Ok, I think what people have started doing is great, its showing comparisons and helping to pinpoint exactly what the problems are, hopefully the people working on the new system will read this and get some ideas of how to improve stuff. (*cough*give tieflings facial hair options *cough*)
So, I'm going to go through some of my characters, only 3 of my more important guys.. since I have 13 character slots and don't want to be here all day.
Kiasan
Ok, I posted him earlier so people have already seen it but, first picture, how he looks currently, Is all right, but tieflings overall have a bit of a gaunt look to them, limited options and I always thought they could be better. So, take him to the face changer and... Nightmare fuel.. that's just hideous.. I don't even know where to start.. but it just seems broken, I can't even alter him to look better, I have to start from scratch.. so I did, and, hey, the end picture actually looks better than the first one. which is great, looks more attractive, eyes look great, etc, big improvement and I'm actually looking forward to having him look like this, its closer to my mental image of the guy, only.. if he had stubble... Though as I said before, I had to max out chin sliders to give him back his manly jawline. Tieflings still suffer from the lack of chin that everyone does, Its just possible to compensate with maxing sliders.
Anyway moving on...
Annarellia
Now I've allways had issue with how elves look in this game, eyes are way too big.. and I literally spent months to try and make her attractive. I'm quite happy with how she looks on the live shard. But, take her to the tower of alteration in preview shard and... yeah, that's just not attractive anymore. he head is too round, neck too long and face allround to pinched in. On top of that her face seems too low down giving her too much forhead and a lack of jaw.
So, I compensate as best I can to try and get her to look right, maxed jaw sliders, eyebrows as high as possible, small neck and streatched head. It doesn't look as bad but still looks wrong somehow, I think its the nose, and that triangle shape where the bow forms into it. One thing I will say though, her eyes DO look better. I'm happy about that, though they are as small as you can possibly make them, which isn't exactly small.
moving on...
Nagrub
Well, Grubby here is actually slightly different as I couldn't copy him over, so the one on the test shard is from ages ago, which is why it has the scar the one on live doesn't... anyway.. Default grubby, I'm happy with, outdoors type halforc getting on towards middle age. Take him to the tower of doom.. I mean alteration.. and, well, his teeth don't clip quite as badly as the previously posted halforc.. but its still got issues. And he's lost his facial hair.. as well as his lower jaw (though not as horrifying as kiasan..) but.. I touched him up a bit.. AGAIN, having to max out jaw width and jaw length... are we seeing a trend here?
He's also now looking a lot younger, which is a bit of an issue singe there's only three complexion choices now instead of the previous 9. But overall, I think I could get used to Nagrub, if clipping issues and jaw problems get sorted out.
So.. overall, its seeming that every character needs jaw sliders maxed out, and faces just feel a bit too low down.
I'd also like to point out how Kiasan looks great, and that Tiefling males just happen to have been the most recently updated. last week, I couldn't get anything better than the middle image. so the work in progress IS improving, and hopefully all races will end up looking good. Still, constructive criticism should be helpful as long as we keep it constructive and don't start getting hostile/angry.
I'm oddly feeling hopeful and looking forward to seeing what will improve with the next patch update.
Nice work on the facial images, guys! I'd add my own if my computer wasn't a piece of <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>, but as you saw in the third or so post in this thread, I don't exactly have quality graphics. These screenshots address a lot of the issues we're having with the new character creator.
Also, wow, they really improved the male tieflings, didn't they?
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
edited April 2014
The overlong necks seem to be a direct consequence of the total lack of chins and jaws.
The way you've all framed your portraiture comparisons, the tops of their heads and shoulders appear to have the same placement, so the proportion that has changed is where the bottom of the head sits in relation to everything else.
It's not just that the default is a weak chin or jawline, but that there doesn't appear to be a jawbone in most of their skulls at all.
Good work on som of the faces, I could 't get to make a female elf that doesn't look like a horrible Bratz doll.
The tieflings look better now. I wish we could give them normal eyes, and that the horns didn't cover all of their forehead, but that's how they were made XD
Things seem to be improving, I think the devs are listening.
edit: also I like the half elves more now, with just a bit more chin/jaw, they would look better. but I hated how low their mouth was before.
