to look cool but I don't mind doing so within the confines of a comparably lacking creation system if it means I have tons of really fun content at my fingertips. I loved ESO's creation system but the game itself was balls so what good did the robust creation do me?

 

I won't lie and say the creation system in FFXIV couldn't use some little tweaks here and there, especially in the minutiae of faces and body types, but I'm also not going to make it a huge sore point for myself because I can still make a roguish-looking Elezen man and a dark and feminine but still strong-looking Au Ra woman and bring them into Coil to hit things until they lie down and stop moving. Fun achieved. Here's my piles of money, SE.

[FreelanceWizard]

I'm sorry to say, but that sort of design is kind of intrinsic in all character/race design systematically in roleplaying games.

 

After all, if you don't, you don't appeal to your base and you hurt your bottom line. Games like Dark Souls get away with having more grotesque designs because they appeal to their player's niche. Bethesda has such widely variant design because it appeals to their more western targeted audience. Everyone makes targeted decisions on character design based on what they feel their target base feels appealing.

 

Then difference is that Yoshida went out and said it plainly, rather than cover it in some corporate PR distraction that waifs the scent of finely minced and measured feces.

 

Oh, I don't disagree. The video game space is by definition very conservative, which means not taking a risk on an artistic decision when you could make a finance-driven one. SE has a bit more freedom than, say, someone being published by EA, but ultimately they're still beholden to their shareholders. If Heavensward doesn't produce a sub bump -- even if it retains the current player base -- it's not going to look good, despite XIV being a wild, runaway success for the company. The artistic choices are the ones you're more likely to see in indie gaming.

 

That said, I'm still unhappy about it.

[Warren Castille]

I think there's also a modicum of attention paid to the fact that, as per the game's story, you're creating a legendary hero type. Sure, there's some challenges in someone playing a demure teensy lady type or child-looking lalafell boy as The Warrior Of Light and all, but ultimately that still works better than allowing me to make, say, Carl from Aqua Teen as the WoL.

[Zhavi]

I'm sorry to say, but that sort of design is kind of intrinsic in all character/race design systematically in roleplaying games.

 

After all, if you don't, you don't appeal to your base and you hurt your bottom line. Games like Dark Souls get away with having more grotesque designs because they appeal to their player's niche. Bethesda has such widely variant design because it appeals to their more western targeted audience. Everyone makes targeted decisions on character design based on what they feel their target base feels appealing.

 

Then difference is that Yoshida went out and said it plainly, rather than cover it in some corporate PR distraction that waifs the scent of finely minced and measured feces.

 

Oh, I don't disagree. The video game space is by definition very conservative, which means not taking a risk on an artistic decision when you could make a finance-driven one. SE has a bit more freedom than, say, someone being published by EA, but ultimately they're still beholden to their shareholders. If Heavensward doesn't produce a sub bump -- even if it retains the current player base -- it's not going to look good, despite XIV being a wild, runaway success for the company. The artistic choices are the ones you're more likely to see in indie gaming.

 

That said, I'm still unhappy about it.

 

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. :<

[Max]

I'm OK with it for the most part, albeit a little disappointed with the lack of diversity. I agree with Unnamed Mercenary; if they're able to add new hairstyles all the time, then some eyebrows or new faces every once in awhile shouldn't be out of the question, I think.

 

I played games like Aion where you could make a million different unique looks, yet the game was filled with deformed Gumby lookalikes. I'm glad FFXIV's character creation isn't like that.

[Zyrusticae]

[...]

 

The FFXIV character creator kinda sucks when it's compared to other ones that offer more options. But you know what we get out of it? Better looking characters. Ones that work well with motion capture. And I like that.

 

Sure, there's still the armor/hair clipping. But please show me an MMO that allowed for more diverse characters that doesn't have that issue, AND rivals FFXIV in terms of players and lore. I don't think one exists. And certainly not as a cross-platform game between the PS3, PS4 and PC.

 

With regards to the bolded, I disagree. This is what Blade & Soul's characters look like:

 

 

Character model quality is a function of art style/direction and technological know-how. Advanced character creation adds to artist workload but it does not necessarily decrease the quality of the models.

 

People keep bringing up Aion but the only reason Aion lets you make such monstrosities is because the sliders have enormous ranges. There is a happy middle ground to be found here (and I would argue Blade & Soul finds a pretty good place).

 

Nobody brought up money. I referenced resources but I'm talking manpower and time-between-patches-not-spent-on-new-armor-or-dungeons-or-whatever.

 

Warcraft spent an entire expansion cycle redesigning the old world to be consistent with new standards. That expansion was considered to be severely lacking on arrival by the fanbase.

 

Then Warcraft redesigned the existing character models to make them all hi-res. That expansion was missing an entire raid tier compared to previous models. People complained.

 

I understand wanting more options. I miss Warren's ass, and I like people having options. Bitching that it doesn't meet the standards of the incredibly-competitive Korean MMO cycle is... misguided, I'd say.

 

Resources are functionally the exact same thing, really. Either way, we don't actually know the amount of resources required to build these things out. That being said, I would not argue that adding character creation options after the fact is an easy endeavor whatsoever. I know it would be a major undertaking, especially for a game this late in its life cycle (yes, first expansion is pretty late considering most character creators are built waaay before release).

