Is there any chance that CO might get some kind of facelift in the near future?

theslyder · November 2016

I really adore the super hero MMO genre. I've been creating super hero characters my entire life and I love being able to realize them in a game setting. CO really gives me a ton of freedom to be creative with character design while others in the genre don't. I have one really significant complaint though that I struggle to get past, and my friends absolutely can't get over. The faces. That isn't a screenshot, obviously, but it's a magazine cover from the mid 90's, and it's what I'm reminded of every time I look at a non-masked CO character.

For all the freedom and customization CO allows, it's almost always dwarfed by how uncanny and discomforting the humans look. Their faces.

Now, I don't know what kind of work it would take, but if they were to update the faces in the game and ONLY the faces, it would infinitely make it more enjoyable for a lot of people, I'm sure.

Does anyone else feel this way?

magpieuk2014 · November 2016

I don't like the male face (or male character's body shape) very much, but then I don't like the one in STO either.... I can't see them changing it, though - that would probably mean reworking all the face/head costumes!

chaelk · November 2016

every single one plus costumes

flyingfinn · November 2016

Nope.

magpieuk2014 · November 2016

the STO ones are a vast improvement though

They are, it's just that all the NPCs tend to look spookily similar because no-one's had time to do much work on them. Viewscreen Man, especially - I have a great deal of suspicion for him and his messages which always send me off into a perilous situation.

roughbearmattach · November 2016

No, there is no chance.

I am able to get better results on my own toons, but NPCs, particularly ones from game launch, are often uncanny and/or just poorly proportioned.

nextnametaken · November 2016

The default wide female lips, like everyone is Geena Davis or Julia Roberts gives me the creeps.

decorumfriends · November 2016

That only helps with OUR characters, not all the NPCs (and other players that never touch the face sliders).

decorumfriends · November 2016

That's not the concern. It's the whole overall look of the game that's the issue. And it's not a big one, just one that one has to accept or not. I know plenty of ex-CoXers that vetoed playing here solely on that issue. But it's something that nothing can be done about.

jonsills · November 2016

They didn't want to play CO because female characters' lips creeped them out??

decorumfriends · November 2016

The overall default NPC face and look.

And how he got into my pajamas, I'll never know.

hypersphere · November 2016

I agree. I am always strongly compelled to hide my characters' heads with masks and hoods, not just because of the faces, but the hair is also so poorly done. I get that it's supposed to mimic the comic book style, but almost all the hairstyles look like playdough or wax paper.

There are other issues too, like the texture alignment on the sides of female chests making bikinis/tank-tops look terrible; very amateurish shader design on auras (some are basically just glitches sold as new products); low-res normal mapping; the list goes on. I can think of maybe 10 costume pieces that have no texture or clipping or alignment issues. A game in which one of the primary features is costume creation, leaving such issues unaddressed since launch: that speaks for itself.

But new art is expensive, and any significant quality update would require a really astounding amount of work. Only a couple of games have ever pulled that off, and they were far less complex (in that regard), and far more successful to begin with. No one is going to invest that kind of time and money to reinvigorate a product that was long ago sold off as a minimal-effort cash cow.

My hopes are on another couple of new contenders currently in development.

spinnytop · December 2016

The faces could be better. Some aspects of the bodies too.

darqaura2 · December 2016

spinnytop said:
The faces could be better. Some aspects of the bodies too.

Interesting, I always thought the faces and bodies were pretty great compared to some other games. (Shudders at DCUO).

decorumfriends · December 2016

Don't even get me started on the ridiculously sexist sliders on the women.

spinnytop · December 2016

darqaura2 said:

spinnytop said:
The faces could be better. Some aspects of the bodies too.
Interesting, I always thought the faces and bodies were pretty great compared to some other games. (Shudders at DCUO).

I mean sure, compare to the bottom of the barrel and things look okay... compare to what the average skyrim modder puts out and...

You kinda start wishing we could have that.... well.... I wish I could have that for Kagami at least...

darqaura2 · December 2016

spinnytop said:

darqaura2 said:

spinnytop said:
The faces could be better. Some aspects of the bodies too.
Interesting, I always thought the faces and bodies were pretty great compared to some other games. (Shudders at DCUO).
I mean sure, compare to the bottom of the barrel and things look okay... compare to what the average skyrim modder puts out and...

You kinda start wishing we could have that.... well.... I wish I could have that for Kagami at least...

Yeah that would be good. . . but that's not this game's art style. They decided they were going with "cartoony" since alpha. Many didnt' agree, but okay we are where we are. For what this game is it's pretty good. Could they do better? At this late stage of the game's life . . . maybe. Is it worth it? Hmmmm

nepht · December 2016

jonsills said:
They didn't want to play CO because female characters' lips creeped them out??

