Addition to character creation and my thoughts regarding the available armor's looks

Hey guys and gals!

I've been playing Guild Wars for a couple of beta weekend events and i, as everyone else, has suggestions regarding gameplay and such. But as far as this post goes, i'm going to focus on the more visual aspect of the characters.

First off, "Character creation". THE most important part of a game in my opinion, because if you're not satisfied with how your character looks you won't want to play him or her; or that might just be me.

#1 - Hairstyles
Alot more variety needs to be added concerning this. At first i thought that the hairstyles would be shared among all the jobs, which they aren't and that limits the possibilities and at worst, forces you to play a character with a certain job just because you wan't to "look a certain way".

Seeing the wonderful GW warrior pre-render just makes you wanna grab your sword and rush at full speed into the fray of battle with your wonderfull, shiny and spiky/dynamic/extreme armor(armor diversity/look/feel is discussed further down) and just... be happy. But what's with the hairstyles for those poor male warriors? (and rangers) oO

Alot more variety when it comes to hairstyles is needed or i and who knows how many more won't create another character that doesn't have the Elementalist as primary job if you're creating a male character. (Or female for that matter)

#2 - Body mass/type
You should be able to choose your body type. (excl. gender and height, seeing as those options is already available) Let people create fat pompus warriors or leaf thin lightning fast ones. Or why not just one with a normal body? No, at the moment everyone that wants a warrior is going to have to be satisfied looking like some huge muscle mountain, not that there's anything wrong with looking like that, i'm just saying that i and someone else might not want to look that way.

As it is now, everyone looks like everyone else and it's realy destroying the immersion and feel of the game. You realy should be able to have more options to choose from when creating your character, but it shouldn't go overboard.

#3 - Armors, their look and feel
The armors as they are now is acceptable, some are beautiful and give you every pleasure you could ever want from... an armor... by looking at it... *cough*.

When i first found Guild Wars, saw the pre-renders, knew it was NCsoft that was funding the bill and knowing about Lineage 2, i knew i wouldn't be let down by the visual part of the game. But as it is now, i feel a bit let down by how few armor options there is and how they look.

The necromancer armor is just beautitul, spikes and other shapes/items bellowing out of the armor, just giving me that animé feeling. It's visually pleasing. Unfortunately i can't say the same for the Ranger's armor, and i'll leave that at that.

Instead i feel that the armors need to be hotted up. They need to scream! Make them more dynamic, extreme, more shapes instead of a flat loin cloth with a different color strapped against your body like latex o_-;

Seeing a huge warrior dashing at you with his boring metal plating against his body wouldn't scare an infant and hence the mental attack against the oponent is zero, wasted. Now, imagine that same warrior dashing at you with his spiky armor and shoulderpads. The first thing that'll cross your mind is, don't stand in his way or you'll be run through by the spikes on his armor, if you're lucky.

It helps the immersion and adding customization options to armors (visual options) will help remove the "Oh hey, those 1k players look exactly the same as me. Oh hey, the same armor, that must mean they've been "there" and bought "that" from "him/her"".

Well to conclude this post, here's a short recap. At the moment everyone looks the same as you, and that destroys the whole "trying to be unique" part of the game.

More options regarding how your characters looks and what he or she wears has to be added, as well as what they wear.

Seriously, I totally agree with you. I want to look unique. Sure, the colors makes it easier to create an unique armor and such but at the moment I perfer to play the female characters because It's more fun. They look better, It that just an coincidence or did you guys really put more work into the female characters?

As the author of this thread wrote, It would be much more fun with various types of armor. Right now the look of the armor is bound to the attributes the equipment carries. When you walk up to the crafter and want to craft your armor, It would be great if you could choose how your armor should look. Then select fom that list what attributes the armor should carry. The more spikes and such you put on your armor, the more it will cost, that would be awesome.

While I honestly don't care much about hairstyles, most of the characters do look painfully similar. Having more varied body types, armor styles, etc., would be a plus if one wanted to immerse themselves in the game. But we should all still be realistic: there are more important things to a game than appearance of the characters... like gameplay. Guild Wars has that in spades.

Seeing as the release is just four days away, I assume the developers don't have the time to render new hairstyles and character models. But as long as this relatively minor issue is addressed at least sometime in the future, I'd be happy.

