More Hair Styles & Options For Character Creation

This is probably more of a long term request, but I would like to see a major upgrade to the character creation system. We need lots more hair styles, flowing hair, and lots of face and body customization options. Improved character visuals would also help with new player retention.

License or copy one of the Asian MMO designs, like Black Desert Online:

CHARACTER CREATOR︱Black Desert︱Time-lapse

 

The character creator needs a complete overhaul to not only allow more variety in head options, but body options and sliders need to be a thing too.

I truly believe this is a deterrent to new players. It almost caused me to keep walking, to be honest. It was hardcore UO fandom that kept me, but that's not the majority of MMO players these days. Not at all.

 

People have been asking for this for a long time. Doubt it will ever get the update it needs. If it ever does I'll definitely eat my words.

 

Seems like an obvious feature to improve. On the other hand, if I have my helmet on most of the game, I never really use this feature significantly. Therein lies the trade off.

 

Yup, literally forever...what's one more time, right?

 

This is needed I agree, the character creation is utterly crap. All characters look the same, it looks very outdated, pre alpha quality and just horrifying.
I tried getting my wife to play Sota but she quit at character creation... I am sure she is not the only person doing so when 'trying' Sota.

Then again, updating character creation looks to be an easy task to do so. But in reality its pretty hard for developers to change as my guess is that all characters including NPC's in the game are dependent on this feature most of the time.

 

Very much agree. The inability to make reasonably unique characters so much hurts us.

 

I completely agree regarding character creator.
The problem I see is that to get us from "here" to "somewhere awesome" where we have the customization level similar to the one linked in the op, is a big big gap. Every piece of clothing, every hat, etc. would need to be adjusted to fit new hair/body styles. We still have problems with the existing ones -plenty of clothing, armor, hats, etc. clip through bodies and hair already and have done for years.

So, fixing this problem is a huge undertaking and not something that's going to happen overnight or even as we approach 2 years post official release. And I totally get why.

But we need something.

From a technical/awkwardness perspective, adding additional hair COLORS to the thing shouldn't be that difficult. It wouldn't affect any collision/hatfitting etc.
Allowing HAIR ACCESSORY COLOR TO BE CHANGED (looking at you, hateful red hair baubles) would be another huge step.

Just these two things above would be a great start.
Additional colors in the creator, just give us a color map and let us pick a shade/hue,
and perhaps premium ones available in the shop (like cycling/sparkle/metallic/whatever)
Monetize this.
I would totally pay the 500 coto 'new you' fee to color my hair for different occasions or simply when I wanted a change.
Right now, that feature seldom gets utilised because there simply aren't a lot of options.

New hairstyles have been added in the past - one as a whimsical april fool's thing - (the reaper thing) - I get the need to configure it to all the hats is an issue, and I get that 'long' flowing/moving/animated hair isn't really gonna be easy. But more static styles/cuts, braids piled on head, hair bound up in chopsticks, etc would be nice. Even just like 3-4 more. That combined with color choices will be a massive improvement to where we are now.

The character creator is almost the very first thing a new player sees, its essential to character identity, and honestly, ours is woefully out of date. Barely functional indie games have more customization variety than Sota does, and that's sad. 15+ year old games like Asheron's call, Runescape, etc. have more choices (albeit lower poly) choices, and have had since the beginning in many cases, or have added them over the years. I'd say start small, fix the colors and add 1 new hairstyle every few months. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

 

My gut feel is that it's going to be a tossup between playable races and a deeper, richer character customization system. Can't do both in the same time frame.

 

Were it my team, i would try to accomplish both goals. A comprehensive look at the character model system might reveal opportunities to make adding new races easier.

 

That would be possible if they weren't up to their necks rolling out Ep2 - it's going to take a while.