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Character creation benchmark now available for Final Fantasy XIV
You don't know when the next (and final) beta test is starting for Final Fantasy XIV. That's a bad thing, because it means you're going through a fair bit of withdrawal. And while nothing can really fix the fact that you want to be playing but can't, being able to play around with the character creator might at least help take the edge off. Which you can do today, as the newest benchmark and character creator is now available on the official site. Aside from offering another chance to test your computer's performance against the game, the new benchmark will allow you to create a new character. It also allows you to save the appearance data from that new character, which can be loaded up again in the launch version or the benchmark for further tweaking. So you could have your character ready to go the moment the game goes live later this month. [Thanks to Brandon for the tip!]
Storyboard: Grieving in character
Grief is not the same as being sad. Being sad is something I've discussed before, and it's a temporary emotional state. Grief is a filter, something that colors your whole perception and pushes you into a holding pattern of regret and sorrow. Real grief colors even things you do that make you happy so that even as you're smiling and laughing there's a pall over what you do. It's the way you feel when you lose a parent. Or a lover. Or a nation. Or almost anything profoundly important that you can lose, that you weren't ready to lose, that you don't know how to exist without. The point is that it's a very important human emotion, one that is going to come up in roleplaying. But it's also a problematic one because you have to convey what is in large part an internal sensation externally. So how do you get the sense of grief across without just making your character into a constant font of moping?
Wii Fit Trainer will battle the bulge in Super Smash Bros.
In a "one more thing" moment at the Nintendo event this morning, it was announced that the Wii Fit Trainer will join the battle in Super Smash Bros. This follows this morning's announcement of new characters The Villager from Animal Crossing and Mega Man.%Gallery-191100%
Crazy Talk 7 puts character animation power on your Mac
Putting words in other people's mouths: more of a hobby than a vocation for most people, I'd say. If your work or play involves facial animation, however, you know how much work goes into making fake speech look convincingly real. Although there are impressive pro animation tools for this task, they might run you hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat. That's why the Mac version of Reallusion's US$29.99 Crazy Talk 7 Standard is such an intriguing product. For a modest cost, this app delivers impressive character animation power -- with a learning curve that's not too steep for amateurs. Crazy Talk lets you work with libraries of preconfigured characters, where mouth movements and other motions are already pinned to specific features on the character's image. You can also pull in your own images for the face animation treatment; political or corporate portraits seem to work particularly well, as do pet snapshots. For the DIY images, the app walks you through preparing them with essential feature points -- corners of the eyes, point of the chin and so forth. The idea is to make a model of the character's face that will react appropriately to the audio using Crazy Talk's Auto Motion feature. Once the base character "puppet" is ready, Crazy Talk really gets to work. Import or record your dialogue audio (or use the built-in text to speech feature) and the Auto Motion animation tools will analyze sounds and phonemes, trying to match mouth and face motions to the soundtrack. You can tweak emotions, attitudes or the overall character energy with a few clicks. The results range from decidedly comical to eerily realistic. In the example here, I've taken Tim Cook and put some of his comments from the recent earnings call in his virtual mouth. The whole process -- including defining the animation "bones" and grabbing the audio from the earnings call podcast feed -- took less than 15 minutes for this clip, and even though the results are kind of rough (sorry about the hair, Mr. Cook) it would not take too much refinement to get them looking really sharp. Of course, now that "Tim" is prepped, future animations using his character will take a lot less time. Aside from the fun factor (which is decidedly present), training pros or web content authors may be able to leverage Crazy Talk to produce quick and hi-quality animated narrations or instructional vignettes. Putting a face with the voice, even an animated one, can help improve engagement and attention versus a voiceover-only approach. Game developers and other animation users may find Crazy Talk or its sister app, iClone (for 3D character animation) useful entries in the utility belt. Crazy Talk's look and feel certainly carries some of its PC heritage in its flat UI and sometimes-confusing controls, and it has a few annoying quirks (no app should ever hijack focus when it's done with a lengthy task like a video export; that's what bouncing the dock icon is for!) but with a little bit of time and effort you can get something really interesting out of it. Crazy Talk 7 Standard is $29.99 via the Mac App Store; the Pro version ($149.95) delivers much more manual control, higher-end animation options and keyframe editing for projects. Here's another video sample from the app, featuring Sarcastic Cat.
