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.
Comments
BDO has a decent system, the templates is what really sets it apart. i personally think the click and drag detail sculpting is far superior to sliders. i fail to see how BDO's is better. as far as the character models, you can fine adjust in sculpting and blending to make them look how ever you want them to.
Short answer is that some people can intuit eyeball sliders more easily than pure sculpt and vice versa. What is quicker depends from person to person.
BDO has both a sculpt mode and a slider mode. AoC current build has a better sculpt tool than BDO but there is no reason to not have both. In my experience it makes macro tweaks easier to compare and contrast against than sculpt does. Sliders are a 'how much clay do you want to use on this part of the statue' question. Sculpt is 'what fine tuned shape you want'. You can also fine tune with sliders if there are enough of them, but it's not much quicker since there is a limitation in fine tuning.
BDO has an additional flaw in that you can't easily gauge between sliders and sculpt side by side, so if you want to use both it's usually a slow and cumbersome process. A simple change to ui could fix this.
The only little detail that I didn't really like was this following beard:
It kinda looks like it's just glued on.
Keep up the good work!
He just got back from Party City
1. There is a "slider" to define how "fat" your arms, legs, and body are, but I am missing a slider to have those parts more/less muscular. It would be great to have such a thing.
2. regarding the hair I think there could be models for different ways people lose their hair when getting older and a slider to define its current progress.
Apart from that I only think that the guy could need some minor usability upgrades, but I guess that's going to happen anyway. From what I saw: clicking on a color option and then having to scroll in order to see all available colors might be not so cool. I'd prefer to see the full color palette immediately after selecting the option.
About custom image uploads: In "Trials Rising" there is a character creator with a similar sticker system. (Trials uses them on the cloth instead of on the skin) and they've provided a huge amount of very basic images like a straight line, a curved line, a line that gets thinner, splash patterns, UbiSoft logo, circular gradient, square gradient, etc.). As a result, there are a couple of absolutely awesome cloth designs in the game, but you'll have a WW2 Nazi uniform, dirty diapers, and gore as well.
So the moderation concern is real even if you don't allow custom images and only allow for a lot of tattoos on the body because you'll probably have people use certain shapes in combination to create other shapes.
1. The ability to put armor on the models while designing them. Not all, just the basics. Cloth, leather, chain/plate.
2. A height bar or something relevant for in game scale.
3. More hair styles.
That's about it. What you have planned already are my other wants.
Has there been any discussions on Kaelar-half races where you would use the blend feature and select a second race?
I don't believe so. Tulnar will have some blends between races however will have animal traits as well.
Also more feminization or masculization for female or male defaults is always really nice.
Hopefully there will be more variation on characters looks than in BDO. Everyone in that game just looks the same even tho they have that character creator
One thing that you could add to the beard section is an option to choose different looks on how the beard is growing around the mouth for the same beardstyle/length.
Also would have liked for the height slider to make more of a difference.
Still over all I think the creator is shaping up well.
PD: also an undo option would be nice, like if I'm sculpting my nose and mess it up I want to cancel the sculpt and get the nose how it was before sculpting.
i find wow/bdo/gw2 to have some very good character creator and came up with a very quick concept:
i felt that msot work was in the first tab added the basics to the origin tab so that you can choose your direction easily before you dive deeper into customization.
then i merged appearance/blend and sculpt together since they are all the same thing.
lastly id add a personality tab which you choose basic flavor choices that add just a bit of RP element to it all similar to how guild wars 2 does it to flesh out the characters depth.
What do you like or dislike about the Character Creator we shared?
Like:
It is by far the most detailed and user friendly creator i have ever seen, the ability to blend premade presets is genius, i'm interested in seeing how this applies to other races though, as what works amazingly for humans may not bode well for kaelar for example. I don't want it to be just amazing for humans and mediocre for the other races.
Dislike:
I find that alot of the sliders are limiting and whilst hilarious, "crotch" and "chest" sliders shouldnt be comical, we dont want characters walking around with gigantic junk thinking its a polearm only to find it's actually an archer. whilst hilarious, AOC isn't a comedy game.
