Character Customization UPDATE!

General Discussion General Discussion
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We see plenty of post on the forum, plenty of things, nerfs/buffs/crafting/suggestion/complains… and most people cannot agree on those things… but one PERSISTENT thing MOST of US can agree on is that the character customization is lacking (for player character [male or female] ).
We have seen countless posts discussing this and sadly I feel like while sometimes AGS staff responded to this… they have not actually done much to improve the situation (there has been some improvement but not enough to be even remotely on par with the quality of the rest of the game).

YOU will hear people say (true or not):
“New World has the best enviroments in any MMORPG”
“New World has the best combat in any MMORPG”
“New World has amazing… this and that”

BUT You will never hear people say:
“New World has the best/amazing character customization.”
“New World has the best/amazing skins”

I think its time for AGS to face the fact that whoever is in charge of this, is by all means lacking, and not fulfilling their roles properly (to the same standards the rest of the game is). Most likely not the people being commisoned to do the work… but the people in charge of them, the ones that request this work to be done in a specific way.

So how can this be fixed? How can NW Characters be on par with the beautiful world and everything else created in this amazing game? (And how can this be done in a timely manner without wasting to many resources)

When we suggest something we should think about how this can be implemented and suggest in such a way to have a chance of actually being done without too much work… with that in mind.

Lets start with the basics:

BODY Types:
We have only 2 body types… armors/gear/skins/animation/hairstyles are roughly the same and they just get applied to these 2 body types, without any real difference.

So the easiest FIX… is to create 2 more Male body types and 2 more Female body types.
The previously mentioned options, will just get applied to these body types as they do now.
Lets consider the current body type as average.

So we need MUSCULAR BODY type and a SLIM BODY type.

This will offer a total of 6 options (3 male, 3 female).

This will require the LEAST amount of WORK, and will provide the MOST customization options for player, the change can be only visual if the developers want to save themselves some time.

A “Character customization card” can be sold in the cash shop to cover for the expenses of creating this… and im 100% confident SALES from this will more then cover the cost of implementing this.

Animations

While the male type general animations (walking/running/crawling/crouching…) are fine… the female type general animations are identical to this… female and male bodies are different having different organs… will result in individuals moving slightly different… can be EASILY seen in athletes. Pull up any Olympics video and the diference will be there.

So the solution is to create a new set of animations (or change the animations for female body type(s) slighly to reflect that difference.

Give the people the option of which animations they want to use (regardless of body type)… and you will apease any people that might have a problem with this difference.

Skins

This is a contested subject… and it’s been brough up many times by female players especially… sadly the quality of the skins is just not great… most of them (90% i would say) are just “strange”… and while its alright to create skins for a niche audience… someone out there will like this quirky skin or another… the majority of skins should APPEAL to the GENERAL Audience, and then have some of them that appeal to some quirky individuals.

In this aspect nothing can be done about the past, but it can be done about the future… Skins that 6-7-8 out of 10 people can say “yeah that looks great”… should be the objective.

In the light of Transmog system coming in 3-4 months, i think this issue is not that great as the others, and to some degree having the freedom to use all available armors will mitigate this issue to some degree…

THIS ISSUE will also be mitigated if THE Preiously 2 PROBLEMS are FIXED and see an implementation… more body types means skins/armors will “FIT BETTER” and having female animations will MAJORLY improve the way the CHARACTERS feel while using certain costumes/armors.

THIS IS NOT A LOT OF WORK!
Body Types and Animations can probably be done by 2 people in less then a week of work, and will have a MAJOR impact on the game, I am very very certain of this.
(As everything just “sticks” to the model will also not be very hard to implement and should not require extra work, and if it does, it should be minimal)!

People from AGS that have the power to do anything about this… if you are reading the forums… and seeing this… please make it so we can also say
“NW has some great character customization options available”!
It will not take a lot of work and MOST OF US will be extremly greatful!

Cheers.

:beers:

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The thing is, none of this is rocket science. It’s not like we need to explain to the developers that this matters, it is something they must know, yet the game was released in such a state, and a year and a half later, this has still not been changed. It makes one wonder if this is done on purpose, because it can not be by accident. It could have been laziness, but others have said this has been brought up already before the game was launched, yet clearly was ignored.

It boggles my mind and leaves me suspicious about motivation.

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I’m not entirely sure it’s being ignored on purpose… at least not out of malice or some hidden agenda, and ill explain why.