Have a nice day.

the idea is to make each primary class instantly known on sight which limits things

having said that i want a very solid (even at the expence of a few details) game foundation to BUILD on with later chapters

give them credit for producing a game that has so many people happily waiting for it who would have been delighted to get it months ago with much less polish and many more bugs

How does it limit what i'm suggesting?

I agree, but foremost, as in real life, looks is what keeps you coming back for more and when you're past the looks, what's underneath counts and is final. So i agree that a stable game fundation is a must, but for me, looks and feels is as every little bit as important as everything else. I'm going to be watching my character each and every minute of my gameplay time, so i'd say that being proud and or satisfied with how your character looks is important.

What has that got to do anything concerning what this thread is about? If you read what i said above, i have nothing but respect for Arena.Net and NCSoft.

to each his/her own

EDIT AGAIN

since there was nothing offensive or inflamatory in the removed content i fail to see the complaint
i simply left the concluding sentiment which is in my opinion not offensive
i edited it as somehow you seem concerned about a non visable post count

Do you have anything constructive to say, something that has anything to do with my thoughts and suggestion for this game, which was posted here in the "Suggestion" part of the forum? Or is this some kind of post count increasing that you're in to with the only intent of "proving me wrong"? Not that i understand the whole proving me wrong thing when this is just my "Suggestions" as per my own feelings and experiences playing Guild Wars concerning what i would see added and/or changed.

Yes, and if so, don't you agree that being able to give that character the look and feel that was planned, important?

If you're going to edit your post and remove/alter the content completely then i'd suggest deleting it instead.

Nokko - Great idea ^^
Llud - I'd love to see atleast the character creation features added as soon as possible seeing as you need to recreate your character otherwise if you want to change your body type or hairstyle to what you realy want(ed) =)

You realize that if we had more options with the body shape of our characters, half of the people in town with be female Elementalists with big boobs using the /dance emote. It's really stupid, but realize that the general audience for Guild Wars, like any RPG, is the socially-deprived male teenager, normally those who are going through puberty.

I honestly wish they could come up with a slightly more modest starting outfit for the female Elementalist. After an experiment, my friend made the comment that her clothes don't cover much more than her underwear.

However, I believe that the hair options should be broader. At first, I thought females weren't allowed long hair because of graphics issues, but then I found that the male charries have more long hair options than the females. I would like to see some nice, long hair for the females and some good, clean cuts for the males.

You couldn't be more right concerning the female elementalist, but with body type i was more focused on wether or not you'd be fat, thin or normal. Not everyone might want to play a fighter that looks like Conan the barbarian but instead have a normal body.

As in real life, depending on your genes, you might not even gain a conan bulk even if you were put through the same physical excercise; it might just be that your muscle density increased.

Now i know adding different body types requires armor versions to be modelled that would fit those body types, unless Arena.Net wants to just scale the current armors which could result in distortions.

I think the the three best things that can be done for character appearance are increasing the number of hairstyles and faces available, increasing the number of armor sets available (which is almost certain to happen as time goes on anyway), and allowing all parts of a weapon or piece of armor to be dyed, rather than just one.

At the moment, most weapons and armor pieces appear to have roughly two color "zones". When dyed, only one zone is colored while the other is left alone. With many armor sets, the zone that can be colored is only the trim, and with many weapons it's only the hilt. Being able to dye each of the color zones seperately would go a long way toward allowing people to personalize their characters.

yeah i agree on the armour dying. it'd be nice to find 'normal' dyes (relatively easy to find, about the drop rate dyes are now) which dye the majority of a piece of armour, and then find rarer 'detail' dyes, which dye the details of the armour. would add that little bit more uniqueness and also shouldn't (i assume) be too hard to add since the armour is obviously already split into two 'zones'

Maybe just make the way you get dyes a lot more easy.

Walk up to the Dye salesperson or whoever and buy some...

Simple as that... Sell Dye in town, for whatever $50 and make all your armor black or white or red and black, or whatever the hell you want.

The reason everyone looks the same is because Dye is hard to get.

Either you are a necro and find them all the time down in the catacombs, or you ask everyone "WHO HAS DYE FOR SALE!!".

Lets just sell it in town, itll be great, the ladies will love you...

