Worried about new character models (one face per race)

[Grinresh]

The faces are not final

They sure are churning out a lot of placeholder textures with the wrong eye color while they wait to finalize the faces.

[godofslack]

Hey look, it's new character model face issue thread #8567


Joking aside, Im not that really worried about it. I think peoples expectations are too high in respects to how much customization they are adding. Don't expect GW2 or Black Desert online levels of character creation.

I can see enough differences in the faces now to be content

I don't think anyone was expecting anything even on par with Guild Wars 2, after all there aren't going to be sliders so it's not like anyone expected that. I mean you'd assume a game that allows for far fewer customization options than their competitors would at least have the options feel different as opposed to being so samey. Like I know we're getting Pandaren level animations and that's a lot of work but they need to do a better job Gnome females are, of the 5 found in the alpha, the most different and that makes me very worried for races that have a lot of differences, because I see 4 faces that are sufficiently different there.

[twh]

Don't ask that question over at the wow insider site. you'll have a bad time. but yes, i too, hope that come live there are different face options - unlike pandaren.

[godofslack]

The faces are not final
/close

I would of believed that if the number of times I saw blatantly unfinished content released, I mean the ending of the Worgen starting zone was flagged as placeholder and incomplete for most of the Cata beta but it released as is. And female Worgen, it is never too soon to state that you are unsatisfied with a model, as we can't allow female worgens to happen again.

[twiddler]

The problem to me is not even "same face", it's "different face". When they're making the new textures, they're not even trying to make the new faces match up to the old ones. I'm going to dump all the comparison images I've done here, look at the eye colors for an easy comparison point, they're hardly ever the same as the old face they're supposed to be an upgrade of:

Dwarf females are the only ones where it looks like the artist at least had the old faces open as reference. With all the others, it's like they were just told "this race is supposed to have seven different faces, so make seven distinct options", and they didn't even look to see what the seven old faces were.

I wish I could say that this is alpha, these are placeholders, the real faces they're going to make sure they look like our old guys, just updated. But we're getting to the point where we've seen a lot of textures previewed, and none of them are lining up. It's not too late to fix it, but the workload to do so it getting heavier by the day.

I have the same problem as you do. I have maybe 12 Orcs set to the peon face. I chose that face for a reason and none of these new faces--which all look the same--look anything close to the "slow" look of the original face I chose.

[Farora]

The problem to me is not even "same face", it's "different face". When they're making the new textures, they're not even trying to make the new faces match up to the old ones. I'm going to dump all the comparison images I've done here, look at the eye colors for an easy comparison point, they're hardly ever the same as the old face they're supposed to be an upgrade of:

-lots of pictures-

Dwarf females are the only ones where it looks like the artist at least had the old faces open as reference. With all the others, it's like they were just told "this race is supposed to have seven different faces, so make seven distinct options", and they didn't even look to see what the seven old faces were.

I wish I could say that this is alpha, these are placeholders, the real faces they're going to make sure they look like our old guys, just updated. But we're getting to the point where we've seen a lot of textures previewed, and none of them are lining up. It's not too late to fix it, but the workload to do so it getting heavier by the day.

I really hope that isn't final. Because those faces look nothing like their old counterparts. Blizzards goal was to update the characters, while staying true to the originals. If this is the result... meh.

Those tweets give hope though!

[Deleted]

I wish I could say that this is alpha, these are placeholders, the real faces they're going to make sure they look like our old guys, just updated. But we're getting to the point where we've seen a lot of textures previewed, and none of them are lining up. It's not too late to fix it, but the workload to do so it getting heavier by the day.

That would be the one thing that could mess it up. Leaving the adjustments as a last priority and then scapping them because there is not enough time.
Haha.. great.. now I am worried too.

[Thelxi]

It really does suck for some people like myself. I literally spent hours and hours deciding on my toon's appearance, and the faces I end up with I chose for very specific reasons. The updated faces have completely stomped all that, especially the human female faces.

[Servasus]

The faces are not final
/close

That was BACK IN DECEMBER. It's been 5 months since then.

It's not going to be fixed. Trust me.

[Deleted]

Personally I think the gnome females got the best facial diversity. The orcs look all the same to me. I agree though that it isn't enough.

There was an excellent Photoshop kicking around here of that same image only the poster altered the gnomes mouth and eye color to match each face. The changes made a huge difference and they seemed truer to their original counterparts. I hope blizzard sees it.

Gotta link for that? Sounds cool

[Hellspawn]

That was BACK IN DECEMBER. It's been 5 months since then.

It's not going to be fixed. Trust me.

There are more recent tweets aswell.

[Grinresh]

Gotta link for that? Sounds cool

By PGGR.

[Aucald]

The technical reasons apply, sure. My feeling is nevertheless that a big company like Blizzard should be able to provide multiple 3D modelled and textured faces for their player models, as does Tera, as does Guild Wars, etc. It's not too much to ask that customisation does not get reduced by an update that supposedly provides visual improvements. Imo. How they do it is up to them, if they can do it with face posing and alternate geosets or if they have to make completely new heads, I don't care. I simply think the fact that other games, even free to play games!, do provide these things makes it an industry standard for AAA games.

I think part of the issue here is that you're going to also have to deal with backward compatibility with your existing art and texture assets, as well. Tera, Guild Wars, and other newer games can take their highly-detailed models and create assets that work with them because everything on the engine level has been developed in the same general time frame. Blizzard, however, has existing assets that work with the older models to consider. Most games achieve facial and bodily variability by stretching or reducing key points in the wireframes, but this isn't really possible with Blizzard's models while maintaining the use of the older assets before the model update. Stretch them too much and the texture skins that accompany armor lose resolution and look clunky (already an issue with Pandaren and some older armor, but it would be far worse if they opened up the ability to distort the wireframes to achieve customization), or you introduce moderate to severe clipping issues with gear across a wide spectrum of races.

