Mastermind: Customizable Henchmen!!!

I love my DSMM but I'd rather summon a pack of ravenous werewolves instead of the same old hell spawn thingies. This probably isn't a new thread concept here but I just wanted to throw some fuel on the MM fire. I'd be content with being able simply assign preexisting npc models to my minion tiers.

Tier 1: 3 of those circle of thrones specter things
Tier 2: 2 of the giant werewolf models
Tier 3: Well, I actually like my demon prince. Id rather see him replaced with a Cerberus type creature or a demon bear.

This all brings me around to my other idea for hero versions of mastermind that can summon animals or clones of your character but that's for another thread.

*Points to the thread in her sig* That right there is what I want for customization.

Be right back... Getting the popcorn ready now...

Since players can get their henchies to speak and use emotes I am sure you can all figure out why we don't have female henchies.

Mastermind customization ties into power customization and presents an immense workload. That's the real excuse. Unlike other summons, Mastermind henchmen have a variety of costumes per henchman, and often a variety of varieties if you have dissimilar, random-appearance for your henchmen like Thugs do.

Basically, each henchman has four costumes: one default, one with just the first upgrade, one with just the second upgrade and one with both. Each Mastermind has three tiers of henchmen, so that's three times four costumes. Some henchmen, like Ninja, Thugs and Mercs, also have multiple models for all their henchmen, and each model has four costumes to itself. For Thugs, in fact, most of their upgrade powers is just costume piece calls - a huge list of them - to make sure a black guy doesn't turn into a white guy when he puts on a jacket and one guy's face doesn't change into another guy's face when he puts on a bandana. What this equates to is a giant lump of artwork to even mess with these things.

There's also UI work. Normally, summons either spawn one entity, or else spawns a group of the same entities, so you can use one option to customize them all. Mastermind henchmen often spawn three very dissimilar entities with just one power. I think the Demon Summoning Demonlings are the best example - each looks different and has different powers of a different colour. Considering the UI doesn't even let us keep our toggles on so we can see what we're changing and STILL only has the light/dark part of the screen take up a 4x3 rectangle on the right of my 16x9 monitor, I'd say that's a problem.

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All of that said... Sure. Of course I'd like to see customizable henchmen. One of my dreams has always been to see a sort of "storm trooper" appearance for Mercenaries henchmen. Right now, the only "futuristic" henchmen we have are Robotics robots, with the Mercs more resembling 1970s Vietnam era US soldiers, complete with the Arnold Schwartzenegger shirtless commando who'd have his eyes sucked out of his head Total Recall style if he actually went out in space like what I want to have mine do.

Mastermind henchmen customization is one of the big things left in this game, right next to the ability to fire non-weapon powers (Ice Blast, say) out of guns and weapon powers out of our hands or hand-mounted implements. It's always been a good idea.

Quote:

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.

Humanoid henchmen customization is easy. Just swap the base model and you're set. The problem is with the non-human ones using exotic animations and/or rigs. The Robotics robots use their own unique models only slightly modelled after the Malta Hercules/Zeus titans. They're so unique that they're actually the BASIS for a couple of other character rigs, like the PPD bots. There isn't all that much to swap them with, because the Robotics bots have their own unique animations that I'm pretty sure wouldn't work on other character models.

Demon Summoning is kind of the same. You can swap the Demon models for Behemoths, say, but would those Behemoths be able to use the same animations that Demons do directly? Because I doubt this, as demons - especially the Hellfire Gargoyle and the other one, have such unique stances and the Hellfire effects in general are so eccentric.

There are a lot of pitfalls here that make for greater complication than it seems. That's the primary reason why it's taking so long.

Quote:

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.