Customisable Henchmen

I was thinking about this and I came to the conclusion that while all the MM sets look cool, they are all the same. This has probably been discussed to death before, but... it kind of irks me somewhat the option isn't there.

Im not talking about building your henchmen to the same degree you build the actual MM themselves, but I think it would pretty good if you could just choose from a selection of body parts and colours.

Head
Body
Legs

For each you get a choice of looks. Obviously with the character creation you get macro and micro management to truly get that unique look. But with pets it should be more of a macro manage only. So you can have different looks and colours for each of your tiers.

You can rename each pet. Why not give your pets a different look from default?

Because the devs haven't been able to figure out a way to implement it yet given time constraints.

short version:

Engine doesn't work like that yet.

Okay, in all fairness your forum join date is listed as October 10th, so I'm going to make the dangerous assumption that you were one of the new players brought in through Going Rogue. Ergo, I'll spare you the theatrics and pointing to half-a-million previous posts.

The big problem with power-customization is that the engine was never built for power-customization way back in 2002-2003. All of the power-data was stored on the server, and no power information was stored on the player-character.

Updating the game to support player tagging of power-customization took around 2 years worth of work on the part of the developers... basically from the time the developers were purchased by NCSoft to the release of Issue 16.

The developers told the player-base back when Issue 16 launched that further engine work was needed for pool-powers, epic-powers, patron powers, and costume-overlay. Costume-Overlay refers to when the engine references a static costume file stored on the server, such as stone armor granite armor... and Mastermind Pets.

The developers made it clear that resources to develop these features would not be made available until after Going Rogue Launched. That was last August.

Now, we don't know exactly how much work is still needed to expose Costume-Overlays to the costume editor. The presumption is that the total amount of time and resources will be less than starting from scratch as Paragon Studios did back when they were bought out from Cryptic. It's still probably going to be a while for additional power-customization to work it's way through the development process. I honestly wouldn't expect the developers to finish up power-customization till Issue 22 or 23... if even then.

* * *

Now, as to your other question about Mastermind's specifically.

If my memory is correct, and to be fair it might not be since it's been a couple years now, back when Issue 16 launched one of the developers talked about power-customization options during one of the beta tests.

The information derived from that test basically said this:

If / When Mastermind Pets are made customizable, options will be limited.

• Robots will only get mechanical parts.
• Ninja's will only get oriental costumes.
• Thugs will only get street clothes
• Mercs will only get military uniform parts
• Necro probably would only get some model selections.

Thanks for the very detailed reply, and for sparing the theatrics. You are right, Going Rogue was the thing that pulled me to the game, the whole alternate reality thing, true comic book stuff that. I had played before, had some characters on a friends account, but, now I got my own, and love the game.

Was most informative. I guess this is one of those things I will have to keep my fingers crossed for in future.

For my Ninjas, I would like female cyberninjas. Here are some examples that I have found.





Being able to pick the look of the henchmen from a few different models would be helpful and might be more feasible than complete customization. I suspect that some work will be done on it soon due to the poor reception that Lore pets have received. If pet customization is allowed for Lore pets, then henchmen should get it as well.

We've got a thread stickied at the top of these forums for new mastermind primaries, you should post those ninja pictures in that thread, they're pretty sweet.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=123490