Good work on som of the faces, I could 't get to make a female elf that doesn't look like a horrible Bratz doll.
The tieflings look better now. I wish we could give them normal eyes, and that the horns didn't cover all of their forehead, but that's how they were made XD
I honestly think Annarellia (my elf chick) doesn't look too bad after I over compensated for the default flaws such as no chin etc. My only reall issue with her is the nose, and I worked out why its bothering me. Its because her skin got paler with the new texture updates, which is fine, but her nose didn't get paler, so comparatively her nose looks very red, like she has a cold.. or is trying to be Rudolf.
But overall the quality and detail of all three of my characters is much better. If only we could get the lack of jaw bone issue resolved I think this will end up great.
And yeah Tieflings are much better now, but some more options would be nice, such as more eye choices. you still get no variety in eyes and no facial hair.
I suspect the reason Tieflings don't have facial hair yet is because the face spikes take up that slot, so they couldn't just copy/paste the other races facial hairs without removing the face spices (try it in foundry editor), they would have to fully re-do them for tieflings. But hopefully now they are redoing stuff, that will happen.
I think we should also give some positive feedback to the devs too. I remember a while back people were complaining about the character creation, that most males always looked angry, and even if you wanted to have a more innocent look, your char ended up looking like a Angry McMurderface.
The different faces now are actually different from eachother, not just the proportions, the expressions are different.so there's more variety in many cases.
So that's a good thing about the new system. I still would like to see smaller eyes for female elves, wider mouths, and bigger chins /jaw for both genders.
Also, I'm not sure but I think they changed the male elf faces a bit, I remember I hated all of them but one (number 5 I think) andn now I find most of them relatively decent, and 5 looks actually better than the old faces to me. They look less pinched, but maybe it's that I'm just getting used to it.
I play primarily female tiefling characters - it's just what I like to play as, as it suits me. I logged in birefly last night to check on whether or not the latest path cleared up any of the outstanding issues, and it most certainly did, including ones I was prepared to grin and bear.
Previously, any hairstyle that crossed the front of the head on a tiefling woman would clip with the horns rather badly. Old hairstyles haven't been fixed for that, but every one of the new hairstyles has been edited to have a tiefling-specific version meat to evade clipping with the horns, which is far more than I expected, and make them my favorite hairstyles in the game. On top of this, they edited the face structures to be a lot more realistic. Let me get a couple examples.
This is Caeri having been transferred to the preview server when Mod3 initially hit and I decided to take a look at the new character creation options. Not exactly pretty, right?
Now, here's the latest version of her after edits. The only difference in facial features are the different horns, a slightly darker skintone, and the hair
Her skin is still pretty glossy, but it's so remarkably better. I lament the loss of freckles on tieflings, as that'd break up the glossy look, but I can get over that for the hairstyles.
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mittensofdoomMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 247Arc User
edited April 2014
I really like the new hair but the faces are so plastic and ferret-like. My halfling who is supposed to look like a little kid looks like a freak no matter what I do. The Orcs' tusks are in the wrong place. I like the tiefling horn textures but the faces are too shiny. The elves.. all ima say is anime and leave it there. The only one I like is my dude.
Her skin is still pretty glossy, but it's so remarkably better. I lament the loss of freckles on tieflings, as that'd break up the glossy look, but I can get over that for the hairstyles.
She-flings can still have freckles, there's 3 options in the tattoos section near the top light, medium and heavy freckles.
you must have missed them. which is odd since your first picture is using them...
I'm looking at the female tiefling options right now, and I'm actually pretty impressed. They've added a lot of new horn options including two completely new styles that didn't exist before. The horns also definitely look better now.
I'll check out today to see if they have added or fixed anything about the character creation.
*crosses fingers for bigger jaws/chins for everyone and smaller eyes for female elves*
She-flings can still have freckles, there's 3 options in the tattoos section near the top light, medium and heavy freckles.
you must have missed them. which is odd since your first picture is using them...
Yeah, I did miss them - Freckles have always been at the bottom of the tattoo list, so when they weren't there, I made the assumption that they were gone. The first picture has them because they've been at the bottom until the recent update.