Its the actual movable fingers that give me future shock.

wraithshadow13 · December 2016

For me, Yeah, Cartoony was they way they went but they went TOO cartoony, so it can be rather off putting at times. The Jim Carrey facial expressions, the ridiculous body slider issues, the difficult to pull off ethnicities, some of the lack luster visual effects for powers... I would absolutely love getting CO updated to at least a STO level. DCUO is pretty rough as well, but they're character creation process in general is just plain crap. Not nice, I know, but given the scale and diversity of the DCU, it really is just crap.

I know people who don't play the game any more but they still use the Character creator for RP games and making characters concepts for other things. It would be nice to see the main draw for the game get some love and a much needed visual update, if not the game as a whole.

chaelk · December 2016

yes , well getting updated to STO level would involve the game having STO level of Devs. AT last count they had over 40, we have?

spinnytop · December 2016

darqaura2 said:
Yeah that would be good. . . but that's not this game's art style. They decided they were going with "cartoony" since alpha. Many didnt' agree, but okay we are where we are. For what this game is it's pretty good. Could they do better? At this late stage of the game's life . . . maybe. Is it worth it? Hmmmm

For me it's not an issue of style. To be honest, I wish they would go more cartoony. My main gripe is that the faces in the game right now are limited in what you can really do with them and just look awkward and ape-like. They actually seem to be hovering somewhere between cartoony and realistic, and they need to push further in either direction ( I vote more cartoony ). Currently beast faces blow humans faces right out of the water, and I'm all for this being a furry rpg but I don't think everyone is quite as okay with that.

eviltwintwo · December 2016

theslyder, most likely, CO wasn't top-of-the-line on graphics to begin with, so even at the start you wouldn't need the best computer available to play it. So, yeah, the game has been out awhile and the graphics are somewhat dated. Personally, I don't mind it so much, though it does sometimes annoy me that the basic face is the only face you get, just with a few slider options. Even though it doesn't seem to bother me as much as it bothers you--I'm just glad my old computer can handle it--I can see your point.

sterga · December 2016

Games like Fallout 4 can use ENB / SweetFX to drastically change the look with zero texture changes. (sin city, borderlands, concept art, Kodachrome, a michel bay movie) No idea if a dev could do something like that for CO. I think it'd be a whole lot easier to do some sort of post processing to make CO look cell shaded or like concept art than go through thousands of textures to make them look less awful.

ealford1985 · December 2016

Face is fine with to me. It's not meant to be super detailed.

darqaura2 · December 2016

spinnytop said:

darqaura2 said:
Yeah that would be good. . . but that's not this game's art style. They decided they were going with "cartoony" since alpha. Many didnt' agree, but okay we are where we are. For what this game is it's pretty good. Could they do better? At this late stage of the game's life . . . maybe. Is it worth it? Hmmmm
For me it's not an issue of style. To be honest, I wish they would go more cartoony. My main gripe is that the faces in the game right now are limited in what you can really do with them and just look awkward and ape-like. They actually seem to be hovering somewhere between cartoony and realistic, and they need to push further in either direction ( I vote more cartoony ). Currently beast faces blow humans faces right out of the water, and I'm all for this being a furry rpg but I don't think everyone is quite as okay with that.

I see. I wish they wouldn't have started as cartoony as it makes certain things just look awkward. But I don't have a grip this late in the life of the game.

With that said I agree that faces could use work. Other parts/sliders in the creator could as well.

darqaura2 · December 2016

sterga said:
Games like Fallout 4 can use ENB / SweetFX to drastically change the look with zero texture changes. (sin city, borderlands, concept art, Kodachrome, a michel bay movie) No idea if a dev could do something like that for CO. I think it'd be a whole lot easier to do some sort of post processing to make CO look cell shaded or like concept art than go through thousands of textures to make them look less awful.

As an aside the outlining still to this day looks fu#%@ng awful to me. It doesn't matter which computer I use or what resources I have (currently play CO on a laptop with a 1T SSD, Windows 10, Nvidia Card with 2 G video ram, 16 gb system ram). Every time I turn on the outlining it looks terribly muddy and unnecessarily thick in some parts of the world and character model.

If that is CO's idea of cell shading, I'd say they should bother delving into it any deeper.

themightyzenith · December 2016

darqaura2 said:
As an aside the outlining still to this day looks fu#%@ng awful to me. It doesn't matter which computer I use or what resources I have (currently play CO on a laptop with a 1T SSD, Windows 10, Nvidia Card with 2 G video ram, 16 gb system ram). Every time I turn on the outlining it looks terribly muddy and unnecessarily thick in some parts of the world and character model.

