Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
[Player Feedback Request] Character Creator
Hello glorious community,
It was awesome seeing all of your reactions to the current WIP for the Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Character Creator during the March 2022 Development Update livestream! We’d like you to provide any feedback you might have, and let us know what other features you’d like to see for our Character Creator in the future.
https://youtu.be/z_PasE-_W6M
NOTE: The goal of our Character Creator isn’t to just help you customize your character. You’ll also be able to customize the NPCs for the places you create in-game.
To help guide this conversation, here are a few thought starters:
We’ll be compiling a report for the development team on Thursday, April 14, 2022, so please try to get your feedback into this thread by then!
Everyone here at Intrepid Studios looks forward to reading all the feedback you have to share regarding our Character Creator!
It was awesome seeing all of your reactions to the current WIP for the Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Character Creator during the March 2022 Development Update livestream! We’d like you to provide any feedback you might have, and let us know what other features you’d like to see for our Character Creator in the future.
https://youtu.be/z_PasE-_W6MNOTE: The goal of our Character Creator isn’t to just help you customize your character. You’ll also be able to customize the NPCs for the places you create in-game.
To help guide this conversation, here are a few thought starters:
- What do you like or dislike about the Character Creator we shared?
- What features would you like to see included in the future for the Character Creator?
- What areas of customization are important to you?
We’ll be compiling a report for the development team on Thursday, April 14, 2022, so please try to get your feedback into this thread by then!
Everyone here at Intrepid Studios looks forward to reading all the feedback you have to share regarding our Character Creator!
12
Comments
2. Besides sliders having a place to put number for more accurate shapes always great.
3. Undo option 🙂.
4. Ability to change sizes of pointing out tooth/horns/some accessories.
5. Compare option (comparing changes with previously save changes before saving).
6. If possible ability to upload photo of person's face and game itself adjust settings to match as much as possible would be great.
I would also like more options with hair customization, specifically in terms of length. BDO allows you to lengthen different areas of the hair, instead of a single slider.
Lots of games have very limited options for the fantasy races. This makes them feel like an afterthought, and like the devs don't know what to do with them, or don't care. So please make sure there's significant customization for the various races, to reflect the varying subcultures in that race. For example, the Vek should have many different body marking options, not just three or four. Unless there's a specific reason that the entire culture sticks to only a few designs, make sure there's a really good amount of variety.
I'm really happy with what you guys showed today, and I can't wait to get into it myself!
Basically, imagine you use 100% muscle slider, yet in-game you can add like 10% more with some heavy training. That would be cool
This is the most user friendly yet detail oriented way of implementing skin tone, hair, tattoos/scars, and over all vertices manipulation I've ever seen. I often have trouble getting through character creator ui despite being in love with making characters. The 'blend' ability is a genius and very welcome tech.
Also shout outs to all the people who made the lighting and scattering in your creator be so dynamic and representational of actual in game environments! I loathe BDO's lighting system with a passion. The Vek's right eye becoming orange looking in the shadows and yet remained yellow in the light gave me a lot of good hype feelings! HOLY HECK IS IT GOOD.
Also I absolutely love the transition particle effects between races and stripping off clothing. So thematic and a small world building detail that really grabbed me.
Things I'd want prioritized:
1.Full camera control. I hate it when character creators make it difficult to zoom in and out at specific distances. Let me zoom in and out unlimitedly and either have a free camera or toggleable lock points! This will be even more necessary with how small and large you can make scars and tattoos.
2. Hex codes and sliders. I want these to be viewable side by side with the sculpting mode. BDO makes you toggle between menus and it makes it really hard to do detail work on a model.
3a. Gradient options. I want to be able to choose between different set gradients for both hair and tattoo coloration. The gradient shown in the live stream was great, but it also opened up an opportunity for a lot more customization than BDO's character creator. A lot of the gradients on BDO's individual hair styles are very limited despite their well done dying system by set gradients. With different chooseable gradients you could get multicolored dye jobs worked in, different mixed hair styles, and softer more natural highlights that are naturally present in a lot of irl hair colors. This would make it easier to give faded, multicolor hairstyles possible if you had a variety of strong and soft gradient templates available.
3b. This would also open up a lot more options for tattoos to be more tastefully incorporated onto the body and look less cartoonish, especially if you give the gradient the same skin tone hues and gradients to choose from to make scarring and tattoos have a wider more natural range (or look super unique and funky!)
