character-appearance
Latest
The Daily Grind: How much time and effort do you spend on your character's appearance?
Guild Wars 2 has an interesting way of handling dyes, with a pool of colors that you can alter at any time that propagates to all of your present and future equipment. It also makes me stop dead in the middle of my leveling and spend about an hour trying out color combinations and then start over when I got a new chestpiece and a nice new pale green dye -- something that I will no doubt do all over again as soon as I replace the existing chestpiece. This isn't unusual. I spend a lot of money in Guild Wars on dyes and mixing them for just the right look. I've spent huge chunks of time in Star Wars: The Old Republic hunting for just the right modifiable pieces of armor. These are times spent looking for things that look the way I want, not actually spent playing the game or improving my character in any other way. But what about you? How much time and effort do you spend on your character's appearance? Is it a major part of the game for you, or just something that you barely consider? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What are your thoughts on headgear?
In the real world, helms and hats are important bits of clothing, especially if you're talking about armor that includes a hefty chunk of metal complete with terrifying plume. So it makes perfect sense that pretty much every MMO set in a vaguely fantasy setting (i.e., nearly all of them) would feature a variety of important hats for characters to equip. But we also live in a society in which most men and women do not wear hats on a regular basis, and that's not even getting into the fact that most lower-level hats in MMOs look kind of dorky at best. Some people like having hats on their characters; hats are part of those characters' appearance. But for many other players, the hat detracts from a character's distinct look, unless it's a purely cosmetic addition without any kind of stats. So what are your thoughts on headgear? Do you like the way it looks? Do you think it should be more freely customizable? Or do you just walk around with the display of said headgear permanently off and never give it a spare thought beyond the stat boosts it provides? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Blizzard needs to steal character customization Ideas from other MMORPGs
The idea of being able to customize your character's look and feel beyond choosing one of 4 or 5 basic face and hairstyle choices at character creation or upgrading to a new piece of loot is one that's near and dear to me. I'm an RPer, so I like to think of each of my characters as a unique person with unique quirks, ideas, and fashion sense that I can't always express as I'd like to due to the limitations of WoW's mechanics. I've even had some very good friends quit WoW because their characters weren't customizable enough. The idea came to the front of my mind a few weeks back when I was visiting my brother. We played EverQuest together, but when it came time to move on from that game, he (and most of our EQ guild) chose Everquest 2, and I chose WoW. So, of course, he ribs me about it quite often, and since I was visiting, he decided to load up EQ2 and show me what I was "missing." Now to be honest, I'm still a bigger fan of WoW, but that's a subject for a different article. One thing I will say for EQ2 is that I was very impressed with the wider range of options to customize your character and show off your character's accomplishments. There's a few ideas related to character customization from EQ2 and other games that I'd really like Blizzard to continue emulating in future patches and in the WoTLK expansion that I believe would deepen the game experience for me and my friends, and for many other players as well.