Diablo 3's missing runestones found at GDC
If you've followed Diablo 3's development for a long time, you might remember the idea of Runestones. They were meant to be actual in-game items that could supplement character abilities in various ways, such as adding a fire attack to a melee hit, or doubling the power of a spell for free. When the game arrived last year, the Runestone system was nowhere to be seen, replaced by the controversial Skill Rune system. So where did those Runestones go? Diablo 3's technical designer Wyatt Cheng said during a talk at GDC that they're still around, in one form or another.The Runestone system was originally created to add flexibility to character skills, and to give players a chance to experiment and play around with new abilities after they had gained them through leveling up. The original idea had ten different effects that could be added to various abilities, including striking, lethality, efficiency, life-stealing, poison, slowing and so on. But ten was too many, Blizzard decided, and they opted to boil them down into five different stone types (Crimson, Obsidian, Indigo, Golden and Alabaster) that would each affect skills in a few different ways.Cheng said having actual stones in the inventory worked in a few different ways. It gave the system a sense of discovery, as players enjoyed seeing which stones granted certain effects, and it accomplished the original goal of allowing players to experiment with customization. Managing the stones in the game's inventory was a "nightmare," according to Cheng, and player expectations didn't always match what the stones actually provided.In the end, the team went with the existing Skill Rune system, which allowed Blizzard to give specific skill and stone combinations more "flavorful names," and let the team make sure that the added effects were appropriate for the skills they matched. But Cheng said the effects were still in there: Some runes still slow opponents or add more damage to attacks, and those were the effects originally conferred by the stones of Indigo and Crimson.
Total War fan will live on as a character in Rome 2
The Creative Assembly has decided to include the likeness of one of their fans, named James, in the upcoming Total War: Rome 2. James visited the studio last year the day after the game was announced, and unfortunately passed away from a bout with liver cancer just recently. The Creative Assembly says he was the first person in the world from outside the studio to play the game, and character artist Mauro Bonelli offered to assemble a model of James from reference photos and measurements. The screenshot above is a mockup for now, as Creative Assembly community manager Craig Laycock says the company isn't sure where he'll end up. But he will be in there, according to Laycock, and the team is "determined to make it a fitting tribute" to their fan when the game is on shelves later this year.
Aquaman joins Injustice: Gods Among Us
The Justice League of America's most under-appreciated superhero, Aquaman, has been confirmed as the latest addition to the cast of playable fighters for Injustice: Gods Among Us. Slightly reminiscent of Mortal Kombat's Rain, Aquaman's abilities appear to walk a fine line between trident strikes and water/lighting-based elemental attacks, as shown in the character's debut trailer at IGN.Injustice's version of Aquaman appears to be closer to the New 52 version of the character, rather than any of his legacy incarnations, due to the fact that he fights with a trident and still has both hands. This is unlike the longest running version of Aquaman from the 1990s, who lost his left hand in 1994 and subsequently battled with a hooked prosthetic harpoon spearhead attached to a mystical, retracting rope.Actually, now that we think about it, maybe that would have hit a little close to home.%Gallery-178886%
Hands-on with Neverwinter's character creator
Cryptic is well-known for giving players powerful tools to create from the get-go when a new character is rolled in one of its titles, so it stands to reason that Neverwinter would fall in line with this philosophy. Because of this, I wanted to mine some of the details of Neverwinter's character creator so that you might be able to start planning out your ideal character -- if only in your mind (for now). At the time of the press preview yesterday, Cryptic was still keeping a few classes and races under wraps. Even so, I was able to make some interesting class/race combos, like a Halfling Devout Cleric and a Tiefling Guardian Fighter. What was of more interest to me was how these characters can be customized, both visually and personally, so I quickly skipped past this step to get into the good stuff. Read on for a look at my hands-on and a pair of videos exploring the character design process.
The Soapbox: The heartbreak of altitis
In the MMO culture, there are those who alt and those who don't. Sometimes there's a hilarious rift between the two factions, as one side can't understand why you wouldn't want to try out all of the game's classes and the other side can't understand why you wouldn't specialize and excel in a single character. I'm one of those who alt, which is a blessing as much as it is a curse. I blame City of Heroes for starting me out on the path to altoholism. C'mon, it was simply impossible to play that game and not be rolling a new superhero concept every other day. By the time I moved on to more "traditional" titles, I was hooked on the idea of alts. It's a curse as much as it is a blessing. I'll be the first to advocate that alting can give you a wider perspective in a game, offer you more play flexibility, and perhaps keep you in a title far longer than if you played a single character until you burned out. But there's a darker side to it, a path to heartbreak. For those of us who alt, this is the unspoken danger that lurks in every reroll.
