The Importance of Character Customization and Warcraft's Delivery of it

Community General Discussion
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TL;DR included.

I believe the highest tenet of any RPG to be the players’ ability to identify themselves in their character. An expansive and thorough character customization system is usually encoded into RPGs to allow a player total control over the appearance and style of their characters, allowing them to immerse themselves into their adventures.

It’s no secret that Warcraft’s ability to customize our characters in comparison to other MMOs and RPGs is limited, an unfortunate consequence of our aged game engine. Despite Blizzard’s efforts to remedy technical limitations as best they can, some exceptionally popular requests (sliders, height, weight, etc.) have little to no chance of occurring because of the core structure of the game world and its engine.

These customizations may be a standard baseline in more recently released titles, but I understand and accept why we can’t have them here. It’s just not feasible without a complete rework of what makes Azeroth, Azeroth.

That said, there is still so very much Blizzard has not yet done to expand our customization in other ways. The recent, and rather unexpected, announcement that we will soon be able to hide all armor besides our legs is an incredibly welcome change, and a very positive one. But we cannot stop there. Thori’dal still gathers dust in my bank, forever unused and inaccessible. Thunderfury gathers dust in many other banks, again unusable - despite Outlaw rogues having a hi-res, modernized version of the model.

Many of our player races have extremely limited artwork to choose from; tauren females have 4 faces that are all virtually the same, human females have 15 faces, but the most striking differences between them are the shades of makeup applied. Void elves have 6 skin tones, 4 of which are almost completely identical, and there are so many more examples to draw from.

TL;DR: :arrow_down:

Again, I understand the limitations of the engine, but these limitations can be made up for in other ways. Allow us to transmog legendaries. Offer more unique faces and skin tone options for all races. Touch up Nightborne - particularly males - and Lightforged, and give them both more than 3 skin tones to choose from.

We have 21 playable races now, but every one of these 21 races has far too few options to choose from. For the health of Warcraft as an RPG, we need more.

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Things like tattoos which could add a lot to our customization is something pretty easy, its just a layer thats applied to the base skin of our characters, Im not sure why something like this wasn’t implemented long ago…

Unfortunately, I just think that the game is too old and they dont want to spend too many resources into expanding our already limited customization options. It is sad however how some races received a lot more than others, Zandalari got so many choices for hairstyles, tusks, accessories, etc while Kul Tirans recieved almost nothing.

The disparity between some races is just ridiculous.

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I just want my elbows and knees back :frowning:

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With advances in modern medicine, any good blood elf physician can take care of that for you :slight_smile:

By offering you theirs, of course.

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I’m not going to hurt a poor Blood Elf just to heal myself.

I’m a lover, not a hurter.

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Blood elves are always happy to sacrifice themselves upon the altar of science. Let them make this donation for you :slight_smile: For the good of all character customization, everywhere.

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Let me have all hair styles on all races already, too. We all use the same barber it just makes sense.

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I’m really excited for the added hide features Blizzard is adding to transmog. Someday I would love to see a feature to hide left shoulder/right shoulder. We’ve seen NPCs have traditionally two-shoulder pieces on just one shoulder, so I can’t see it being too hard to give players that options.

That said, I’m more than happy with what we’ve been given and don’t want to hound Blizzard for more right away.

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No, that would weak the identity and uniqueness of every race. Instead of that they should put more uniques hairstyles for every races, hairstyles related to every race aesthetic.

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Races already have shared hairstyles though. I’m pretty sure human females can even wear some blood elf female styles, though it’s been a while since I’ve been on a normal human.

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Character customization is something that WoW needs major improvements on across the board. Almost every other major mmo out there surpasses WoW in those aspects.

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Some styles it’s fine, not all of them.

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Aye, and it’s not just about our equipment - transmog does a fine job, and far better than any other MMO I’ve played at gear appearances - but more about our actual characters. I don’t want the most striking differences between the faces available to my race to just be their makeup applications. I want actual structural differences, here.

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Well said OP, I agree entirely.

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Don’t forget guys that we have a great mog system, that give us a lot of customization that is key in a MMO. I say this just to remind us that WoW is not that bad on customization. Even so, i agree that the customization on our characters when we create them or when we go to barber shop, are very poor compared to others MMO.

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You must not have played a lot of MMOs. Wildstar and SWTOR right at the top of my head offer severely improved gear customization over the archaic system WoW has.

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Wildstar is dead and SWTOR is a F2P hellscape. Yeah, I think we still come out ahead.

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I would love more customization in general as well.

I wouldn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it though, coding is not my area of expertise.

Even it was more variety of pre-canned appearances. Option to make our guys skinny or fat, tall or short, etc.

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“World of Warcraft 2” it’s the solution

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no excuse for not having more hair styles and more facial beard/mustache styles, things like having the hair hang down from the helmets like some ncps do, no the skinner look, they could make way more rpg style of clothing instead of the battle gear, at least give more color variations of the most popular xmogged gear, so much more could be done imo.

1 Like