I think they're probably hard at work on micro-level fluctuations in the textures and wireframes that will allow for a wider selection of customization without introducing any of the above problems, but it can't be an easy undertaking. I think we'll also see that regardless of how much customization they provide it won't quite be to the same visual level as we're accustomed to with the older models and their larger textures.

[Drilnos]

The problem to me is not even "same face", it's "different face". When they're making the new textures, they're not even trying to make the new faces match up to the old ones. I'm going to dump all the comparison images I've done here, look at the eye colors for an easy comparison point, they're hardly ever the same as the old face they're supposed to be an upgrade of:

*picture*

Dwarf females are the only ones where it looks like the artist at least had the old faces open as reference. With all the others, it's like they were just told "this race is supposed to have seven different faces, so make seven distinct options", and they didn't even look to see what the seven old faces were.

I wish I could say that this is alpha, these are placeholders, the real faces they're going to make sure they look like our old guys, just updated. But we're getting to the point where we've seen a lot of textures previewed, and none of them are lining up. It's not too late to fix it, but the workload to do so it getting heavier by the day.

Looking at the cross comparisons, it's pretty apparent to me that they were following the original faces for a reference point. The wrinkle lines and shading translate over in almost all cases. I think, though, you might have mismatched some of the gnomes, judging from the eyebrow lines.

[Aucald]

I don't buy that sorry. Other games (and MMOs) have shown you can have unlimited variations and still have very detailed and complex models/textures.

It's less of an argument and more of a technical explanation. Other games use model customization built in-line with their engine of choice, and make use of art assets that accompany their models variability accordingly. Blizzard opted a path that uses model presets without the ability to change key points in the wireframes to show customization, so now that they've upped the polygon count within the models they're still beholden to the preset dimensions of the older models but with less surface area per polygon to work (higher polygons = smaller, finer textures = customization via wireframe manipulation as opposed to texture swapping). In order to provide the same level of customization options as let's say "Skyrim," they would have to go back and make all the older gear scalable and mappable to the new model textures. That would be quite a huge undertaking and would delay WoD substantially. Not too mention it would also require the creation of a facility to allow the players to make these types of customizations in the first place (since WoW currently has none), adding even more time to the development arc.

[Fullmetal89]

The faces are not final
/close

Blizzard has said this kind of thing before and lied.

Those that are saying this is Alpha are kidding yourselves; what you see now is almost guaranteed to be the launch models. They have started to cut corners since Cataclysm. Just look at the difference between the Worgen/Pandaren vs Goblins. It's obvious that they worked a hell of a lot more on the Goblin models as opposed to the Worgen; the Pandaren also look exactly the same. At best we will see some more wrinkles and deformation but you will not see completely different faces like the old models because of the new animations they added to these models. For them to add new faces they have to re-animate the new face choices individually and they are not going to do that. That will take time away from their Orange County Choppers contest or other pointless shit they spend development time on.

[Hellspawn]

Some deformation to the nose, lips ans eyes would be enough for most models.

[Ielenia]

I mainly play night elf characters and now I'm worried they will all look exactly the same because of the new character models.
Worgen, Goblin, Pandas, all have basically one face option.
Up to this point I expected the character previews were for one facetype, but then I saw this picture:
[IMG]http://www.adriacraft.net/images/stories/news/2014/Apr/wod_gnome_female.jpg[IMG]
Same face, with very small changes per facetype, while gnomes currently have very different looking faces.
It would suck if all my alts will look like clones :/
What do you guys think, will Blizzard take to lazy route?

It's not different from WoW at all. We all currently have the same face model with just some differences from texture to texture. Emotions could only be shown through the face texture, since the face model was basically static save for some very basic 'open-close' mouth movement.

But now the game has full face movement. Your character can frown, grin, snarl, etc. So emotions went from the face textures to the face model. And a very articulate face model doesn't allow for too different face textures, or else they'd look silly with the emotion movements.

[SirRice]

As I see some people are a bit lost with this one-face issue, I'm gonna explain a little bit what's the problem Blizzard is facing with the models. (Don't want to sound like a smartass, just want to help people understand this problem).

The previous WoW customization of the faces was basically like a mask. It was a texture painted over the model that had all the time the same expression. If a face was sad or angry, it was sad or angry the whole time, no matter what you did. It had a static expression that was different from the rest of the faces, along with some customization of the facial features).
Now, with the implementation of facial animation, we have the same facial features customization, but those previous customized expressions are lost. Every face is sad when it has to be sad, and is angry when it has to be angry, no matter what face it is.
Problem here, is that we are so used to see a face in a certain expression that now they all look literally the same to us.
This is something that cannot be fixed by doing a diferent remodel of each face like other MMORPGs do, as it would only increase the differences of the features, but no the expressions. I don't know how Blizzard could fix this, because doing unique facial animations with different expressions for each face... well, not going to happen, unless they make the animations much much much simpler.
People have to understand that, although other MMORPGs have more remodels of faces with more customization (facial features), they don't have (not even close) the level of complexity in facial animation we are seeing in those new WoW models.

Just wanted to clear that a bit

[Scorched2Black]

the faces are more animated through actual animation and not just resting in one flat image. The morph based on emotions/speaking/smiling and look different.

the faces also aren't final, its alpha. you havent even likely played on them. all the races have yet to be revealed. Once everything is actually finished and you see mutliple facial options fully animated I have a feeling theyre going to blow us away.

patience