Same deal here. I've even paid to recustomize my characters before several times until I've gotten them exactly the way I like them and feel comfortable with. I spend as much time choosing how my character looks for roleplay as I do in writing there roleplay profile, and working on getting there transmog gear to look just how i envision them.
So to have the developers come along and say 'we're giving you an updated model, but taking away the choice you picked in making your character unique', hell, why not take away my roleplay profile and transmog gear while your at it?
I sincerely hope there are devs floating on these threads here reading what people are saying, as was mentioned in a tweet, because this issue is on thin ice with a lot of players now.
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and what of the choices we make. you might be a conformist who goes along with whatever the devs tell you to like, but people here are showing they want that choice, and for there update character to BE there characters still.
telling people to accept change when it has to come from the developers to do the job right is just letting them do a half arsed job of it. If you don't give a crap about how your character looks, fine, but don't go telling people to just accept what they feel passionate about.
#boycottchina
People will defend Blizzard on anything here, it seems.
The issue isn't "better quality than before", the issue is "looks nothing like I've played for 10 years".
Blizz said they will try and make the new faces look like the old faces, but higher definition, and this case, especially the gnomes, look like entirely new faces apart from the eye color.
They look nothing like what the player originally picked, they don't even look similar.
It's not the polygons, its the familiarity. You won't login and think , "Hey, my gnome looks high-def and nice now!" You'll login and think, ".....is this really what I picked all those years ago?"
Some players will find it very hard to re-attach to their characters simply because, hey, they don't even remotely look like their characters.
http://samaramon.co/
My transmog & misc. blog!
#boycottchina
shhh no tears, only accepting now
#1 fire mage US. u mirin'?
"Aaah ah ah ah ah ah ah yea, f*ck me, ah, f*ck, aah yeah"
- Jenna Jameson
I'm glad the models are being updated but, hell, I'd take more customization over more animations any day. Currently my main's (dwarf female) face is completely different and looks pretty bad - I'm hoping these are far from finished.
After looking closer at the gnome female it seems they arent too similar to the old faces after all.
I think it will be impossible for Blizz to exactly replicate the old faces - which is bad for people who really care about them - but then why do other MMOs have no much more freedom? I watched an hour long video on char customization in Elder Scrolls Online and the range of customization was staggaring. Of course, they probably dont have such 'over the top' exaggerated animations as WoW, but still
exactly, and see here in itself is the larger problem.
Where as other mmos out there are either advanced enough they haven't needed to do something like this, so everyone knows the characters and faces they choose, with WOW, this is a game people have played near to a decade.
Blizzard could have taken the route in making Wow 2, but instead decide not just to keep releasing expansion after expansion, but take this risk in trying to update the models for a game people have played for that length of time.
See, if they did release a new game, there would have been more chance people would just make new characters on that, and play updated races and characters from that new games format.
Instead, blizzard has taken a decade old game, and now are trying to update the look of our 10 year old characters. There has been no other game that has done this before, other game makers just make new games, blizzard are refusing there old game and trying to make it up to date.
This is unique, and also a massive risk, because they don't seem to have taken into account how serious players are when they say they are attached to there 10 year old toons. They don't seem to be taking it seriously when people say they would sooner quit the game then be stuck with a character they don't even recognize.
Because of this risk they took, they are now either going to have to work hard to make sure it works well, or be faced with maybe one of there biggest mistakes, doing something they were not prepared for.
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shhh, ignored, only ignoring now.
#boycottchina
http://samaramon.co/
My transmog & misc. blog!
Yes it does have those things. There's an option for blue eyes, for small eyebrows (as I'm not sure what mild eyebrows are) and the face is incredibly innocent looking. I see no problem with the lips either.
I'm not talking about emotes, I'm talking about cutscenes, custom animations for characters in scenarios etc. For conveying the story awesomely, that's a lot more important than distinct faces (which we're getting anyway.).
I roleplay as well. Even when I don't roleplay I immerse myself and semi-roleplay. I come up with an authentic name, read all the quest text. But to me it's unfathomable to care so much about the story and then just quit because my character's face has slightly more bad customisation than before (though I think the customisation is just as good). I mean how often do you really spend looking at your character's face? Is their face really more important then the backstory and personality you've made for them?
