Freakishly Long Toes

I'm going to quote someone whose name I don't remember, but those shoes look like someone sawed off the woman's feet and replaced them with hands. Those toes are a mile long! I mean, OK, the Witch boots are infinitely goofy, but at least they're still boots. You can claim the woman simply has no taste in footwear. But those are actual bare feet! There's no excuse for that. It makes every female character I've tried them on look like a manatee!

On the plus side, I like a lot of the other stuff in the pack. I'll personally be buying it for the Jeans and Penny's hair. And I suppose for the Marty McFly lifejacket. The rest of the stuff doesn't interest me. The "metallic" top and bottom for women look so "realistic" with all their creases and crinkles it's just ungainly.

As for the male "dyed" hair... I don't know, it just looks like one of the Deckers from Saints Row: The Third. It's not so much bad... OK, it IS so much bad, but more than that, it just looks so cartoony as compared to the rest of the set I'm honestly starting to get conflicting messages. First David stands up strong and tall for hyper-realism (as I read his posts) and we get those photo-realistic crinkled textures, then we get this hair, which looks like something out of Worms 3D. It doesn't even look like hair, it looks like a quill rat is sleeping on my head. Either that, or like I haven't washed my hair in six months and it's clumped together in leaves of a sort. And it still looks like those hair clumps can be used as deadly weapons.

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.

I just realised something. Do you know what the new male hairstyle reminds me of? Knuckles the Echidna!



I'd also like to cast my vote AGAINST further hyper-realistic textures making their way into the game. City of Heroes has always had an art style that's part serious mimicry of real life, part stylised, idealised representation. All the Unreal engine games that keep coming out these days do look more realistic, but that's the style they're going for. I don't believe City of Heroes would look better with such a style.

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.

Speaking of uncanny valley. CoH already has highly photorealistic faces that everyone accepts (well, at least, they did for years until pointed out, at which time some people suddenly have issues with them <sigh>) which *do not* fall into the uncanny valley. They were introduced in CoV for the Luddites, Scrapyarders, CoV Family, Gold Brickers, and Arachnos. Then they stopped being used for a while. When I pointed them out to Noble Savage for Player use, all of a sudden, they started to be used again for NPCs, such as the Praetorian Police (the humans, anyway). But still, not for players.

What makes them successful compared to the waxy Normal Mapped faces is that they're not waxy or shiny, but very flat matte. And they have a bit of a graininess and uneven shading to them that resembles human skin rather than mannequins.

Come on, Paragon Studios. You know that sooner or later you *will* release these for players. It's inevitable. Please make it sooner than later.

To wit...



Newer ones v. old low rez...

Yup. I guess it's MORE disappointing, knowing that they HAVE and CAN make faces look awesome, yet the whole 'OMGNew Shinies!' thing gets in the way of what actually works and is proven to work pretty much without fail.

Quote:

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.

Quote:

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

If you think all or even most of the player base would agree that adding nothing but grizzled lumberjack faces with wicked witch noses from here on out would be awesome, well, I suppose my diction so far in this sentence makes my thoughts on that clear enough. It's worth considering that those "great, realistic" faces were all added for CoV and are all clearly designed to give CoV a drearier tone than CoH had already established.

Fair point. Talk of how that was the golden age of CoX faces strikes me as slightly odd though, as that does more than just slightly imply that they should go back to doing those. The thing is, all of CoV's faces look the same to me because they're all gruff and grumpy and weird. I doubt the devs would consider those faces suitable to be ported to players given the wonky nose issue alone, but more generally the fact that they are complete packages not designed to be customizable with masks, beard options, and so on.

do the faces really affect your enjoyment of the game?

I mean I take a minute to choose a face when I make a character, but in game I almost never see someone's face from closer than 10 feet or more.

I play in a 3rd person view so I never see my own face, and I would have to zoom into first person view and walk right up to see someone else's face in detail

the general appearance of faces I see is fine for me when playing the game. I would rather the devs made new backpacks or wings than revised faces