Shadowlands: An Inside Look at the Character Creation UI Redesign

[Pakheth]

Honestly, who cares about these kind blog posts? They're so pointless and just feel like writing something for the sake of writing something.

Some of us enjoy seeing the inner workings of game design. Some gamers also happen to be game devs themselves or they are just curious. It can also help explain to players why things are like they are.

[cface]

Wow models are some of the ugliest on the planet. Really awesome to create a female in one of the asian mmos, such cute godesses. But puritans in america are extremely afraid of sexy women.
Too bad I haven't found a good mmo from asians yet, but I do hope asian games take over and adapts a bit in the right apartments to make it more appealing for western (no 2000h grind, and subscription or f2p done right).

[Alanar]

I have seen 1 to 2 people create this as a side project even my.. sig is showing what a single person can do.

This is just embarrasing.. they try to bring it as such a big project and so much work.. jeez.


Removing mmorpg elements because it would make a simpoe choice hard? Really.. ??

[ResentfulUK]

Blizzard is not talking to the community about important stuff but they give us useless shit like this. That is where the anger is coming from.

They're giving people updates on the Season of Mastery, and they're clearly now starting to pour out some of the BlizzCon content.

What exactly is it you're expecting right now? Blizzard - like all companies - has had to adjust to working from home under COVID and that was always going to have an impact on the development cycle, then add to that the recent law suits, walkouts and everything else and it's pretty clear things are running behind schedule.

Honestly, at this point it just feels like people are trying to get angry for the sake of it. All this whining and complaining feels extremely forced.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Honestly, who cares about these kind blog posts? They're so pointless and just feel like writing something for the sake of writing something.

It's for WoW's ultras, the overly invested that want to gobble up every little detail about the object of their fandom. They are probably still largly playing and make up an increasing part of the game's audience, so I guess the post makes more sense than I gave it credit for.

[socialmaker]

Prettier package wrapping but inside the box a turd still lies...

[MrLoque]

I suggest you to install Black Desert Online (free 7 days trial) and play around with the character creator tool. Then come back to this post and cry in agony.

[saixilein]

In year 2021 this is still a really bad charactereditor. We need sliders and option to move around eyes, nose, cheekbones, eyebrows etc etc.

[LedZeppelin]

i dont understand why they hid the racials

[muto]

but where is the boob slider?

In Final Fantasy XIV.

Blizzard teams is too busy replacing women with bowls of fruit.

[Strawberry]

In this example, if you want to play a Night Elf, you’d have to go back to the previous screen, pick a different class, and then keep going back-and-forth between screens to see all your options.

Yeah, it was pretty awkward.

This didn’t work out, so we nearly ended up keeping the old layout and simply updating the art. During a last-minute brainstorm, my fellow UI Designers, Crash Reed and Ray Ocampo pitched a concept where the races were split into opposite sides:

One highlight of this layout is how the face-off between the Horde and Alliance instantly communicates the faction war. We loved the simplicity and freshness of this design, so it was full steam ahead!

This made me laugh. Took them from what I understand quite a bit of time to come up with something they didn't like, and then almost gave up until a couple of people brainstormed - "hey let's just put alliance on the right side and horde on the left side".
Everyone's like: YOU GUYS SO SMART.

[Ardourdan]

All this effort for such little gain... can they just crack on with WoW 2.0 now please!

[Aekero]

They're really pressed HARD to post something, eh. This kind of behind-the-scenes look would be something I'd expect at the start of an expansion (or leading up to it) - not in the middle of a massive content drought.

my first thought..."what do we have?" "uhhh we could go over what we did at the beginning of the expansion for the character selection screen changes nobody asked for?". Nice.

I would have preferred they spent their effort on actually adding a good amount of customizations for all races instead of all that.

[Giovaaa]

I love how they're doing this "for new players"
Lmao, what new players? They can barely keep their old ones and they're gonna lie about actually having new ones?

[Sinyc]

It's for WoW's ultras, the overly invested that want to gobble up every little detail about the object of their fandom. They are probably still largly playing and make up an increasing part of the game's audience, so I guess the post makes more sense than I gave it credit for.

I don't play anymore, but I enjoy the systems design blogs and the engineering blogs. Being a former software engineer that now deals with system design/architecture might have something to do with it.

Try not to paint with such a broad stroke next time. People will be more receptive towards you and your ideas.

[Soulsinger]

I love how they're doing this "for new players"
Lmao, what new players? They can barely keep their old ones and they're gonna lie about actually having new ones?

As someone who used to sit in Northshire, &c. to help them out can confirm: new players stopped coming ages ago. It's been just recycling for many, many years.

[Loveliest]

Wow models are some of the ugliest on the planet. Really awesome to create a female in one of the asian mmos, such cute godesses. But puritans in america are extremely afraid of sexy women.
Too bad I haven't found a good mmo from asians yet, but I do hope asian games take over and adapts a bit in the right apartments to make it more appealing for western (no 2000h grind, and subscription or f2p done right).

There are a lot of people who dislike asian mmo character looks. A lot who won't even look at the mmo because of how chars look. For example, most of my friends refuse to play ff14 because "what is this anime sht".

So you see, looks are subjective. Moreso, if you want cute anime girls and boys you have loads of options. If you want whatever wow offers, you can pick that.

I myself prefer asian ones as well and find wow models quite ugly but not because they are not "sexy". But because they have no chins and have weird oddly elongated "horse faces".

[Snufflupagus]

1) I’d be really interested to know how many new players are actually arriving and getting the tailored new player experience. I don’t doubt it’s happening but I’d like to know how many.

2) I’d play the shit out of that malformed LFD as a female Broken Draenei allied race.

[Soon-TM]

While I like the subject discussed in the OP, and it's presented in very a nice way, the moment they've chosen to make such a post is distinctly... Odd.

[El Gucaragua]

As someone else said. It's because all the content that was being prepared for BlizzCon can now just be shared online.

Expect more of these over the coming weeks. What I don't get is the anger from some here though. They're literally just sharing a little bit of insight into a major change that came with the expansion ... what's to get so butt hurt about.

While I agree and actually enjoy information such as this, I think the sentiment that can't be understated is that people more-so care about the future of the game and the direction it's heading at this point in time rather than look back at a change that occurred quite some time ago to get a deep dive into the rework and functionality of this UI.

And to the quote's point, they give huge dives about something like this whereas they basically never do the same for any of their game impacting systems that have been terrible for quite a while. Blizzcon 2020 certainly did not have anything about game systems.