The dwarf females are by no means perfect, but at least they sort of resemble the old models. They tried to stick to the original eye colors, lip shape and color, and eyebrow shape. The textures are good, the model who previously had dark shiny lips has again dark shiny lips. Their noses and general expression are still too similar, but that could indeed be fixed by being able to choose different emotions / animations for the idle face.
The gnomes however are a disaster at this point, let's hope they'll get vastly improved. Why the gnomes, they're my favorite race.
But you must understand that it was much easier to make different faces for the old models since they had much less polygons and animations for the face. Yes the new models faces do look similar. But they do have some differences to their face, not as much as we were hoping though.
well they wont be *forced* to, theres the toggle of sticking to the old ones.
anyways i cant help but laugh, this is what us female worgen fans said would happen and people pooh-poohed.
"oh its just that blizz is incapable of making distinct faces for beast races, duh."
but really its not that hard, its a matter of how much effort they will put in to it.
we had artists whipping up really good faces for the female pandas in no time flat back in the mop beta.
so its possible they will go back and re-do all the faces... maybe...
Yeah. And as someone else said here. The problem here is that while the old faces may have been painted on, they at least looked like unique faces, different people. The updated faces are all the same person, but just showing different ages of that person.
or do the devs think players are to thick to notice that?
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that will be a cheap cop out, and it will be there way of saying they failed to meet what we hoped for.
they said the same thing with pandaren too, worgen and pandaren faces all looking the same, but its a beast face so it doesn't count. Bullshit, it is plain and simply the devs not trying hard enough to show uniqueness in facial design. And we will see this clearly as each vanilla race profiles are released.anyways i cant help but laugh, this is what us female worgen fans said would happen and people pooh-poohed.
"oh its just that blizz is incapable of making distinct faces for beast races, duh."
maybe if they loose a couple million players they will..but really its not that hard, its a matter of how much effort they will put in to it.
we had artists whipping up really good faces for the female pandas in no time flat back in the mop beta.
so its possible they will go back and re-do all the faces... maybe...
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not just the gnomes, orcs too. and we're see the same as time goes on.
#boycottchina
Oh I don't disagree, by all means provide feedback and be vocal about it. But we don't need to fly off the handle as a knee-jerk reaction.
Just saying "It's shit" doesn't help anyone. Why is it shit? Why does it not look like your character? Constructive feedback is critical here, flipping tables will get us nowhere.
I'm really not seeing it. Could you post which face you think might resemble my priest?
I have seen almost zero cutscenes in WoW's history so far, and very little special animation in scenarios. I'm not someone who plays one character though. I have a TON of characters. I care more about each of them being unique in their own way, than all of them having the same great looking animations.
It's why choice is generally always so important to me in this game. If I just played one character (and that happened to be human), I would probably be looking forward to garrisons. As it stands, I'd have to build the exact same looking same garrison with the same boring human design on 10+ characters. There is zero appeal to that. I would much rather have distinct, customizable, unique, race-specific garrison options that were a lot less "shiny", than one super shiny model that is the same for everyone and every character ever.
Yes, because the faces are who that character is to me. The backstory, everything is in that face. I only came up with the backstory because I saw the face and thought "she looks like she would be like this, and do this, and react to this in this way". And while I do play almost all the races, there are some that I greatly favor over the others. Gnomes are my number one favorite races, I have 5 different gnome females who all look very different and thus are all very different persons to me. If they all look the same from WoD on, I will feel no incentive to play them anymore. They will not be my characters anymore.
And I spend a TON of time looking at my character's face. I zoom in very often, and there were times when I spent more time in Model Viewer than actually in the game. More importantly though, even when I'm not looking at my character's face, I know what it looks like. It's like when you're lying next to your boyfriend in bed in the dark, you can't see his face, but you know that he's there and what he looks like. He might have his flaws, but you wouldn't want him to get a facelift to look super handsome, that would make every other man in town look exactly like him.