They also added back (from alpha) the Heels slider. Now we can have 'classy' chicks running around. :P
Ugh. That's really stupid. And what next, plate bikinis?
New faces still suck and look very unnatural, the skin is greasy, if you make blond hair you'll get blinded by looking at it, female tieflings have awful noses (I want my old nose back! Arrgh, I hate you cryptic!), I don't want to play a barbie or an anime character, please somebody tell me this all is going to be an addition and not a replacement, please.
It's quite simple, really. You know who else has permanently arched feet? Some shiny plastic broad named Barbie. See, Cryptic is listening! They heard all the complaints about oily anime barbies and gave us a matching <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> heel option! *Facepalm*
Meanwhile they continue to not respond to or acknowledge any of the feedback we've been giving, or fix the massive, glaring screwups in the generator. Whatever alterations they did last maint didn't do much. Here:
Still defaults to pinchy chinless bushy eyebrowed hideousness. Still can't have mouth height at anything but max without weird folding. Still looks nothing at all like the original characters. STILL has ears that don't attach to the bloody head and that hairstyle is still screwed up. Necks are still too long. Note the funky ghost neck where the original head comes off the neck on that last shot of my half-elf. Happens on my TR, HR, etc too. Dunno if it sticks post-alteration or just during it, not buying an alteration token on live just to test this horribleness when they clearly aren't listening to our feedback anyway. Oh yeah. You can make females even more plastic barbie now, but half-elf males STILL can't have facial hair. The hell?
Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Is Cryptic even paying the slightest bit of attention or listening to what we're saying and posting screenshots of? There's been zero official response or acknowledgement and still no sign at all that these plastic travesties aren't replacing the existing character creation. It's really disheartening and disgusting that nobody on Cryptic's end seems to care at all about 11 pages of 99% negative feedback.
Largely inactive, playing Skyforge as Nai Calus.
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
Yea, after checking it out. There is a serious Anime vibe on the new female faces. Big doe eyed and vacant looking. Even a new option for bigger pupils to go with the giant eyes. I'm not really happy with it. Having a serious western style, without all the anime influences, was one of the things I personally liked about the game. The style set NW apart from an overload of generic fantasy styles, filled with half naked, doe-eyed, battle barbies, in combat lingerie. This feels like a step backwards.
However, I do like some of the new tatoo's and hair styles. So its not all bad
Well I do like them,
But I also like anime and watch it a lot. So... I'm just fine with it but then again, I'm not a girl and I don't use female characters.
Still nothing? Not a word from devs and no improvements? Sigh...
At this point, were you really expecting anything? They seem firmly committed to ignoring us completely on this. Oh, but they made Jarlaxle's feather bigger! That was such a needed fix! *sarcasm*
If this goes live as-is, even if they fix the unconnected ears, I'm not bothering to make any more characters. If this goes live and is forced upon existing characters, I'm seriously going to have to take a long hard look at whether or not I want to continue a game whose developers ignore the feedback of their playerbase on something as important to so many people as character appearance.
And midnightfang, you can access the Tower of Alteration to see the character creation. Your existing char once in alteration interface is forced to the new options and you can play around with them there.
oh hey, they added the neck length slider. Now we can choose whether we're part giraffe.
Im pretty sure the Neck slide has always been there, since all my characters had it in the lowest range. Unless they temp removed it and then added later.
I admit I had a tiny little hope, which proves how naive I am, obviously. I am also going to quit this game if those changes are forced upon me.
If ure upset with a probable chance of this being pushed to Live w/o response from the Devs, wait til ppl see the 'new' male Halfling. :P
BTW, both examples are the default Heavy body (for testing purpose), with the waist width/depth slides lowered. Fuggling hilarious, if u ask me LOL! xD
Leanan Sidhe(not "The Dresde Files" fairy!)- NW Legit Channel Moderator
Comments
So, I'm going to go through some of my characters, only 3 of my more important guys.. since I have 13 character slots and don't want to be here all day.