Add some options like special dyes that you can choose on a spectrum, like photoshop and make them $100 instead of $50.

Special Dyes cost more than normal colors.


Im just throwin out random ideas but i think it would solve the " Hey that guy looks exactly like me!"

I think it would be nice to make the armor more customizable. Dyes are nice, but all the guy Elementalists still look the same with Grey blah with some border color. It'd be cool if we could add ingots or sashes or other ordimentation at a seamstress for a small fee. I was sad when I saw a guy with the EXACT same model as mine (hair, face, skin, armor) in the previous BWE... and he was my Guildmate. 0_o Girls add ruffles to your armor if you want. :P

Dye this and dye that. Sure the dyes are a bit too rare which limits the amounts of customization and at most all you get is a rim color change which isn't enough to realy matter.

More armors and the way they look should be added. Hell, why not just be able to select an armor style and add special attributes to em for extra fees like Nokko suggested? Fork up a little extra to get it dyed properly from the start or add that spike you always wanted. Okay, adding spikes and such might be a bit too extreme but still, c'mon, we need more diversity with how the armor looks. Why should my ultimate warrior armor have to look exactly the same as those guys'? I might prefer mine to be a bit more subtle and dark with a cloak rather than 10tons of metal grinding and squeking as i make my way down the hill ^^;;

Welcome to crafting your armor, please select apropriate pieces for designated areas.

Left Shoulder Pad
Right Shoulder Pad
Upper Torso
Lower Torso
Waist
Hips
Left Leg
Right Leg
...and so on...

I might want a huge spike on my right shoulder but nothing on my left. I might want to have a skirt hanging down over my left leg while my right is bare.

Any comments on this aproach?

I think starter armours should still be available in design later on. Some of them look pretty decent, and while a bit plain, is likeable by some. Just for the aesthetic variety you know? I mean, why else is the elementalist master armour still around when it has no benefit? Aesthetics!. So why not shove the starter armours to have lvl 20 version of them too? :O The game has small variety as it is you know.

Another thing to add would be stuff like helmet varieties. I hate how the useful Captain Helmets look so darn ugly on warriors usually if you mix them with other armours. Then again, gladiators armour fits perfectly, but it wasn't like that before.

I havent seen the ele master armor but i would realy love to, but at the same time i don't want to because that's the only armor that i haven't seen yet thanks to PvP character creation.

Changing height is good, but being able to change body mass would help individualize each character but still make their class recognizable.

It would be so much better if we could buy dyes from the outfitters..I mean he has dye remover...why not dyes? And being able to specify what part of the piece of armor we want to dye would be good...it is sometimes hardly noticable with the tiny bits that the dye affects.

It would be cool to be able to lengthen the skirt and raise the bodice of the female elementalists if desired.

You can buy dyes in Lions Arch

just some random thoughts put in a semblance of order:

another game by ncsoft allows body mass- City of Heroes... too bad the programmers from diablo didn't get a chance to talk to the ppl who did CoH cuz both games would be uber and i'd still be paying for CoH...

yes armors may be meant for ppl to instantly recognize a class but i think in real life ppl are more varied and also when i play pvp i tell their class from tabbing through classes...

and what Xellos was trying to say was some of the starter armors rock, instead of sucking like in some other games, and as such should be usable in later incarnations (such as making Mesmer Stylish armor usable (by ppl who like that sort of armor who also happen to play a certain way, maybe inspiration magic or something along that lines), but that's maybe 3-5 years ahead of its time)

to sum it all up: this game is free so they did not add these things, along with some other things they did not add, like a search feature to find your friend and what zone he's in so u can go there and annoy him... hey maybe Guild Wars 2 will have all this...

If you pay attention, it really looks like they're just holding back.

When I first started I even noticed it. There are some NPC's out there with some really cool, elaborate armor. There's tiny convenience features that should have already been there. I even saw a completely different skin for the interface in a beta screenshot (this one though was probably removed because it had too many fancy graphics to customize it like you can now).

I think they're just holding alot back for the expansions.
They've got to make them kick ass to keep gaining money.

Probably true Gearfire.

They have too many major issues to deal with before they pay attention to the eye candy.

Plans are in the works for GW. Apart from the two new zones, i don't know what they are.

Just let them know of our ideas and desires are and eventually...who knows.