Will Blizzard half-ass the new character models?

[Deleted]

Edit: To be clear, I'm not worried about the actual 3d models or animations - I'm confident they will be of very high quality and a huge improvement, I'm worried about the possible lack of distinct textures.
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This is going to be a longer one, so bear with me.

As you all know, Blizzard is working on the new, updated character models.
What they said is they want to bring up all of the Vanilla (and later TBC) races to the quality of the Pandaren.

Now here comes my concern - while the Pandarens have very high quality models and great animations, they lack in customization.

Every race and gender has 5 ways in which you can customize them: Skin Color, Face, Hair/Horn Style, Hair/Horn Color and the last option varies between Earrings, Markings, Facial Hair, Ears and other features.

Let's take the Gnome Female for example.
Here are all of her Face options:





As you can see, she has 7 different faces to choose from and there are very noticable differences between every one of them: noses, eyebrows, eyes, facial expression, wrinkles, etc.

All of the Vanilla and TBC races have this kind of facial customization.

The problem started in Cataclysm - mainly Worgen females.
They have a total of 14 face options. Two times more than what the gnome females have. Impressive, right?
Not really, given that all of their faces look exactly the same, except for very slight differences in noses between a couple of them. Really, the only thing changing is the tone of their skin.
Here are all the worgen female and corresponding human female faces.



As I said - human female - big differences, Worgen female - only the skin tone, with the same face undearneath.

Fortunately, the rest of the Cataclysm skins don't suffer from such half-assness and you can really make them your own:

- here's the Goblin female (10 faces)
- Goblin male (6 faces)
- Worgen male (5 faces)

Nothing to complain about here. Great work.

And then we come to Pandaren...
Here's the male Pandaren, with whooping 22 face options:


Too bad, you can hardly tell the difference between most of them. It's there, but it's extremely slight - eye color, nose, scars, etc.
It really feels like it should fall into the last category (markings) as the base texture of the face barely changes.

But the worst offender of them all is the female Pandaren:


Again, amazing amount of 20 "face options", where literally nothing changes but the markings. In reality, she only has one face.
This really feels like quantity over quality and just straight up half-assed work.



Imagine if these were the new Night Elf face options:


because that's really how the Pandaren faces differ from one another, instead of real customization like this one:




Anyone who pays any attention to character models must have noticed this already.
The new models obviously take much longer to create than the old ones, but should it excuse the lack of real customization?

Are you concerned that your characters might all look almost the same after the update?
I sure am.

[Deleted]

The Pandaren faces differ in that way because changing the shape of their face too much might make them look un-panda like. You can already see the variation in faces with the new player models. It's not just face paint. How would that work for humans or gnomes, anyway?

[Immitis]

no /endthread

[Kerath]

I'm not as concerned about 'humanoid' races.
Blizzard seem to struggle with offering different looking faces to beast races. I suppose it's difficult without making changes to the muzzle etc, which might require more in-depth changes with the model then just a different texture over the top? I don't know anything about 3d modelling etc, so just speculating here.
I'm fairly confident that the different looking faces on the classic 'humanoid' races will be carried forward. A little concerned about Tauren though, hope they don't have the same fate as fem-pandas and fem-worgen with only 1 face.

[Hctaz]

no /endthread

The orc faces didn't look different to me at all ._. Neither did the other two aside from the changes made because they had different facial hair or regular hair.

[NatePsy]

Yeah I'd be disappointed If my Orc only has one face, different skin color.

[-Superman-]

How about we SEE the new models and have a chance to decide. I would imagine ANYTHING will be better than what we have. Not sure why people feel the need to make stupid ass assumptions and wrap them up in a new thread. If you think everything they do is half-ass, maybe you should find another game to play and another forum to haunt. Most of us here actually ENJOY 95% of what Blizz does.

[Netherspark]

The Orcs in that video had two distinct faces. The Dwarves and Gnomes though was just the one face.

It's not any reliable way to judge anything though, given that none of the models are finished yet.

[zoefschildpad]

The gnome faces are just as different from eachother as the pandaren females are, they're the same model painted differently. With so much better models, I'm not sure they can pull off the same simple repaint (which is why all the pandas and worgen have the same mouth, because they can't change the color of things to make them look different anymore). We'll have to see.

[Deleted]

How about we SEE the new models and have a chance to decide. I would imagine ANYTHING will be better than what we have. Not sure why people feel the need to make stupid ass assumptions and wrap them up in a new thread. If you think everything they do is half-ass, maybe you should find another game to play and another forum to haunt. Most of us here actually ENJOY 95% of what Blizz does.

First of all, calm down.
Second of all, if you actually read my post you'd see that I have a problem with no more than 3 existing models.
And I don't agree with the "shut up and wait until release" approach, if I have a concern about something I voice it before it's too late into the process and there's nothing left to do about it.

- - - Updated - - -

The gnome faces are just as different from eachother as the pandaren females are, they're the same model painted differently. With so much better models, I'm not sure they can pull off the same simple repaint (which is why all the pandas and worgen have the same mouth, because they can't change the color of things to make them look different anymore). We'll have to see.

