Better Faces

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

This is a MONUMENTALLY bad idea. Outright removing costume pieces out of the game based on nothing more than "I don't like them!" is a catastrophically bad suggestion. You don't have to like them or use them, but other people DO like them and DO use them, and having their faces yanked out for what amounts to no good reason cannot and will not go over well. I'm not averse to touching them up a bit, but I wouldn't dream of removing them outright.

While I'm right with you on wanting something like this, I'm not sure you appreciate quite what that really means. Right now each different face is a separate underlying mesh with its own texture, with many faces having meshes that are more or less detailed than others, which don't really correspond to each other. Animating existing faces would have to be done one at a time, face-by-face, and for every new face added to the game. While I'd like to see that, certainly, I doubt it'd happen.

Breaking faces down into eyes, mouths, noses and so forth is actually even worse, because it leads to the Champions syndrome - one face for the whole game, slightly altered. Right now our faces are as diverse as they are because each face is separate and made in whole. If we broke them down to a piece-by-piece creation method, we would more than certainly lose a LOT of what we already have in terms of final options. More specifically, we're very likely to lose the non-human options, such as Feline, Protoss (I forgot what it's actually called) the tusked monstrous ones, the Roswell alien and the many stitched together faces. Remember, the stitches go over the entire face, not just one section.

I would definitely like more facial animation, but I would not like it if it comes at the cost of facial customization. I like my faces, and I don't want to lose them.

I don't see a reason to disagree with this, but again, this comes back to a question of workload. While it'd be great, it'd turn each face into half a dozen to a dozen times the workload to create, not to mention taking a huge toll in retrofitting the 70 or so faces we already have. I can't say how difficult that would be to pull off, and I WOULD like to see this as the most elegant solution, but I'm not confident the developers will go for it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.