Kiasan
Ok, I posted him earlier so people have already seen it but, first picture, how he looks currently, Is all right, but tieflings overall have a bit of a gaunt look to them, limited options and I always thought they could be better. So, take him to the face changer and... Nightmare fuel.. that's just hideous.. I don't even know where to start.. but it just seems broken, I can't even alter him to look better, I have to start from scratch.. so I did, and, hey, the end picture actually looks better than the first one. which is great, looks more attractive, eyes look great, etc, big improvement and I'm actually looking forward to having him look like this, its closer to my mental image of the guy, only.. if he had stubble... Though as I said before, I had to max out chin sliders to give him back his manly jawline. Tieflings still suffer from the lack of chin that everyone does, Its just possible to compensate with maxing sliders.
Anyway moving on...
Annarellia
Now I've allways had issue with how elves look in this game, eyes are way too big.. and I literally spent months to try and make her attractive. I'm quite happy with how she looks on the live shard. But, take her to the tower of alteration in preview shard and... yeah, that's just not attractive anymore. he head is too round, neck too long and face allround to pinched in. On top of that her face seems too low down giving her too much forhead and a lack of jaw.
So, I compensate as best I can to try and get her to look right, maxed jaw sliders, eyebrows as high as possible, small neck and streatched head. It doesn't look as bad but still looks wrong somehow, I think its the nose, and that triangle shape where the bow forms into it. One thing I will say though, her eyes DO look better. I'm happy about that, though they are as small as you can possibly make them, which isn't exactly small.
moving on...
Nagrub
Well, Grubby here is actually slightly different as I couldn't copy him over, so the one on the test shard is from ages ago, which is why it has the scar the one on live doesn't... anyway.. Default grubby, I'm happy with, outdoors type halforc getting on towards middle age. Take him to the tower of doom.. I mean alteration.. and, well, his teeth don't clip quite as badly as the previously posted halforc.. but its still got issues. And he's lost his facial hair.. as well as his lower jaw (though not as horrifying as kiasan..) but.. I touched him up a bit.. AGAIN, having to max out jaw width and jaw length... are we seeing a trend here?
He's also now looking a lot younger, which is a bit of an issue singe there's only three complexion choices now instead of the previous 9. But overall, I think I could get used to Nagrub, if clipping issues and jaw problems get sorted out.
So.. overall, its seeming that every character needs jaw sliders maxed out, and faces just feel a bit too low down.
I'd also like to point out how Kiasan looks great, and that Tiefling males just happen to have been the most recently updated. last week, I couldn't get anything better than the middle image. so the work in progress IS improving, and hopefully all races will end up looking good. Still, constructive criticism should be helpful as long as we keep it constructive and don't start getting hostile/angry.
I'm oddly feeling hopeful and looking forward to seeing what will improve with the next patch update.
Also, wow, they really improved the male tieflings, didn't they?
The way you've all framed your portraiture comparisons, the tops of their heads and shoulders appear to have the same placement, so the proportion that has changed is where the bottom of the head sits in relation to everything else.
It's not just that the default is a weak chin or jawline, but that there doesn't appear to be a jawbone in most of their skulls at all.
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All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
The tieflings look better now. I wish we could give them normal eyes, and that the horns didn't cover all of their forehead, but that's how they were made XD
Things seem to be improving, I think the devs are listening.
edit: also I like the half elves more now, with just a bit more chin/jaw, they would look better. but I hated how low their mouth was before.
I honestly think Annarellia (my elf chick) doesn't look too bad after I over compensated for the default flaws such as no chin etc. My only reall issue with her is the nose, and I worked out why its bothering me. Its because her skin got paler with the new texture updates, which is fine, but her nose didn't get paler, so comparatively her nose looks very red, like she has a cold.. or is trying to be Rudolf.
But overall the quality and detail of all three of my characters is much better. If only we could get the lack of jaw bone issue resolved I think this will end up great.
And yeah Tieflings are much better now, but some more options would be nice, such as more eye choices. you still get no variety in eyes and no facial hair.
I suspect the reason Tieflings don't have facial hair yet is because the face spikes take up that slot, so they couldn't just copy/paste the other races facial hairs without removing the face spices (try it in foundry editor), they would have to fully re-do them for tieflings. But hopefully now they are redoing stuff, that will happen.
The different faces now are actually different from eachother, not just the proportions, the expressions are different.so there's more variety in many cases.
So that's a good thing about the new system. I still would like to see smaller eyes for female elves, wider mouths, and bigger chins /jaw for both genders.
