Petition To Expand Character Creator

[Bahati]

-MORE FACE OPTIONS (I can't believe some races are still stuck with four... FOUR.)
-Muscle tone for non-hyur races (male and female)
-The abililty to have more than one face paint at a time (freckles AND eyeshadow? Too much to ask?)
-Option to set standard emotes by character (rather than stuck with whatever race/gender option)
-More voice options

I'm being modest here, most of this is just additions to what we already have or options we already have being unlocked for everyone.

[Melichoir]

Id love for the character creator to be more nuanced. But as people pointed out, it would require a lot of work. Im not opposed to that, but revamping character creation does not seem like something SE is going to do pragmatically, particularly when the shelf life of MMOs is shrinking. I cant, honestly, remember any relatively modern MMO that redid its character creation other than WoW (at most) to the degree thats being asked for.

[Edax]

Id love for the character creator to be more nuanced. But as people pointed out, it would require a lot of work. Im not opposed to that, but revamping character creation does not seem like something SE is going to do pragmatically, particularly when the shelf life of MMOs is shrinking. I cant, honestly, remember any relatively modern MMO that redid its character creation other than WoW (at most) to the degree thats being asked for.

I remember SWTOR eventually made a patch where you could unlock other factions races which was a big thing at the time. Although it was poorly done since the dialogue still referred to you as an Imperial race. I think I played as a Sith Pureblood Jedi for the novelty and everyone in the Republic referred to my character as "human". It was a lazy implementation, but at the very least it did encourage me to make an alt and start playing the game in ways the first batch of players couldn't.

[MsQi]

-MORE FACE OPTIONS (I can't believe some races are still stuck with four... FOUR.)
-Muscle tone for non-hyur races (male and female)
-The abililty to have more than one face paint at a time (freckles AND eyeshadow? Too much to ask?)
-Option to set standard emotes by character (rather than stuck with whatever race/gender option)
-More voice options

I'm being modest here, most of this is just additions to what we already have or options we already have being unlocked for everyone.

If they just separated some of the facial features it would feel like a lot more. Horns and face should be entirely separate, as should face and stripes for Miqo'te, among others.

complexion (skin features like freckles, etc.), cosmetics, and face paint should be separate things.

[Sylvain]

Significant changes in models would require significant changes to all existing equipment. All 10s of thousands of it. Not gonna happen. Anything like that kind of effort on models is gonna be going towards making entirely new races.

I agree, but having more control over the facial feathure wouldn't. And tbh this is what needs to be worked on the most.

[Lukha]

Server hamsters this, server hamsters that...
It's 2018, maybe it's time to upgrade to server guinea pigs?

I'm perfectly happy with my character's looks, but I'd love to have some alternate emote or animation options. More options overall would be great, if it might help cut down on the number of long-lost siblings I run into in the wild.

[Iscah]

I know there are lots of things that would be nice to add to the creator - but even if they wanted to add things, they're locked in by what framework already exists, and maybe can't expand it without rewriting a lot of code about how character information is transmitted and used. Plus there are all the NPCs that are built using the same features, so anything currently existing can't simply be changed without affecting the appearance of every NPC that uses that data.

Anything that requires introducing new options (eg. another set of choices or a slider) probably can't be added without a redesign of the system.

While I'm not really familiar with the coding, I know data is transmitted with binary code, and the amount of data that could be sent in a particular number of code-bits should increase in 'powers of two' (2,4,8,16, etc).

So, my guesses on things they could expand without mucking existing things up:

More races - we know they can add extras, because of Au Ra. There might be limited slots of how many extra races they can add in future, possibly eight (the maximum number of options that could be transmitted in a three-digit binary number).

On the other hand, they might not be able to add more clans to the existing (or future) races. The current choice of clan A or clan B would be stored as a single digit of binary data. A choice of three clans would require two digits to store that information - and so I assume it could not be added.