5. I'd appreciate being able to adjust length of a hair style in separate 'quadrants' for additional asymmetry (front, back, left, and right)
6. An undo button. Prefferably one that can reset any given body part to default AND/OR last change. Sometimes making small tweaks or big tweaks on characters can be nonlinear due to the nature of how some parts of the body effect the look of others.
7. Body hair options that also use the 'gradient' technology to have different body hair patterns in varying intensities.
Extras that would be nice:
1. A way to add saved or user made files as selectable presets for the blend tool
2. A selection of natural poses, emotes, and class animations for testing both character voice (probably wont happen till beta 1) and over all body proportions. Optionally clothed and naked while performing these would be great. Most games force you to be clothed while doing this.
3. A way to save and share your saves on various work. Preferably with some sort of popularity system that gains you either materials or some small bonus to a freehold activity as a reward to 'professional' stylists.
4. A comparison mode between changes would be nice but I suspect difficult from a technical standpoint.
5. I'd really appreciate a cash shop way to get other racial hair and beard styles available for races that wouldn't otherwise have them.
6. A way to preview our character in varying graphical qualities mid editing without resetting any of our work would also be highly appreciated but understandable if not included.
7. Also I would absolutely love to be able to preview my character in a sample selection of both cash shop and in game gear at different silhouette levels to make sure I'm getting my body proportions right in a way that will show meaningfully on my character. A way to preview my existing outfits in my inventory without leaving the creator would also be welcome though probably too complicated to work it out.
The character creator feels bloated in my opinion. I don't think there needs to be as many options, sliders, tabs, etc to achieve the same level of customization. I think breaking it up in tabs is a bit confusing. Also, having both sliders and the sculpting seems unnecessary. I can't imagine ever using the blend tool.
Sims 4 does character creation great with sculpting from presets and I'd like to see it more in that direction. The dots, boxes, and the inverse scaling are both not intuitive and could be frustrating.
Lastly, I feel like hair sliders never go long enough... please consider this.
1) shoulder slider for width
2) Ear Sliders (yes plural)
3) blush and makeup for females
4) please make woman feminine, do not make the mistake Elden ring made that woman look and move like trolls (pretty much using same animations and skeletons as males). Games to reference for what I am talking about are Tera, Nier Automata, and Lineage 2. Add elegance, and you will be a step ahead of most American games who know nothing of elegance and femininity.
5) Braids and tide up hair styles (also plural)
6) waist, belly, tights, calves and waist slider (Dragon Raja Moba game does an AMAZING job with their character creator, check it out. Game is garbage, suggest to delete it after you play with their creation tool)
7) Video does not show much of the female, but if you are going to add breast size sliders, please do not do what most games do that breast only expand forward just like missiles ready to poke out and kill someone. It is okay and pretty to have natural look where gravity does affects the shape and movement.
8) elegance, elegance, elegance. Specially with elves. Don't want to play with caveman. spend time with postures, idles, running, jumping animations. This is not a place to cut corners.
9) be able to treat each eye pupil individually. (able to have pupils with different shapes and colors)
10) able to add tattoos like Soul Calibur 6 that you can size them, rotate them, and designate the location in multiple parts of the body (head, chest, legs, arms, back)
I love the hair length feature, body sculpting, and tattoo editor. I'm a bit worried about how these things will hold up with the server load/infrastructure etc...).
I don't like the UI. I understand it's a placeholder so I'm not worried.
What features would you like to see included in the future for the Character Creator?
Adding things like ingame areas for light/shadow testing and/or a time of day toggle.
What areas of customization are important to you?
Hairstyles. The game needs a healthy amount of hairstyles for each race. Some unique and others shared where it makes the most sense.
Side note:
Please..please pleeeeeeaaseee add unique black hairstyles. Every game does the same thing --
Bald? Check
Shaved? Check
Afro? Check
done
Those are fine, but please go further beyond when it comes to black hairstyles. This is what I want to see:
Male
Female
Variations of the pictures above would be greatly appreciated. Just be unique.
with that being said please DO NOT add hairstyles like this or any variation of it.
https://thatsisterimages.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/12200345/Canary-from-Hunter-x-Hunter_opt.jpg
Save yourself the PR headache because hairstyles like this have the likeness of a racist caricature.