Poor choice of words, it's the same model, yes, but the texture is completely different in every one of them, while the Pandaren have the exact same "base" texture with just markings added on top of it.

[Deleted]

The orc faces didn't look different to me at all ._. Neither did the other two aside from the changes made because they had different facial hair or regular hair.

They have different wrinkles, just like the other races




The old faces all have the same shape, too. If you look through the old orc faces that are now on live, they all have the same shape, just different wrinkles that make the faces look different.

[ReleaseDay]

This is a good topic. It also shows how overrated the new models are. In reality a new race would be so much more interesting than upgraded models.

[Spl4sh3r]

I like how everyone comments something that isn't even halfway done. I believe only one type of face is done especially for Blizzcon just so people could see it. We will really have to wait and see. If you really want to comment on the current state of things go to the official forum and do it. I don't see why people go to secondhand sites (no offence MMO-C ) first if they are worried about something.

[ringpriest]

How about we SEE the new models and have a chance to decide. I would imagine ANYTHING will be better than what we have. Not sure why people feel the need to make stupid ass assumptions and wrap them up in a new thread. If you think everything they do is half-ass, maybe you should find another game to play and another forum to haunt. Most of us here actually ENJOY 95% of what Blizz does.

Given how many old timers (and former players) still haunt MMO-Champ, and how a lot of things poll around here, unless your "us" is referring to some loyal cadre who would gleefully pay Blizzard for the privilege of paying tic-tac-toe as long as the models were pretty and they were guaranteed epic loot, no "most" of us don't enjoy 95% of what Blizzard does.

One reason that people are preemptively complaining and sharing their concerns about this and other changes is that if they do wait, Blizzard's unquestioning supporters will jump on them as claim things like, "it's too late now" and "you should have spoken up when you had the chance, now play or go away".

[cFortyfive]

The orc faces didn't look different to me at all ._. Neither did the other two aside from the changes made because they had different facial hair or regular hair.

Might be blind but I also do not see how this video supposedly "ends" the thread with a clear no.

[Hottage]

This is a good topic. It also shows how overrated the new models are. In reality a new race would be so much more interesting than upgraded models.

In your reality, it's all about taste.
Personally, I am really glad they are finally giving the old races some love instead of making yet another one.

[Kubiszot]

Yeah I'd be disappointed If my Orc only has one face, different skin color.

You realy think that after years of playerbase crying, blizz will give us one face per race with diff skins? Omg...

[zoefschildpad]

Poor choice of words, it's the same model, yes, but the texture is completely different in every one of them, while the Pandaren have the exact same "base" texture with just markings added on top of it.

My point was that because the model is so much more detailed, you can't use textures to change the shape and location of the nose, mouth and eyes anymore without changing the model and redoing animations. It's definitely something they should be talking about. If they end up not making the faces look as different from each other as they do now it's not because of laziness, but because too many things, especially in the face, are defined by the model and bones now.

[SunspotAnims]

Having more polygons and actual facial expressions might lead to there being less to no room for psuedo-facial expressions made by facial textures that the current models have, but otherwise I don't see much of a big deal of Blizzard taking current customization/face options and trying to update them for the new models (which is what they're trying to do), which is why your Night Elf example doesn't really make sense to me. Aren't facial markings a customization option on their own, separate from the face? It's very likely that won't change.

Of course this would lead to the potential problem that if someone doesn't feel like a certain race-to-be-updated doesn't currently have many customization options, then the updated model won't likely change that, as, aside from maybe a few new hairstyles, the number of options available won't really change.

[Drithien]

They already intend to as far as I can understand. When they informed us about their intention to upgrade the older character models the first thing that popped in a lot of people' minds was that, finally, the game would have a character customization system worthy of its massive appeal. That players would no longer have to be so limited in the creation of their character. World of WarCraft's customization was lacking even at the time of its release. To be able to come up to par with modern role-playing games, and, why not, surpass them, in "typical Blizzard fashion" was something rationally expected; especially for a feature that have been worked on for so long.

Yet from what we know the customization options won't be touched almost, if not, at all. We'll just get models of higher definition. And with the clipping problems still in existence even. So bodybuilding-human priest will look similarly idiotic. Hunch-back orc is hunch-back orc once more. The tauren seem like they are on some shrooms, all smiling, and look even more like a cartoon and less menacing than even before. And so on.

I will enjoy the higher definition of my characters. But compared to what I was expecting, compared to what they could have done by working just bit by bit all these years that the game raked in so much cash, compared to what is being done by so many other games, lots of which are not even role-playing games!; yeah, they don't seem to have done much of a great job in advancing character customization, just "Now In HD"-ing the existing models. And with them talking about including an option to keep your current model for performance reasons, it is not even a matter of fearing to infuriate players by taking away the familiarity of their characters, They could have kept the older models for whoever opted to keep them and offered some genuinely evolved new character models.