Going into SL I was excited to hear about additional customization features but the more I read the more it doesn’t match expectations.
I think it’s cool they’re adding a billion skin tones, eye colors, whatever but why aren’t character models customizable yet?
Tall, thick, fat, lethargic, obnoxiously long nose, whatever the case is. The closest feature we have is … I can make my Orc not hunched?
Why is WoW still decades behind here?
Pretty sure the engine doesn’t allow it and Blizz wouldn’t want it even if it did allow it since I’m pretty sure (could be wrong) that it was never added in the first place because it’s a significant amount of resources for very little pay out. Everyone gonna put on a helmet anyways so who cares how cute your button nose is.
You’re not wearing a helmet …
and you’re wearing only a helmet… coincidence, I think not 
Yeah and I want smaller forearms
Regardless, the engine was built with the design philosophy in mind that people wear armor so there’s really no need to that much customization. Transmogging stuff invisible came way too late as the engine can’t be rewired at this point to allow for sliders other than just making an entire model proportionally bigger and smaller.
Sadly not a priority for them, OP. But I fully support your disapointment.
Preset faces, skin tones, etc are a huge disapointment in comparison to most other MMO’s broad range of slider technology - which typically allow you to make an incredible range of different looking characters.
Really wish we were getting GW2 quality of customization but its not happening
If the engine is built that way it definitely isn’t for reasons stated. The reason you find a lot of people playing female characters is because they simply just look better wearing armor. The armor is the same design but still adjusts to various races based on their static frames.
Saying it doesn’t matter because armor is armor would mean every race would just have the same exact build and the differentiating factor would be which shade of green do you want your eyes to be?
Playing that game is what made me even more disappointed. For me, character models aren’t a deal breaker but you look at something like GW2, in which even the mounts have real physics attached to their movements, and you look at how they are able to incorporate all that character customization even given those models compared to what we have here … yeah, WoW is abysmal in that department by comparison.
The armor is manually stretched to different body types, it doesn’t auto calculate the bodies proportions. One of the games artist has to go in and stretch every piece of armor to every skeletal rig that can equip it.
This I know for fact. It’s in John Staats WoW diaries and he’s one of the original dungeon designers for WoW.
Agreed. Most people on here dotn care or have never played it though.
GW2 has some very powerful shortcomings but character customization, armor dyes, WVWVW, mount physics and abilities are so incredible. Its too bad most of the cool things added to the game go the gem shop - and that they have virtually abandoned wvw. Most fun Ive had since Mage Tower was playing that game.
Oh and unfortunately most other games are TERRIBLE at tuning for the holy trinity. Wow excels at this and its why its still relevant - dungeons and raids.
I don’t know if I fully agree that they have super glaring shortcomings… I find the combat there to be refreshing and my understanding is that end-game PvE is relatively new to them. Given that they have the PvP side on lock, I’m interested to see what their next expansion brings. If I had friends there now, I’d surely spend a lot more time playing.
I played off and on but only played hardcore about a year ago for a bit over a year.
Did all the masteries, got all the mounts, played a heck ton of WvWvW and unrated pvp. Made a bunch of legendary weapons - had a great time. but the lack of a holy trinity makes pve feel bad and fractals were never my thing beyond collecting legendary quest items.
It just got to be disapointing seeing every story chapter just be a lame questline that was easy af, most of the other content would be gem store items. Most of the cool skins are purchased, not earned. I also hate their anti-farming tech - very anti-mmo.
Still ALOT I love about the game. Just dont liek how they are using their dev time. I’d much prefer they do a hard holy trinity and have a monthly subscription and put the items in pve/pvp rather than the gemshop.
I didn’t do high-end fractals but I enjoyed the ones I did. Spending 10 minutes or whatever it was in an instance feels good over any WoW dungeon imo.
The engine was originally developed on top of the WC3 engine and simply can’t support those features on a fundamental level.
Always said we should get something like that but eh not much of a concern. Until these classes are fixed we should not try to focus too much on character customization.
Blizzard already mentioned that we were not going to get different body types, and especially not sliders. The problem lies in how armor textures and meshes work in this game.
The game was designed with armors having a fixed mesh for each race/gender, and would take some serious overhauling to make work with different sizes of each race and gender.
If the game was designed with this feature in mind, it would be super easy to implement, but because of this, and the sheer amount of models that would have to be updated, we will likely never see this in the game.
If Blizzard was still its own thing (made by gamers for gamers) I believe we would have had this and more.
I don’t. I like to see how nice I look while shedding the b ood of my foes and just walking about whatever city I am in and I do look very good.
I bet it was a bit of unwelcomed irony on their end as there are currently more people in this thread with hidden helmets than not.