Sharing some examples of some big boys I'd like to make on the CC:
Only thing that I could think of would be to add some sort of "undo" button to the character creator. Otherwise it's absolutely the best character creator I've seen in any MMO ever. Continue this same level of quality with the rest of the races and genders and it'll be PERFECT...er
To add to this:
-- Be able to save your own cosmetic preset templates from one character ... to apply to a new character.
-- Would be cool if Alpha/Beta testers could save cosmetic templates for launch (one can only dream).
Edit... also you're creating jobs in the process.
Edit again... also if you really dont want to use the money to reinvest in the game since you have that covered it can go towards a PvP prize pool or other contest... costumes/character creation voted on internally or by the community or a mixture. I feel it would be an amazing feature that could leverage some good return elsewhere.
Also I love the Eve Online character creation, love some of what was brought over from there.
Overall really pleased with the character creator very confident that the majority feel this way. I like that you have adopted features such as the plate editor used in BDO, but have added your own elements of customisation to bring your own take on it.
Things I was impressed with:
- The tattoo customisation! I would like two potential things with this. Firstly, we need a good selection of tattoo options so that tattoos can be unique enough. And to build on this - why not have tattoo parlours in game with in-game achievable tattoo (and other cosmetic) unlocks? The main things I think would be reasonable to change in game similar to IRL is hair and tattoos. I would probably leave the rest as locked at creation.
- Hair extending. it just felt good. Following on from other commenters, Being able to extend different sections of the hair i.e. keep the top short but long on the sides or vise versa.
- Beard - I don't know if it's due to the limited options that were tested on stream, but the long beard I remember feeling like it would be nice to offset the beard's starting point to be slightly further from the mouth. Also, will the beard also have some independent customisation i.e. adjust the chin section of the bard, the side burns and the moustache separately to blend them in our own way?
- The "dots" within the platelets system. Awesome way to tweak. I think the UI could have words to better represent what a particular direction will change. I.e. if adjusting the nost, you could have two axis "height/depth" and "low/high" or similar just for some visual clarity. But the feature itself - amazing.
The overall quality just looks great. The afro style hair for black characters looked good - and I will echo the sentiment that I hope you continue to add more varied options that are not regularly seen in games.
- Randomiser and exporting/importing presets. Great. And the merging of "profiles" in order to blend elements will be a nice way to add relatability between characters made.
What features would you like to see included in the future for the Character Creator?
Will summarise some of the bits mentioned before and some other suggestions I've seen here I will echo:
- A good range of tattoo options
- hexcode for colours as other said. I also hope you can "click, hold and drag" when selecting colours to dynamically look through colours without having to "click" every colour individually. Just a small QoL feature.
- Good range of hair and particularly afro-style options.
- hair and Beard options to be able to be customised in sections (perhaps just not seen in this video).
I think that all in all the majority of the creator is really well done. And I think outside of just adding options and some more versatility - just replicating this *range* across the other races so that others don't feel they got the "short straw".
The Vek isn't properly setup but the randomised options didn't look hugely different from each other - whether its by design, or I assume because there are just not many different options uploaded for Vek yet - i am hopefully we can achieve a fair level of variance across all races most of all.
But all in all - very happy.
The sculpting and blending feature is amazing. So exciting to see such attention to detail.
Player always take tools like this and run with them as far as they can to create very interesting characters. It'll be refreshing not to have everyone looking very samey like in other MMOs.
What features would you like to see included in the future for the Character Creator?
Makeup for both genders. Usually Men are limited to “warpaint” whilst women get a full variety of extra eyeshadows, liners, blushes, lipsticks. Makeup can drastically change the face and provide a lot of diversity to character appearances. Players who want to create feminine male characters or want makeup for roleplay reasons (court jester, evil necromancer, roguish pirate etc) will really appreciate having the same options as female characters.
It goes both ways too, Female characters are rarely allowed to have ugly or gruesome scars. Never mind how ridiculous the sexual dysmorphism can be. The men are brutish 7ft towers of muscle and the women are delicate waifus. If you want to play as that all the power to you but please don't force every other player into that limited binary.
What areas of customization are important to you?
Very excited- can't wait to bring to life all my DnD characters and create many new ones. It's so clear how passionate the devs are and I can't wait to create many stories in this game!
Not just alpha or beta testers. Ideally, they will release this as a standalone creator a few weeks ahead of launch.
