[REQUEST] Can we have a more original race next time?

[KisaiTenshi]

One thing i have yet see through all of these post is anyone simply stating the uniqueness this game already offers. Hear we have a great series I love completely, every race is detailed, amazingly animated, and simply fits well with established lore, races, equipment, story. Any of the oft mentioned/ referenced games brought in to this discussion i feel have those option some have been asking for. .

No game will allow a player to play anything that isn't a Biped (or a vehicle.) This, as stated multiple times is because the animation system (eg how legs and arms work) require it to work that way. Likewise the monster animations for the human-sized beast tribes are all essentially the same.

The detail in FFXIV goes above and beyond. Take a close look at the earrings and necklaces... any other game and those wouldn't even be shown.

1) "Ugly" gritty, dirty, western-style characters. So many WoW-clones do this and quite frankly I can't figure out why anyone would want to play a WoW clone only with de-saturated colors. Yet the TESO fans really really wanted to not look colorful like WoW

This is what TESO actually looks like:


As I mentioned earlier in the thread "same body on every character, regardless of age and race"

2) Japanese games almost always align with cute, even when they are trying to be gritty:

Wizardry Online

So there's your different body sizes, and in this game every piece of gear "fits everyone" but they are all model-specific. Which also means that there is very little unique gear other than these special cash-shop costume items. Wizardy has nearly no non-combat animations (all cutscenes are just your character doing the idle wobble pose.) In fact, asset reuse even applies to dungeons.



3) Korean games tend to not really care:


Every race wearing the same outfit. Tera's animations are essentially identical between every race, even though they have more variation in the actual shapes. Tera's conversation (eg with story/npc's) system is non-existent and last time I played it was just text boxes.


http://i.imgur.com/kIo9z.jpg (This image is super-wide)
Here's GW2, same idea... essentially every animation between every race is the same. And for whatever reason people love to compare Tera and GW2. I never played it, so I can only comment based on video/screenshots.



Then there's Archage. Which the game models are actually pretty capable, if not terribly unique looking (The Firran IMO are rather awful looking) but just about everyone in the game looks the same, because there's not a very much variety in gear. What is really awful are the cutscenes. While they are certainly better than say, Wizardry Online's "stand still and wobble", they seem to only serve the purpose for the jiggle physics, and most players just turned the "cutscene style conversations" off.



Aion, only has two races. But they have the most tunable models among all the games (you can create your own face/build.) But they still only have one animation set. So... less races = more customization.



4) FFXIV's customization starts and ends with clothing dye.



...and some costumes.

Like... when you look at every other game, at least FFXIV's races have uniqueness to them. It would probably be better if faces had more tuneables and we could have different age/weight builds, but then there are other things to consider, like how cutscenes work (Lalafells get some rather messed up videos during the Hildibrand storyline for example, where as on every other race the objects being thrown go in a straight line.) FFXIV's cutscenes are the best cutscenes I've seen in any game i've played to date. Mabinogi was the only other game that the cutscenes were actually interwoven into the storyline using the character models, and not just a series of one-sided conversations with a faceless NPC.

So the point is, the reason we don't get more variety in races is because it's not just a simple substitution. Everything has to be considered.
- Gear
- Cutscenes
- Animations used in and out of battle
- Voices (when present)

At some point in the future, when the game assets can be streamed, and players aren't being gouged by their ISP's for data usage, maybe we will see games that have far more variety. But today, I don't think you're going to get much support for a game that needs to ship on a 1TB hard drive.