More faces and face elements - currently most races have four face options, up to six for male Midlanders, and face elements such as eyes and noses often come in groups of six. There might be programming space to increase each of these things to eight options without breaking anything.


More colours - if they can make space in their UI for it, additional colours should be possible - though the palette might look rather messy compared to the current neat gradient. The current grid is 8 x 24 so there should be space for up to 32 rows, and looking through character data I've noticed there are already some NPCs with "off-the-grid" colour references: eg. Curious Gorge from the WAR questline, canonically a Hellsguard, is actually a Sea Wolf with a skin colour that players can't access. (Grid reference 31,1 for a fairly dark brown - so probably not a neatly arranged set of colours like the ones we can see. Which might be why they don't want to unlock it because they can't easily straighten it out.)


More hairstyles and facepaints - I don't think they can add in the option to flip hairstyles now, but they *could* add some flipped styles as separate designs. On the other hand there must be an eventual "upper limit" to how many styles they can add, though hopefully a large one if they planned ahead for it.

Thinking it through, it might actually have been good planning to not include the option to flip hairstyles. Say they allowed "seven digits" of data for transmitting hairstyle information. That would allow for either 128 choices, or 64 choices and one digit to indicate "straight or flipped" - which would be wasted on symmetrical hairstyles. Of course, it would still be very nice if they'd give us some flipped versions of popular hairstyles as separate options. Perhaps they're conscious of the risk of giving us too many things now and running out of space later on.

Facepaints do have a flip option, and might not have been allocated as much data to begin with. I wonder how many we currently have, including the few added seasonal ones?


Voices - could go up to 16 options? (but would it be worth the extra recording time and cost? Also would mess with the 'highest to lowest pitch' arrangement they generally have going with their lists of voices.)



Meanwhile, things I don't think we'll see (because it would involve 'new' data):

Au Ra horn options - they could have done this at the start instead of giving us a choice of tail shapes. They decided not to. I wonder if it was deliberate 'forced variety' so people wouldn't all gravitate to the one design of horns?

New scars/facial hair/etc. - each 'face' gets five options to switch on and off separately, although the exact options vary. Each on/off would be stored as a single bit of data. There's probably no room to add extra.

Detailed body shape adjustments - would need a fair bit more data to store extra slider settings. If they can squeeze any more data-space into the character information, I'd rather see it spent on other things. (At a guess, if a slider can be set 1-100 then it would need seven digits of data to store the setting? That same data could carry Au Ra horn choice (4 options = 2 digits), an equivalent new choice-of-four-things for other races, four new scar/makeup/etc options and a hairstyle flip option. Would that be correct?)

Ability to choose your emotes - I would absolutely love to have it, but I don't think we're going to get it. As well as extra data to transmit for a player-character, depending on how the programming works, it might "break" the pre-set emotes for NPCs in cutscenes if the animations are de-linked from their race - in which case they would have to revisit every single scene in the game and re-program the emote choice to fix it.

[Lihtleita]

Id at least like the same amoubt of options that hyur have.

[Dragoon4life]

Give us Beards! Please

[Rokke]

It's going to be very interesting if we end up getting a new race added in 5.0 but no adjustments to the playable races that exist at the moment.

tbh I expect it. All races are human shaped so you have a base body, from there they just have to assign it’s designated “options” (ear length, tail shape/length, muscles etc) in the allocated space. They don’t take clipping into account if Au Ra are anything to go by so gear isn’t really altered and if it has the same # of options they don’t have to muck with existing coding. Its the easy way out.

Meanwhile, things I don't think we'll see (because it would involve 'new' data):

Au Ra horn options - they could have done this at the start instead of giving us a choice of tail shapes. They decided not to. I wonder if it was deliberate 'forced variety' so people wouldn't all gravitate to the one design of horns?

I wish they gave us horn options instead of the stupid limbal rings. Worrying about people gravitating towards a single pair of horns seems like a moot concern when in game the bulk of males and females I see use face 1