I always use the comics outlining setting, I understand and accept that not everyone likes it, but we do have the option of turning it off so no biggie if you don't want to use it.

However, as a user of this function, I have to say that it certainly isn't "muddy" for me. Lower settings make the outlining thicker and higher settings make it thinner, but still there and giving the desired effect.

It's possible that it could just be your settings. Fancy posting a screenshot so that we can see how terrible it looks for you?

nepht · December 2016

In my personal opinion I think CO looks fantastic for a game that came out in 2009.

darqaura2 · December 2016

themightyzenith said:

darqaura2 said:
As an aside the outlining still to this day looks fu#%@ng awful to me. It doesn't matter which computer I use or what resources I have (currently play CO on a laptop with a 1T SSD, Windows 10, Nvidia Card with 2 G video ram, 16 gb system ram). Every time I turn on the outlining it looks terribly muddy and unnecessarily thick in some parts of the world and character model.
I always use the comics outlining setting, I understand and accept that not everyone likes it, but we do have the option of turning it off so no biggie if you don't want to use it.

However, as a user of this function, I have to say that it certainly isn't "muddy" for me. Lower settings make the outlining thicker and higher settings make it thinner, but still there and giving the desired effect.

It's possible that it could just be your settings. Fancy posting a screenshot so that we can see how terrible it looks for you?

Sure next time I'm online I'll take one.

roughbearmattach · December 2016

I talked with a student of mine (a 12th grader) today about CO. When he pulled up some images, he was initially surprised (in a bad way), and commented immediately on what he thought were poor graphics and a poor style. When I said it was "a comic book hero game," he said, "Oh, yeah. Not so bad."

When he looked at images of recently made NPCs, and examples of well-made costumes from players, he was actually impressed with the customization.

Still, the initial impression wasn't so hot.

spinnytop · December 2016

nepht said:
In my personal opinion I think CO looks fantastic for a game that came out in 2009.

You know what else came out in 2009?

Why can't Kagami look like that? >:|

renegade0 · December 2016

Different face textures would go a long way. There's like a handful, but there could be a lot more.

avianos · December 2016

You have to agree that CO's face costumization is the weakest part of the Tailor

nepht · December 2016

spinnytop said:
<

You know what else came out in 2009?

Why can't Kagami look like that? >:|

And you used a picture of the 2016 remaster. GG Foxi.

spinnytop · December 2016

nepht said:
GG Foxi.

Here's a screenshot of the PS3 version

Also you know what came out in 2007?

Why can't Kagami look like that??! >:T

flyingfinn · December 2016

OMG! They got Backwards Running! That's even better than Wall Running!

decorumfriends · December 2016

a1fighter said:

Hard to trust these people with dates but CoT and VO are the future of the super hero genre.

Wow, you really are delusional. It's a crapshoot whether they'll EVER be anything but vaporware, but even if they do launch, they're not the future of anything. No part of the gaming industry is going to be taken over by fumbling amateurs that take forever to develop, with a mindset locked on a past game. They're vanity projects that are unlikely to have any kind of widespread appeal, even in the tiny little niche of the super-hero genre.

themightyzenith · December 2016

a1fighter said:
They are the future, not hard to be the future when one of its' competitors has around 300 populace.

Your ability to know the number of folks that play CO has already been disproved. See the exchange below........

a1fighter said:
It is fairly simple to gauge the population in-game (Most reliable)

themightyzenith said:
You're right, it is fairly simple to gauge the number of players in game at a given moment using the interface. However, this only shows you how many people are on at the moment you press the button. Not how many are playing that hour/day/week/month.

a1fighter said:
or through Steam, but Steam does not cover Arc players.

themightyzenith said:
Steam also doesn't cover those who play only using the CO launcher that doesn't require arc or steam. Therefore the steam charts only show number of players for one out of the three ways of launching the game

decorumfriends · December 2016

I've seen three hundred people on AT THE SAME TIME several times over the past several months.

roughbearmattach · December 2016

Vaporware.

a1fighter said:

Hard to trust these people with dates but CoT and VO are the future of the super hero genre. They stated CoT would have a character creator in 2014, still waiting for that one

This, right here^^

spinnytop · December 2016

a1fighter said:
Not going to go back and forth with the usual derail suspects anymore

Giving up is probably your best course of action.

decorumfriends · December 2016

At the very least, quit repeating BS information that's already been refuted.

Is there *any* chance that CO might get some kind of facelift in the near future?

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Is there any chance that CO might get some kind of facelift in the near future?