Storyboard: Nobody gets your character
Odds are good that you went through a stage as a teenager convinced that no one really got you. Sure, your parents told you that they understood, but they never experienced a love like what you felt or pain like you felt or ennui like you felt, and so on and so forth. You were the first person to ever feel certain things so acutely, and it was a tragedy that others thought they understood. It's also likely that you realized a few years later that none of the above was true, and if you were lucky, your parents were polite enough to point out that you thought you had the purest love of all time simply because you had no basis for comparison. (If you haven't gotten there yet, it's cool; we'll be here when you have.) Those around you understood better than you thought; it was more a matter of your not getting something. There are many roleplayers who seem to believe that their chief problem is that no one understands their characters. All of the drama and poor roleplaying is a result of other people not getting something crucial. I invite readers to draw the obvious comparison.
SMITE issues doomsday patch with Mayan god
Everyone's hopping on board the (non-existent) apocalypse bandwagon, and SMITE may have the edge on irony. Today the MOBA has expanded to include the Mayan god Xbalanque as well as a host of new features and additions. These changes include special holiday skins, a jousting map and 1v1 queue, a themed "match of the day," changes to the conquest map, and an improved item store. Hi-Rez Studios is participating in a 24-hour "post-apocalyptic" livestream charity event for Child's Play tomorrow, and our very own Patrick will be joining them to cover it. Check out Xbalanque's reveal video after the jump, if only to figure out how to pronounce his name! [Source: Hi-Rez press release]
The Perfect Ten: Character creation options nobody uses
There are two types of people in the world: those who can't get through the character creation menu fast enough to start playing "LordBladezz" and those who spend hours crafting the perfect face that will be seen by the player only 0.03% of the time. I've heard rumors of a species of middle-ground player, but I've yet to see one. I think there could be a doctoral thesis for someone willing to investigate which visual character creation options most of us use and which ones we ignore. My hunch is that most of us are looking to recreate an impeccable standard of beauty or handsomeness, resulting in game worlds exploding with Abercrombie & Fitch models. Because exploring the "most-used character creation options" isn't as much fun, today we're going to examine the 10 options that pretty much nobody uses. And yes, you'll feel compelled to comment that you do indeed use one of these and prove me wrong, so let me give you a gold star in advance for doing so. You're awesome.
Avengers: Battle for Earth features favorites, familiar faces
Ubisoft has named all twenty characters appearing in Avengers: Battle for Earth, the upcoming fighter for Kinect (and then Wii U). You'll be able to spin off some psy-force as the Phoenix, embodied by the X-Man Jean Grey, and take command of the Skrull queen Veranke, among others. It's not surprising to see a big "Secret Invasion" influence, given the game's initial trailer. See the full list after the break.Avengers: Battle for Earth will have you and your friends jumping around and debating the correct time for clobberin' on November 9. If you want to see some of these heroes throwing down right away, there's a demo available for download in the meantime.
SMITE enlists Freya, Queen of the Valkyries
SMITE's mining the Nordic pantheon for its starting lineup these days, as Hi-Rez Studios has revealed the newest playable character: Freya, Queen of the Valkyries. No, kids, Freya's not just a lingerie brand; she's a kick-butt warrior with a very long sword. Hi-Rez released a five-minute video on this tattooed protagonist to get players up to speed. "Every rose bears thorns, but this one wields swords," the video narrator begins before launching into a rundown of the character. Freya is a melee magical fighter who can use her magical power to beef up her physical attacks. Freya boasts abilities such as Irradiate, Pulse, and Banish, although her Valkyrie's Discretion is perhaps the coolest. This ultimate ability allows her to fly above the battlefield and attack without fear of reprisal. Check out Freya's video after the jump!
The Daily Grind: What character creation option do you wish MMOs would include?
I'm one of those players who takes forever and a day just to make it through the character creation process (forever and two days if it's a superhero title). It takes so long because I just agonize over every little aspect of how my character looks, even though I'll be spending the rest of my game time with them looking at his or her back. Because of this, it does frustrate me when games skimp out on character creation options. MMOs that have only three hairstyles, or identical faces, or nothing but an absurd standard of beauty have me gnashing my teeth. I don't need sliders all the time, but some interesting options to allow me some degree of personalization would be dandy. So what character creation option do you wish MMOs would include? Are there beards, hair styles, scars, or accessories that you never see but wish you did? 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!
