No New Customizations is the "Don't you guys have phones" of 2021

Community General Discussion
574

Night Elves, Orcs and Humans made out like bandits, getting the most customizations of any race. But for me, it’s not really just the quantity of customization that each race got, it’s also the quality. The love and care that the artists put into Night Elf customization was evident with clear attention paid to certain parts of the racial fantasy. Female night elves finally have golden eyes, and leaves in their hair as depicted on the iconic box art for WoW classic.

It was very apparent that the artists who worked on Night elves had a love for that race. That being said, even the night elves had some odd decisions on how customization was allotted, for example, no body tattoos on females. After they were done with Orcs, Night Elves, and Humans, the quality and enthusiasm behind the project seemed to dwindle pretty quickly. I’m not saying the rest were all bad and low effort, I’m saying as they went down the lists of races they lost interest and passion.

Blood Elves didn’t get any customization that appealed to their wider racial fantasy. They received customization that stereotyped them. There is much more to blood elves than being pretty and vain. Blood elves are survivors just as capable of fighting with skill and ferocity as the rest of the Horde. They are magisters, battlemages, Farstriders and Blood Knights. None of the customization save for one blind eye suggests any of those aspects of Thalassian culture. Vain, snotty rich white people is what we got. I mean no offense to people actually liked what we got.

However, the weirdest part about what Blood Elven customization is the fact male blood elves received little of the customization the females got. No jewelry for men. But this issue isn’t isolated to Blood Elves, it’s pretty pervasive throughout all the races actually. The customization we got was really skewed and maybe a little random which tells me they were not operating on a system.

I grade them a D- on their “try.” The Allotment for customization among races was very unequal.

A few? That depends on your definition of a few and whether you count all the old customization in with the new, Blizz. I don’t count the old in with the new because customization was sold to us as new and improved. Let me see…

  • Gnomes: Very few

  • Worgen: VERY few

  • Goblins: Very few

  • Trolls: Lacking

  • Pandaren: Very few

  • Tauren: Lacking (They have like five faces to choose from.)

  • Blood Elves: Few (even fewer for males.)

  • Dwarves: Few

  • Forsaken: Very Few.

  • Maghar: None

  • Nighborne: None and holy hell do they need it.

  • HMT: None

  • LF Draenei: None.

  • Mechagnome: A couple

  • Vulpera: None

So really not just a few.

I’m struggling to believe that.

14 Likes
575

They shot themselves in the foot with this…It’s gonna a take a while before the pain travels up to their wallet/brain.

That poor guy was probably being honest. Baiting our fury to get his bosses to release the goods. If that was his plan…well played.

If that wasn’t…my god that was the dumbist thing you coulda said. I hope it was the first one.

9 Likes
576

Was this reply a mistake? Who is talking about raid/dungeon/pvp testing? If you meant to indicate that character customization content is only from artists (and not designers or developers) and all other gameplay content like raids etc. does not include artists - you’re wrong on that account. Almost all content involves artists, designers, and developers.

1 Like
577

I already forgot about that one again. We mentioned it before in a customization feedback thread and I even looked for official Draenei artwork with magenta/ purple eyes and posted them. It’s something Draenei do have in lore and they should get their purple eyes!

https://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screenshots/normal/665884-prophet-velen.jpg

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/forscherliga/images/7/7c/Velen-WoD-portrait-large.jpg/revision/latest/smart/width/200/height/200?cb=20131111185556

3 Likes
578

How did blood elves make this list twice and Forsaken didn’t once? Forsaken have the least options of any core race besides worgen but only if you don’t count their human form at all.

1 Like
579

I knew I was forgetting something! I’ll fix it.

Edit: Fixed it. I really should have remembered forsaken as they are one of my favorites. Guess I forsook them?

580

Seems so much energy was put into the condensing of levels to make them seem smaller. At the same time, the content that was delivered may have exceeded the prior expansion by but not a lot. It seems from a project management perspective that they either pursue inflated desires, or lack any semblance of priorities. This would be in conjunction with selective client interaction.

While some of the customizations added were nice, they seem rather underwhelming overall. It’s obvious with modders that more options are entirely possible with little effort. It may be worth remotely hiring some of these people just to expand cosmetics features, as they seem to hit the back burner.

Honestly they could probably justify some of this if the mechanics were spot on, but…yea.

1 Like
581

You know what would’ve been a cool option for Forsaken? Patchwork skin with visible stitching.

8 Likes
582

Indeed this would be very cool.

583

Imagine if this had been a regular Blizzcon and they’d answered that question about customization the same way. My god, it would have been worse than the mobile Diablo game situation.

Really makes me wonder what the hell is going on behind the scenes there, honestly. As we’ve seen from many community artists, a lot of new options aren’t even much of a time dedication to make. Not only that, but a chunk of the ‘new’ options were just stuff already made but either not implemented or locked to certain classes.

A Reddit thread on this mentioned that the art team likely has to run through several corporate hoops and approvals just to get one new thing put in, but even that doesn’t explain it, in my opinion. The amateur (and that term does them a disservice honestly, because their work is professional grade) artist that made that thread said things like adapting new hairstyles to other races takes very little time and effort, and that even things like body types are totally possible without breaking how a model wears armour.

So what’s going on that the art team can’t do that much?

9 Likes
584

What I’d like to see for Forsaken:

  • Skull faces for both genders
  • Jawless for Female
  • Straight back
  • Stitched and patchwork skins
  • Fully skeletal
  • Beards
  • Burnt options
  • Tattoos
  • Normal hair styles
9 Likes
585

Back when they were talking about sub-races I was thinking Forsaken could have a possessed sub-race where the body and spirit didn’t match. Like you could be missing an arm or a leg and the “missing” limb would just be a ghost limb. I thought it would be cool if they had a racial where they could throw their body somewhere and teleport to it.

3 Likes
586

At this point I’m holding out for them to finally fix the less bony options so their toes aren’t poking out, upright posture (why is Blizzard so obsessed with hunches? They’re just not good), facial hair and dark ranger stuff.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/590006575905898498/812206253354516500/forsakenbeard.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/590006575905898498/812373344174473266/unknown.png

10 Likes
587

They could totally reuse kul’tirans to give us aboms

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588

I want Dark Ranger stuff so badly. I should have put that in what I want to see for Forsaken. As a toggle.

OMG, the toes poking out on the non-boney forsaken bothers me so much.

4 Likes
589

Par for the course.

590

They really need to at least add the ear sizes for Void Elves, and tail sizes for Lightforged Draenei.
Since their counterparts of Blood Elves and regular Draenei already have these, it just seems like a severe oversight not to have those same options for their allied race counterparts.

5 Likes
591

It took my wife less than half an hour to fit a Kul Tiran hairstyle on a Pandaren female, map the hair to the Pandaren hair texture, and weight paint it to move with the model. And she has only a base knowledge of Blender (the famous donut tutorial and a few youtube tutorials on importing and cleaning up WoW models). I imagine someone who actually knew what they were doing could do it in half the time, or less.

And that loose bun with the curls coming down along the cheeks is adorable on pandas, btw.

2 Likes
592

This 180 better 180 again because you sold us the “expansion of customization” and now you’re not following through on one of the pillars that was promised.

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593

As someone who is also using blender I also did some basic changes to the model few years ago which also took minutes.

Such as eye-color change.

I really don’t get it - all they need is to task ONE person to do the job, why is it such a problem?
One Person to work on customization and gradually add more through the patches. It will make community eager to see what’s new coming for them each patch.

2 Likes