Also, I'm not sure but I think they changed the male elf faces a bit, I remember I hated all of them but one (number 5 I think) andn now I find most of them relatively decent, and 5 looks actually better than the old faces to me. They look less pinched, but maybe it's that I'm just getting used to it.
Previously, any hairstyle that crossed the front of the head on a tiefling woman would clip with the horns rather badly. Old hairstyles haven't been fixed for that, but every one of the new hairstyles has been edited to have a tiefling-specific version meat to evade clipping with the horns, which is far more than I expected, and make them my favorite hairstyles in the game. On top of this, they edited the face structures to be a lot more realistic. Let me get a couple examples.
This is Caeri having been transferred to the preview server when Mod3 initially hit and I decided to take a look at the new character creation options. Not exactly pretty, right?
Now, here's the latest version of her after edits. The only difference in facial features are the different horns, a slightly darker skintone, and the hair
Her skin is still pretty glossy, but it's so remarkably better. I lament the loss of freckles on tieflings, as that'd break up the glossy look, but I can get over that for the hairstyles.
She-flings can still have freckles, there's 3 options in the tattoos section near the top light, medium and heavy freckles.
you must have missed them. which is odd since your first picture is using them...
*crosses fingers for bigger jaws/chins for everyone and smaller eyes for female elves*
that.. looks pretty awful... and more than just a bit trashy.
Ugh. That's really stupid. And what next, plate bikinis?
New faces still suck and look very unnatural, the skin is greasy, if you make blond hair you'll get blinded by looking at it, female tieflings have awful noses (I want my old nose back! Arrgh, I hate you cryptic!), I don't want to play a barbie or an anime character, please somebody tell me this all is going to be an addition and not a replacement, please.
Meanwhile they continue to not respond to or acknowledge any of the feedback we've been giving, or fix the massive, glaring screwups in the generator. Whatever alterations they did last maint didn't do much. Here:
Still defaults to pinchy chinless bushy eyebrowed hideousness. Still can't have mouth height at anything but max without weird folding. Still looks nothing at all like the original characters. STILL has ears that don't attach to the bloody head and that hairstyle is still screwed up. Necks are still too long. Note the funky ghost neck where the original head comes off the neck on that last shot of my half-elf. Happens on my TR, HR, etc too. Dunno if it sticks post-alteration or just during it, not buying an alteration token on live just to test this horribleness when they clearly aren't listening to our feedback anyway. Oh yeah. You can make females even more plastic barbie now, but half-elf males STILL can't have facial hair. The hell?
Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Is Cryptic even paying the slightest bit of attention or listening to what we're saying and posting screenshots of? There's been zero official response or acknowledgement and still no sign at all that these plastic travesties aren't replacing the existing character creation. It's really disheartening and disgusting that nobody on Cryptic's end seems to care at all about 11 pages of 99% negative feedback.
Well I do like them,
But I also like anime and watch it a lot. So... I'm just fine with it but then again, I'm not a girl and I don't use female characters.
No desire to sweep through the characters I copied to keep stuff I made in there, so nevermind.
At this point, were you really expecting anything? They seem firmly committed to ignoring us completely on this. Oh, but they made Jarlaxle's feather bigger! That was such a needed fix! *sarcasm*
If this goes live as-is, even if they fix the unconnected ears, I'm not bothering to make any more characters. If this goes live and is forced upon existing characters, I'm seriously going to have to take a long hard look at whether or not I want to continue a game whose developers ignore the feedback of their playerbase on something as important to so many people as character appearance.
And midnightfang, you can access the Tower of Alteration to see the character creation. Your existing char once in alteration interface is forced to the new options and you can play around with them there.
I admit I had a tiny little hope, which proves how naive I am, obviously. I am also going to quit this game if those changes are forced upon me.
Im pretty sure the Neck slide has always been there, since all my characters had it in the lowest range. Unless they temp removed it and then added later.
If ure upset with a probable chance of this being pushed to Live w/o response from the Devs, wait til ppl see the 'new' male Halfling. :P
BTW, both examples are the default Heavy body (for testing purpose), with the waist width/depth slides lowered. Fuggling hilarious, if u ask me LOL! xD