 

However, at the same time it is clear that Blizzard has some serious management issues going on internally. The tiny amount of actual content they release for WoW is hugely at odds with the size of their team and the amount of revenue the game obtains on a regular basis. FFXIV's content schedule completely dwarfs WoW's and that is without considering the expansion content. I believe Squeenix would do a much better job than Blizzard at a task like this, should they ever decide to undertake it.

 

[...]

One wrinkle in all of this is knowing that the au ra female design was heavily informed by gameplay data. I have to say, I'm not a big fan of a dev's vision being "whatever is likely to get a lot of players." I'm a believer in the school of thought that says you should create what you want, not what you think others want to see. That the au ra female design was informed by people wanting to play characters of that body style, as opposed to some strong lore reason or even just Yoshi-P thinking that's cool, irks me. It feels like a cash grab, which really rubs me the wrong way.

 

THIS. This is exactly how I feel. It's building a creative project through focus group testing, something I will always disagree with. It feels completely wrong. I'd much rather see what they think is cool and adds to the game and its world than what they think players want more of.

 

Right, so yea, there are a few games that have done or are doing customization a LOT deeper...but this isn't news here. It wasn't during XI. It wasn't during 1.0, 2.0 and it damn sure shouldn't have been come 3.0. This is so old hat you could schedule prisoner feeding time around it.

 

Genuinely stunned this is a thing/topic of conversation or consternation...but I guess some will bitch about anything...

 

The Au Ra coming around and being disappointing to me only puts the weakness of the game's character creation in sharp relief.

 

Expect me to bitch again if the next expansion's race is similarly disappointing.

[Warren Castille]

Edit for not locking this in under an hour:

 

Those proportions are questionable. We're now comparing subjective opinions of what looks "better." I love the female figure as much as anyone else, but those are inhuman to me.

[Desu Nee]

I still do not understand why people insist on justifying these things monetarily. Look, Square Enix's finances are not your or my problem. They can handle that side; it's their ball to roll. Justifying decisions "because capitalism" is only an after-the-fact explanation for how things are, not a justification for why we can't have nice things.

 

We don't know how much things cost. Unless someone among us is one of the higher-ups in a video game development company that is making a game in a relevant genre, none of us can know how much any of these things cost. Therefore it is a pointless tack to take when discussing ideas for what we, as players, want that is not in the game currently.

 

All we know is that all things take time and effort to produce. We can decide what to prioritize because we know not everything can be prioritized, but simply taking things out of consideration because you think they'd be too expensive when you don't have any facts on expenses is foolhardy to me.

 

But since the point was brought up already: Phantasy Star Online 2. It's one of SEGA's most successful franchise operations in ages, and it's purely because of the character creation and the dress-up. Believe it or not, there is a huge potential revenue stream there and I do not believe SE is sufficiently tapping into that as of now. Not that that matters to me. I just want better character creation purely for selfish reasons.

 

I'm not looking for a Dark Souls, extremely detailed character creation method.

:surprise:

 

I'm sorry. This is just... incomprehensible to me. Dark Souls is your benchmark for an "extremely detailed character creation method"?

 

Look up Dragon's Dogma. That is an extremely detailed character creation method.

Yes, it is. You literally can do close to anything with the character, bordering ridiculous, while DD is more about the details.

[FreelanceWizard]

Whoa, hey, let's not start going down a bad road here. I think we're having a good discussion here, but it's going to quickly turn bad if people start being dismissive.

 

With that out of the way, I personally would like to see just a wider range of options, so long as they fit with the lore and the overall aesthetic. What would be great, IMO, is if we had a "basic" creation option and then a checkbox to go to "advanced," where you'd have more slider options. Random would never touch the advanced options.

 

However, alas, we have that boat anchor of the PS3 holding us down.

[Zyrusticae]

It's impossible to take you seriously when you say Garuda's boobs are too big and SE's design team is a disappointment and then post scantily clad mousegirls and a woman made out of hourglass and hips with the tiniest head and most obscene proportions I've seen in recent memory.

 

I'm sorry... I don't recall ever saying Garuda's boobs are too big. I do recall saying something along the lines of her being a bird-creature and as such shouldn't even have boobs to begin with, however.

 

The character you mention is an NPC. The point was to show the graphical quality of the character models, not what I personally prefer.

 

If there's something you're confused about, it's probably the fact that I want options and the ability to express my characters in unusual ways, especially non-gender-conforming ways. Blade & Soul is not perfect in this regard, not by a long shot, but they're still better than Square Enix, especially since they have a race specifically for people like me (the Lyn, who are completely androgynous by default while not being absurdly stylized like the Lalafell are).

 

As a matter of fact... if the Lalafell were more like the Lyn, I probably would be playing one right now. Ho-hum.

 

Yes, it is. You literally can do close to anything with the character, bordering ridiculous, while DD is more about the details.

 

But that is exclusively tied to the face.

 

A huge part of any character creator is what you can do to the body. Everyone of a particular race-gender combo having the exact same body is just weak, IMO.

[Warren Castille]

If there's something you're confused about, it's probably the fact that I want options and the ability to express my characters in unusual ways, especially non-gender-conforming ways.

 

If there's something you're confused about, it's that you're trying to do this in a triple-A MMO.