What features would you like to see included in the future for the Character Creator?
Definitely i'd like to have some way of uploading images and having the softward do its best to create the image. alot of people would love to literally be themselves and i've seen this done with poor success in the past as nobody looks good if you paint your face onto a model that doesn't resemble you.
I would also love the races to be more than just humans, whilst i know it'll make it easier to develop as alot of humanoids are the same in terms of skeleton i'd much racher a versatile and diverse game, I would love to have quadrapeds, slimes, animals themselves being playable characters as races. whilst i'm not expecting people to be anthropomorphised wolfes, or to go as far as let people be a gigantic slime holding weapons, i'd like for the customisation to be a large variety, let us make very obease characters, you have super skinny ones, whilst Ashes has expanded to the extreme with details (i loved the wrinkles btw, they actually work for once) the larger aspects are generally the same. slight hight differences, a weight difference of say, 200lbs? at most, it just seems to me that whilst there's alot of versatility there isnt nearly enough. I understand alpha and whatnot, you're not gonna have everything in alpha 2, but that doesnt mean you can't have more in the full release. a race having tusks and sharp ears, purple skin is one thing, but we have dwarven spieces too, but humans can also be dwarven sizes, and likewise a very tall dwarf can look like a short human. dont let the races be limited by height and size, let all races increase and decrease their weight, muscles and everything. give us true creative freedom with our characters.let us make our characters look like other species too, we coudl have a human with facepaint to look like a kaelar, or a tall dwarf to look like a human, with typical dwarven nose. it wont be quite mix and match but the option to truly customise our toons instead of just customise it as best as we can given the confines of their race really would feel like a complete game. you're goiing to have 10's of thousands of players, i dont want them all to look the same.
What areas of customization are important to you?
I think i answered this before but, All of them.
I have a standard fear with all games, and thats that my characters will end up overly sexualised. I get it, sex sells but i dont want to have characters walking around in bikinis, or swimming trunks in their time off. nor do i want emotes that twerk, or any of that anime UwU stuff. There's places for that stuff and in a game as expansive and with as much work put into it as ashes, where you're re-defining what it is to be a MMO, and not just copying every game out there since the year 2000, is not the place for it. Its a fame filled with fantasy, lore, wonder and action. not to get your rocks off.
The character creation has limits, i'd like to be able to have facepaint of a design of our choosing, and not just the scorpion tribal patterns. yeah there's going to be people who draw phalluses on their faces and stuff but they will find a way to do that regardless. so why not open it up and let us draw what we want and just moderate it. I'd love to have a guild symbol on my face, or chest or back. i'd love to be able to tell what someone is about, be it harmless animal tamer, or fearsome pker, or even a mercenary, just by looking at them. let us brand ourselves with freedom.
I think further than this to critique it i'll have to play around in it, but i could go onfor hours suggesting things and asking for things. Ultimately i don't know the furthest extent of customisation that Intrepid are going to allow us so i cant brainstorm within that.
Hex codes are a godsend. I can google exactly what I want
Strange that small studios have better character creators than big studios full of money like acti-money or Blizzard
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I'm not really big into character creators because eventually you are wearing armor that covers up all that glorious work you put in to the CC! I would just make a small recommendation; A barbershop in certain node types that will give you the option to redo you character for a fee.
Barber Startup text: "Not all of us are comfortable in our own skin, some just fancy a change. Luckily for you I am skilled in Physiological Energy Manipulation, sit down - if you so choose."
A couple things I'd love to see:
Ability to import/export characters, and being able to create a character without needing an account. With so much variation you've already put into the creator, there are a million variations. It could be possible to have an entire third party economy or shop developed around character creation, which some people excel at, and others couldn't care less about. I'd love to be able to pay someone who is great at facial mapping to take a picture of me and see how to map it to a Dunir face.
The second thing is body effects, like a tattoo that only glows at night, or only when fighting undead. This could be extrapolated to the antlers on the Py'Rai, or braids in the Ren'Kai or Dunir hair.
Can't WAIT to see what the Tulnar options are going to be like! I'd love to see something similar to a Dragonborn or Lizardkin.