We want your most creative City of Heroes character!
While we at Massively are certainly disheartened to hear of City of Heroes' imminent closure, we also feel like celebrating the great run that this title had. As part of our tribute to City of Heroes, we want to gather some of the most creative character designs that the players have come up with over the years for possible use in a future column. Think of it as the ultimate costume contest! So if you're proud of a superhero that you whipped up in CoH or want to see him/her/it immortalized, listen up! Send in your absolute best screenshot of that character (minimum of 600 pixels wide) along with the name and a story of your time playing that superhero to justin@massively.com with the subject line "My City of Heroes superhero." Please note that due to the potential volume of submissions, we're asking just for one character per person -- so make it your best!
Massively Exclusive: Previewing Mihile from MapleStory's New Dawn update
It's going to be a brand-new day for MapleStory when the New Dawn update goes live in early September. If you can't wait that long, we've got a little treat for you: a video preview of Mihile, who previously served as an NPC and can be played in the update. Players will be able to explore Mihile and find out how he became the Knight of Light -- and investigate his abilities in the process. Mihile uses a one-handed sword and a special shield known as the Soul Shield. Unlike other shields, this one improves as Mihile does, earning an upgrade with each advancement and leveling up as it gains experience. That gives Mihile a defensive bulwark from the start of his career all the way to the apex. Check out the preview past the cut, and keep your eyes peeled for more information before the update in early September.
25 percent off character transfers this weekend
Last weekend we had a discount on faction transfers, and this week Blizzard has confirmed that there will be a discount on realm transfers! Betting will shortly open on the nature of next weekend's sale. Realm transfers are offered all the time, of course, allowing you to pack your character's bags and shift them, their bank, their mounts, pets, and all their holdings to a new realm. This discount decreases the price from $25, £15 or €20 to $18.75, £11.25 or €15. (American prices are subject to tax in certain areas.) The realm transfer sale ends on July 23 -- Monday -- so get your skates on! Do check out the Character Transfer FAQ if you're curious about any aspect of the service. Importantly, you should note that a character transfer doesn't include a faction change, race change, class change, or appearance change. Also, a goblin doesn't really fire you out of a cannon. New horizons await! Through this weekend and for a limited time only, you can initiate a Character Transfer to move one of your World of Warcraft characters to a new realm for 25% off the regular price. To get started, simply click here. Alternatively, you can log in to your Battle.net account at www.battle.net, select your World of Warcraft account, and then click "Character Transfer" at the bottom of the page. Don't delay -- this offer ends Monday, July 23. source So, if you have ever fancied a change of scenery -- well, OK, not scenery, but the people steering the avatars within it -- or if you fancy going from a PvP to a PvE realm or back again, now's the time! Carpe diem, people. Who knows when this will roll around again?
Marvel Heroes unveils Rocket Raccoon
The team of playable heroes in Marvel Heroes just keeps getting more and more impressive. Today's addition is the furry and ferocious Rocket Raccoon. An anthropomorphic raccoon, Rocket is more than just sentient -- he's a tactical genius, great with a gun, and unwaveringly heroic. Rocket Raccoon has some close ties with the Guardians of the Galaxy (you know, that team that Marvel Studios just announced is getting its own movie), and he's out to save the universe whether it wants to be saved or not. We don't know much about this little fellow's in-game powers yet, but keep an eye on his hero information page to find out.
Marvel Heroes turns the flame on with the Human Torch
We hope you're dressed for warm weather because Marvel Heroes' latest addition to the roster is sure to heat things up a bit. The Fantastic Four's cocky Johnny Storm, better known as the Human Torch, has officially been announced as the title's newest playable character. Johnny's presence in the game also makes him the first member of the Fantastic Four to hit the playable character roster, though hopefully Sue, Reed, and Ben will be around to help keep the Human Torch in line. We don't have any details on the Human Torch's gameplay abilities or anything of the sort, but we do know that he's categorized as an energy-based ranged attacker, so players can probably expect to be flinging fireballs with reckless abandon. But while you wait for more details and more heroes to be announced, head on over to Marvel's official site to check out the company's live coverage of San Diego Comic-Con 2012.
