Our humans are ugly

I'm sorry if this seems like a mean thing to say, but I just feel it's high time we accepted this and, more importantly, admitted that we need a solution to it. I was just watching the MMOgrinder review of City of Heroes, and it occurs to me that Chaos is not the first person to say our characters look plastic and doll-like. I agree that a lot of our newer, paid-for costume pieces look very good - better than a lot of contemporary games, actually.

But our humans are still ugly. Of all the old costumes in this game, some of by FAR the oldest are the basic human body shape and the human skin texture, and those have never been updated. And that's a problem. Our clothes and our armour are getting better and better, yet our bodies remain very ugly when we take those clothes off. Our necks are atrocious, our feet are cube-like, our hands have no fingers, our women's arms are cylindrical tubes, our skins have no definition, our hair is static and on and on and on.

Obviously, some of those things are too resource-intensive to do. Fingers, for instance, would require the remodelling of all available gloves while moving hair would probably require new tech. But at least some of those things shouldn't be this hard to improve on. Our characters' basic physique is laughable. The old "naked" body modle is severely limited in terms of detailing, essentially the same as it was back in 2004, or 2001 or whenever those were first made. Giving us better BARE feet should not be this hard. Giving us a torso with better shoulders and more realistic physique should not be this hard. Giving us ankles that look like ankles should not be such a problem.

Our costumes look great, but the characters inside those costumes still look blocky, dated and unrefined. But that's just me complaining. I want to turn this into something positive.

Suppose you could change any number of things on the basic character model sans any clothes. What would they be, and in what order of importance would you arrange them?

For me, those would be:
*The skin. Our basic skin texture is far too simplistic and uncustomizable. We can do better.
*The necks. Those double chins have to go.
*The faces. The whole head mesh can do with a LOT more 3D details.
*The arms. For women, these look like sausages more than like arms.
*The feet. This is 2011. Shoes painted with toes on them is not good enough.
*The ankles. There's just something really weird about those.
*The hair. I don't know how other games do it, but having even short hair sway just looks cool.

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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.

Now how many years have I said this???

If I had a quid for every time I've thought that?
I could retire. Right now. Happily.

And bloody hell do I wish they'd fix the basic model. But will they?
Uh....oh look, a new shiny!!

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Basically there's no way to get around the fact that this game is based on a game engine/system that's now pushing 10+ years old. Remember much of what we see here was established during the first years it took to initially develop this game before it officially launched.

I'll be the first to priase the efforts of our Devs for all the hard work they've done over the years to push the limits of what this game can do graphically. But sooner or later we'll have to accept that this game will never be able to last forever in its current form. At some point the amount of updating it'll require to stay competitive with newer games will become so massive that really the only reasonable alternative will be starting over with something like a CoH 2.0.

The complaint that "our humans are ugly" is starting to approach that tipping point where as Aura_Familia said the only way to adequately "solve" that problem will be to wait for the next game to be made.

I was rescuing debutantes from joining the Carnival the other day, and I thought, poor girls, maybe I should let them join after all, a mask would only help them....

I have to say, as an old-time comics fan, I love the fact that the heroes and villains look so much like good silver-aged comic book art rather than bulgy plastic puff-stickers, cell-shaded TV cartoons, or anime.

If I go back and look at my 80's and 90's comics, this game looks tons more like them than any other similar themed game out there. I guess people these days are thinking of the game more like a superhero movie than a comic book, but I like the authentic comic book look and feel.

I would be sad if the game started looking like an Xbox game (like some superhero movies lately have looked) or started to play like a first-person shooter--which seems to be what people who are less from a classic comic book angle and more from a "gamer" background seem to want.

But, I also know that ultimately people will vote with their dollars, and that will win out. I have two VIP accounts--one that is years old--so I get two votes :P!

That being said, I'd be first in line for COH 2.0, to support the games continuance and because I figure the Dev's would have learned a lot from the good, bad, and ugly they did (mostly good! I'm practically a fanboy!).

The funny thing is, our characters faces have a certain "uniqueness" to them. I think the more plastic look to the new steam-punk models seems off to me.

2012, Sam.

I'd like some better looking (and more variety of) faces, but the more detailed ones that came with the steampunk and gunfighter sets are just plain creepy.

It must be the way my mind works, but I havent really noticed an NPC in years and this sort of puts me in mind of the thread awhile back where people were complaining about the new, ugly coins over contact's heads.

Even though I dontnotice these things, Id be game for a new game engine whenever...itll just add to the epicness of everything we have already.

I wouldn't mind an update to how our character models looked, but if we ended up with something like our Distinguished Competition's plastique or our Chief Opposition's shiny clay, I will throw a fit. Promise. City's character models are halfway between drawn art and reality, and that looks way better than those other two's.

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Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.