New hrothgar hairstyles are really bad.

[Iedarus]

Once again posting the gold standard for playable beast races for no reason...





(se, please use this as inspiration.. pls Stop half-assing hrothgar. Respect your beast races and their appeal.)

THANK YOU for using this as an example! Despite its flaws, Gw2 has the best race designs in the modern MMO industry. While American MMO companies do have larger budgets, on average, this is Square freaking Enix we're talking about...

[Denji]

Okay no but for real is the peanut hroth real?

Because... dang. That got in? That seriously got in??

[Karowolus]

Yes. It is. Unfortunately

[Denji]

Yes. It is. Unfortunately

I'm STILL WAITING FOR THIS TO BE A VERY LATE APRIL FOOLS JOKE, SQUARE.

[CodeAscalon]

It's bad enough that Face 2 takes up like 75% of the Hroth population, now they only cater to them? Why not just give eyebrows to all faces? A lot of questionable decisions made from the devs.

Honestly this bullshittery slowly really pisses me off. I have been waiting for them to add eyebrows, because I simply want some protection from sand and dust? Square come on. They could've cut some screentime from Zenos or Krile and add this work to our race man. I always have the feeling as long as its not "uwu look at me I'm a pwetty pwotagonist bishoujo/bishounen" everything comes second or even third(in case of hrothgar). The reply of Yoshi leaves me with a bitter after taste. Really I admire a lot of his work but when it comes to priorities its just off. We deserve love and its long overdue. 3 years to come around the corner with this weird answer which keeps us again, waiting without any deadline whatsoever.

[Midareyukki]

I'm STILL WAITING FOR THIS TO BE A VERY LATE APRIL FOOLS JOKE, SQUARE.

You can sit and wait all you want, Denji :x just don't inhale hopium.

[Iscah]

(paraphrasing)

Ok. A bit to unpack here.

Hrothgar now have 8 faces per clan. [...] I hate to say but it looks like instead of being given new hairstyles. We were given new faces. Mainly for these initial hairstyles.

I had used the... Aesthetician earlier. TO swap my hairstyle to the other version, without the braid. I feel like this changed my face to the 'new' face. New in quotation marks because there's nothing different about it.

This... It is a way of doing it... But it's not the right way TO do it. It actually seems like a more roundabout way that makes it simply more difficult.

Oh yes. By the way. Apparnently our ears are still part of our head

I don't have access to mods at all as a PS4 player, so my understanding of all this is just based on observation and guesswork and what people say here on the forums, but this all adds up with my own suspicions a lot more than the idea that they were able to add a new section to the character template.

I get that modders (and devs making NPCs) can do more by rummaging around in the game's innards, but it seems that the character creator is really rigidly fixed to the same limited template of settings for every character. I believe it's why they put hair attached to faces in the first place, and why they're forced to take this roundabout route now. You say it's "not the right way" but maybe it really is the only way it can work through the front end of the system rather than the modders' back end.

I think it is not possible for them to add a hairstyle category without removing some other kind of choice, so they have had to resort to this trickery of making each hairstyle an identical but unique-in-the-system head, packaged up and presented to the player as a choice of hairstyles.

So that adds up with what we've been hearing. It would make sense if the thing they've been wrangling with isn't the models themselves but a way to make the character creator do something it was never designed to do, and develop the back-end logic to give the seamless illusion of it doing something it actually can't. And that well may have been a "pushed to the side" project worked on only when they had spare time and/or good ideas.

I don't know how this all factors into their decision to turn off ears instead of show them through it, but I find it hard to believe they would do it this way if it was both easier and a better end result to let them clip.

I don't understand that part of it (or think it was the right choice if deliberate) and I will continue to wish that they will offer a full technical explanation at some point so we can understand the true problem and I can see how much of it I guessed correctly.

[Iscah]

It's bad enough that Face 2 takes up like 75% of the Hroth population, now they only cater to them? Why not just give eyebrows to all faces? A lot of questionable decisions made from the devs.

While I don't actually play a Hrothgar, I do like their designs, and I think the added eyebrows look silly. They look fine without.

[Denji]

While I don't actually play a Hrothgar, I do like their designs, and I think the added eyebrows look silly. They look fine without.

I'm not a huge fan of them either but the fact that they're just a flat texture makes locking them behind a single face just... bizarre.

[Retrisar]

I'm not a huge fan of them either but the fact that they're just a flat texture makes locking them behind a single face just... bizarre.

That texture got more details than entire Hrothgar body.