That way we can all tweak our perfect characters, save them and then on launch day just load in the template, pick a name and gogogogogogo!
Too many times I've rushed through character creation because I want to get playing the game (and yes, I realise a few hours on launch day is nothing in the grand scheme of things...)
Liking the stylized concept art ≠ disliking realistic models, especially when there's barely any negative comments regarding the realism; most people(I included) seem to be fine with it. Are you suggesting that there should be a glossy/cartoony skin texture as an option in the sliders or are you asking for a complete overhaul to make everything cartoony? If it's the latter, it appears to be a bit too late to try divert the game into another artstyle when we're this far into it, do you want to be delaying the game even more?
I think the sculpting allows players to be more aggressive and quick with their model designs, while sliders allow us to be more precise and take our time. I see no issue with that.
I agree with your take on the hair length slider, it's not that long in my opinion. But everything else is fine to me.
Damn, all those hairstyles look nice
- I like hair length slider,
- hair gradient is also nice,
- the level of customization is amazing,
- I noticed that tattoos disappear when crossed collarbone line,
What features I'd like to see?
- I feel like sculpt section is missing hands/feet sliders,
- different eyes colour I think. It would make sense if someone decided to make an eye scar,
Tulnar options:
- There are plenty of animalistic features that could be implemented to tulnar character what makes me excited about making one. Such as: fins, plantigrade/digitigrade legs, tails, horns, spikes along the spine, fangs/claws. I could write down a whole page.
- one other option I'd like to have is mixing some reptilian and mammalian features for example lizard looking shape but with fur instead of scales.
What areas of customizations are important to me?
- Whenever I chose to play a game, I always check if there are different races to select. I rarely ever play as human.
- I hate when races are locked to gender(unless it's golem or something), class, size or musculature.
Overall very promising.
Need something like this.
To make "Blend" actually useful, let us choose which body part we want to copy to our character, mainly from another player's character(if players can share their designs via a global album or savefile). If it can be used for marriage system babies when the couple are of different races, that would be great too.
Cons w/ranting:
• The two females don't look good, the entire face needs a looooooot of work to reach BDO's level.
• The sliders' range seem too narrow and restrictive, mainly the height and chest. You can go 140cm height and flat-chested and it still will be realistic even for an adult, why stop there? I'm tired of being limited to playing adult humans(muscular man, curvy woman) while being stuck inside an adult IRL. "High-fantasy" where? Can't go furry, can't go l0li/sh0ta, and I doubt dwarfs can have slender figure either.
• Add "armors preview" and I would prefer if they keep their starting armor by default at least until we click on "body editing" which is again like BDO x_x". Some weak-minded people will be tempted from accidentally seeing realistic partial nudity and it will affect their later decisions like trolling with sliders, choosing the opposite gender with confused mind and running around with only underwear 24/7. I think these things affect what the community grows into as well. Peace ♥
- The hair colours provided look great, I think keeping them natural-ish looking is a positive. Having glistening neon blue, greens and purples in hair is a little off putting. Although I'm for character freedom so maybe if these were added, they could be muted somewhat.
- Potentially tattoos could have secondary affecting sliders such as ink bleeding, ageing and wear & tear. This may be in the creator already but having a priority list for scars and tattoos would be cool to see. Since scar tissue can't really be tattooed on, having a long scar breaking up the ink would be really aesthetic.
1) Birth Marks
2) Freckles
3) Moles
4) Burns (Scars, Burns)
5) Body Hair
6) Player Created Library (Like in BDO)
- I love the fact you'll be able to share your templets with others! Why not just make a Library??
7) A Basic Option and Advanced Option for Character Creation
- Some people feel like its too many options which I don't think so however making a Basic Tab would help out those people drastically.
8) Make up for the Females (Blush, Lipstick, Glitter, etc.)
Other than that, I feel like Intrepid has a very great direction on the vision of the Character Creator so I don't have much else! Great, great, GREAT job guys... I was blown away and can't wait to see its final form!!!
Love the undo option and comparing previous changes! That last one #6 is a no. People could be uploading anyone or anything and impersonate that person.
Personally i just like having plenty of options. Such as hair, cosmetic, hair color etc. As for as customizing every single detail of the character, i just want something basic. And i would like to see colors in hairstyles, skin tones being somewhat real. Neon in hairstyles doesn't fit in my opinion.