The fact that there are only 2 body types and they share animations… is clearly because they wanted to save resources, and it is easy to optimize around it.

The reason for that would be most likely because they believe this is NOT IMPORTANT… if they do this on purpose, they would be sabotaging the game and lets face it, they have higher ups too that want this game to do well… its the only “real” game AGS has as their own (developed by them and still alive)… and while its not doing poorly, its not sustaining the massive playerbase that it could if things were done properly.

I believe with a few changes this game could easily sustain 100k concurrent players, and if they could do that… the development team would get more resources… have easier jobs… have more people to work on stuff and so on… overall it would be in their best interest to improve the game as much as they can. Also having a succesful game on ur CV is much better then having a mediocre game.

So we can say with some confidence that, this is being done because they see it as LOW PRIORITY and not needing any attention.

As for them reading the forums…
They say they come to the forums to read what people post… (they might do it themselves, or have someone else compile a list of “community priorities”). Most posts are about balance this balance that… so ofc that will take priority.

But in my mind, if they actually came to the forums themselves and saw, that there is ONE ASPECT OF THE GAME… that the VAST MAJORITY OF THE COMMUNITY can agree on, that should escalate the priority to a MUCH HIGHER Level.

SO this leads me to believe, that they might not care to read the forums… or whoever is compiling the information is not making it clear that this is something that if implemented would please most of the community… as well as drive people to come back.

I personally cannot stress enough how important CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION is in MMORPGs, you have people playing thousands of hours, sitting around chatting and so on… for this purpose alone, there are MMORPGs making hundreds of millions on skins alone. MMORPG players love fashion… and great caracter customization and visuals will carry games though their most desperate times (BDOs first years).

Coupled with the fact that these are fairly easy things to implement…

SHOULD BE A NO BRAINER… LOW EFFORT INVESTMENT = HIGH RETURN FROM THE COMMUNITY.

The way i see it… all we can do is keep bringing this up, UNTIL someone HIGHER on the chain of commands, says “ENOUGH” and decides to allocate a few members of staff for a few days to take care of this.

So the solution is SIMPLE, keep posting keep bringing this up with every single change we get…eventually if done enough someone will notice.

If im wrong in any of my assumtions, and anyone from AGS staff wants to clear things up… please do so.

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My take away from your stance would be that the development team and/or higher ups have next to no understanding of human nature, nor did they conduct any kind of research into the market they were planning to cater to. In more direct words: You imply they were and still are too stupid.

This is possible, but not very probable…

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I definitely feel like this is a very low priority for them, if “priority” is even the right word. The devs have to be aware of how bad the characters are at this point. But they simply can’t be bothered to do anything about it right now. Bigger/better fish and all that.

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BUMP plz

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Still pre alpha, give it time.

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I think we’re definitely in Beta, but release won’t be till at least 2024.

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I think it’s much easier to
“Not attribute to malice what can be easily explained by a lack of knowledge”

And considering the way New World was released, its fair to say they didn’t have a proper understanding of the MMORPG genre. That being said they have done amazing work over the years (a bit slow, but never the less impressive quality work)… so my first port of call would be to believe they are doing this because of a lack of knowledge on the matter.

Competent market research is very expensive and hard to come-by, especially when it comes to MMORPGs that are extremly complex games, that being said it would have done them great favors if they “employed” a few consultants (people that would comprehend the MMORPG market [which is extremly complex], and have the intelect required to explain the sitution will most certainly be making much more money then a market research position for a MMORPG could ever pay them, so they would need to find people that would do this from the passion for the MMORPG genre and not financially motivated).

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People claim beta a lot, I still see alpha max. :eyes:

Ok, maybe pre-beta. :+1:

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Fair.

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Once we get Mounts + Transmog + Gear sets… and hopefully hopefully they update this character creator (so that fits in the MMORPG genre even just barely :slight_smile: )… it will be in a great state for mass consumption ^^ (sure things could always be improved, but i think most major problems that make New World not quite “fully” release would be fixed). 6-7 Months to go ^^

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lmao okay right. At a minimum every armor set will need to be redone so it looks right on the larger and smaller characters. 4 new character sizes * 1200 peices of armor, a week per peice, QA checks, testing, etc…

Wow only introduces new player models every few years because that’s how long it takes. Wrath saw the death knight, it’s human and was easy, pandaren with Mists, and demon hunters with Legion, and finally drakenoid with Dragonflight. Literal years and expansions between all those introductions.

