Guild Wars expansions: Trend of decreasing face / hair customization...

Sure each class’ amount of face and hair customization varies a bit but the general trend is the same. Guild Wars expansions are asking for the same price as the original Guild Wars but not giving very many face / hair customization options compared to the first game. Plus the 4 new expansion professions don’t get 3 sets of appearance palettes like the original 6 professions. Instead, expansion professions are further limited to only 1 palette of skimpy appearance customizations. This matter wouldn’t be a problem if Guild Wars actually allow you to mix and match faces / hair of each expansion you add to your account to actually increase the combination possibilties. But the developers don’t bother doing that. So to the many players who really care to have a decent amount of face / hair options to create truly unique looking characters in the highly populated game, this
aspect of Guild Wars looks to be a major disappointment.

[ Based on the Factions preview event, the Nightfall preview event will likely indicate the final amount of face / hair customizations players will get in the final Nightfall expansion. ]

Maybe they noticed that most of the original GW ones are actually quite fugly and no one uses them. So perhaps they just kept the best ones from the expansion choices.

not really, the factions face / hair variety and appeal was lacking in itself--at least for the new professions

Yeah I agree I was hoping for a lot more but there might still be a few more when the game is released..

Atleast give the new classes a lot more hair options. All the male dervish hairs look the same.. was hoping for a few longer hairs like rangers get. Paragons male and female barely have any options at all.

I could see not as many options for existing classes since you won't find as many duplicates when there are more of you from 2 other CDs running around but for classes who only exist on one disk very few options for character creation is just dissapointing.

...i wouldn't count on that

I am definitely disappointed in this - I like to create a "unique" facial look to my character, so that I don't find 15 copies of her long lost twin in a town.

I thought the options for the new characters were a lot less ugly than the Tyrian originals, so that made up for it a little. I actually had to take time to choose when making my Dervish. But overall, yeah, I agree that this is a paltry choice, and when everyone makes their Dervish/Paragon on day one they're all going to look the same.

Also... I really wanted to make a second Necromancer with the release of Nightfall. A male one this time. I just looked at the faces/hair/sunburn(!) on the Elonian guys and....no. It can wait

I wish there were more attractive males in Nightfall, I've found one or two nice combos but everyone's picking them... as for the Male Necros, I love one of the hairs, think the one of the faces is okay but hate everything else, though I do think the sunburn is down to the armour, as it doesn't change one iota when you mess with the skin tones...

I swear... i see more clones of my character in every towns and outposts. Not to mention the same armor and dye color.

The way i like to think of it in way of face/hair looks are

GW:P = Decent
GW:F = Ugly
GW:N = Ugliest

Is it just me or do most of the nightfall characters remind u of cavemen.

not necessarily asking anet to create more new faces / hair ... but is it so hard to throw in some additional appearance variety from the other professions?

That sounds really racist. Just so you know :P

Disappointing. I'm sure people will say this is just a preview, but wasn't the preview of Factions the final in terms of Faces / Hair?

At the very least, we should be able to choose any face and hair from any Chapter, more mix and match, less clones.

I wish that one male paragon haircut with the sideburns was a male dervish hairstyle... Its a perfect match, but I dont want to play a male paragon... too enthralled with the Breakfast Club Hairdo for female Paragon...

Care to explain how saying the looks of the characters are declining with each new expansion or that the characters in nightfall look like prehistoric cavemen is racist.

Uh oh here we go. Do we really need to go there? Though it maybe wasn't framed as extremely PC as possible, I think it's basically unforgiveable by ANet - and agree with the OP and thread direction in general - we seem to be left with less and less choice as we buy more and more chapters. Why?

At least carry over past faces to the new lands - we got there by boat, transplants can happen. It's a fantasy game. I think it's unfortunate there wasn't more variety in the original, since people are already doing this lets call it 'western'. Then we got 'eastern'. Then we got 'african'. But all of them have their ugly, and when you have fewer choices = more obvious.

Less choice. Make no mistake that for example, there were ugly male warriors and monks in chp1 and in general the trend continued with even less choice. The power of linking? The model is in the code, let the linkers mix and match what they bought, not narrow it down to the world ANet envisions - and the fewer face models they produced to boot.

It seems to be one of the extras they're not putting the time in, like PvP templates. It's a sideline item for them - they're not so worried about it, the pretty/attractive/leading ones are the NPC(s), on the cover, not a player character. I'm guessing heroes will have armors and faces we'd wish for.

I give them props for finally giving us templates, and NPC control sounds great. However I agree that I noticed the trend in 2 chapters and I'm guessing when I log in tonight I'll have the exact same thought regarding 3.

And that's not something we should really expect to change from preview.
It'd be a nice surprise - but better to bring up some attention on it before release.

i wish i could use the face and slimmed down bod of the presear female who walks by you at the start.

makes what you can make look like a cheap imitation

it feels like these appearance options are done at the very end when the game is about to be release and they don't put much time or thought into player character creation anymore

Hee hee...i dont think i need to spell it out how that statement sounds racist.

I dont think any racism is intended, but i just wanted to point it out. just be a little careful with that statement to the more thin-skinned people.

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I do agree that the smaller pool of choices is disheartening.

For me, i find most, if any GW faces to be very unattractive. They just have zero personality.


Looking at Prophecies we see a LOT of faces, but its also non-uniform. Theres some asian faces in the monk choices, its not all anglo-european. Factions narrows it down to asian faces, and Nightfall narrows it down to african faces.

Being area specific drastically cuts down your possible face/hair choices.

Now...the idea of using other faces from the other chapters has been brought up before. As practical as it is, i dont know if i would agree with it. Hair maybe, but not faces :/ But thats just me.

i think id rather see more faces than just simply taking older face options.

ya, but if they don't do that, at the very least add variety by mixing in more old ones to widen the possbilities ... where it's at right now is very lame