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Totally agree that we need more and better than what we have, bodies and FACES. Myself and some of my friends don’t even feel motivated to play because of all of the clones. Hope they address this soon it would be great to at least know that it is on their radar

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Actually this is completely FALSE.

We are past that technology for something like 15 years now.

Models have anchor points, you make 1 single armor fit and the rest will model after those points. Exactly what is happening RIGHT now in the game for Male and Female body types… they don’t make 2 armors… they make only 1 and it litteraly gets copy pasted to the other body type… and if you would had any knowledge in this field you would know where to look.

It’s alright that you dont understand this or have the knowledge in this field… but dont try to “express” ur knowledge like its a fact when you clearly dont know… maybe ask questions and I would have been more then happy to explain why i said this takes a few hours of work to implement.

Also its nonsensical to compare almost 20 year old technology that “barely” saw any improvement (WoW) with something released 2 years ago.

In game development now-a-days people work SMART not HARD. (maybe both sometimes :stuck_out_tongue: )

… … … … … … … …

Edit: On the working smart but not hard note:

For female body type they could easily copy from NPCs and scale them to size. These models are net superior to the player models in more ways then one… it can be easily seen if Female models wear the same armors, painfully so sometimes.
Isabella, Empress Zhou, Skye and so on…

The same can be said for male body type, where there are plenty of examples in game where some NPCs are net superior to the player model… such as General Crassus.

The work is already there, just needs a bare minimum of work, to be copy pasted for the character creation, and maybe a few tweaks here and there to better fit the desired aestetic.

And while animations might require a bit of looking into here and there, it would not be something that can be considered “too much work” especially since Character creation is one of the most basic features in MMORPGs and New World is severely lacking in department, so much so that i cannot think of a popular MMORPG (3rd person) that has character creation as bad as NW… even survival games have better character creator (check out Ark, and in Arks case its super bare-bones).

Again and i cannot stress this enough, we have the technology for this to be implemented… and it should be done, without too much work.

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I wouldn’t even count them.

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This is not hard to come by knowledge though. It’s not even only an mmorpg thing. People spend money on ‘character customisation’ in real life, and lots of it. Cosmetics, clothing, jewellery, watches, shoes, hairdressers - these are massive industries, and not just targeting women. Mmorpgs only reflect life in this desire to be an individual. You do not need massive market research to understand this, you learn this just by living, so again, this knowledge is rather a base understanding of human nature, that most humans have, and just one look at the top mmorpg titles will have this jump out as well.

We have to agree to disagree on this, I am afraid. I just can not buy the ‘simply didn’t know’ argument.

However, do keep bringing it up, not because I believe they just have not grasped this yet, but to show this remains unacceptably low quality, and should be remedied.

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I agree with you for the most part…

But calling them (the developers) names… will not get us anywhere.

SO how do we make them understand this ? How do we get them to listen to us and ultimately provide us with at least the bare minimum that we require? What can we do as players of this game to get them to understand this?

This is all that there is to the problem… and I wish I had a better solution… but we need to find ways to get this mesage across, rather then vent our frustrations at them… because if we just vent our frustration at the devs all we will achieve is breaking down the communication channels between us and them… and not achieve our goal.

It’s a very frustrating situation… we are all here (hopefully) because we love this game… and we want it to fit our preference… but no-matter how frustrating the situation is I think we have to remember our goals and try to actively work towards them, and if we get together as a community im sure we can achieve at least these small goals… the NW devs seem “well-intentioned” so hopefully we can communicate our desires to them and they can do something about it… and hopefully in a reasonable amount of time (not 6-12 months).

PS: where is that COPIUM tube, need my dose :joy: :stuck_out_tongue: :rofl:

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Big hugs <3 <3 and I do understand your desire, I just do not think what we say or do not say, will make much of a difference, as they must know. It is very frustrating, as this is truly something that can impact a game experience very negatively. We had so many threads on this for the weeks after launch. It was clear this was a massive problem for many gamers, but it got ignored, and has remained ignored to this day, with no communication from their side. I personally find that extremely disrespectful, but above all… very very strange, and that’s why I am saying I am suspicious of motives here :confused:

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Well I hope if we bump and other such topics enough, someone will notice our outcries and maybe just maybe do something about it.