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Requesting Ability to Change Player Costume
disqord
Member Posts: 567 Arc User
After the release of Season 13.5 and the mission Brushfire, I got to thinking; What if we could change the player character's costume or entire appearance, like the prison getup from the recent FE and Temporal Ambassador, or at least custom holoemitters like in The Doomsday Device and The Core of the Matter.
I know people have talked about this before, but I don't believe there has been proper feedback as to whether or not it is possible or likely to be implemented.
If we were able to provide custom costumes to players, there would be a number of different stories able to be told:
Espionage and Subterfuge - The player character must pose as a member of an opposing faction's military to gain access to critical information on fleet movements and attack plans
Holodeck simulations - The player takes on a role of someone else to have a relaxing day off. And then the thing has a malfunction, and the safeties turn off and the simulation is suddenly really dangerous. (Because of course it happens. You can't have a holodeck without it.)
Body swap - The player character is on a normal duty shift, when suddenly a Bio-Neural Gel Pack explodes, overwriting the neural pathways of them and their bitter rival. Hilarity ensues, because of course.
...this one may be a bit harder to do, unless we were able to also set npc's to have varying costumes resembling user characters. That's a bit less likely to happen, unfortunately. But hey, we can make contact dialogues with BOffs, so it could work!...possibly.
Granted, these are some...basic ideas from a tired mind, but my point still stands. It would be really freaking useful and fun to be able to give players holoemitters or costumes to use for missions, as long as it doesn't break the game or something.
Thoughts?
I know people have talked about this before, but I don't believe there has been proper feedback as to whether or not it is possible or likely to be implemented.
If we were able to provide custom costumes to players, there would be a number of different stories able to be told:
Espionage and Subterfuge - The player character must pose as a member of an opposing faction's military to gain access to critical information on fleet movements and attack plans
Holodeck simulations - The player takes on a role of someone else to have a relaxing day off. And then the thing has a malfunction, and the safeties turn off and the simulation is suddenly really dangerous. (Because of course it happens. You can't have a holodeck without it.)
Body swap - The player character is on a normal duty shift, when suddenly a Bio-Neural Gel Pack explodes, overwriting the neural pathways of them and their bitter rival. Hilarity ensues, because of course.
...this one may be a bit harder to do, unless we were able to also set npc's to have varying costumes resembling user characters. That's a bit less likely to happen, unfortunately. But hey, we can make contact dialogues with BOffs, so it could work!...possibly.
Granted, these are some...basic ideas from a tired mind, but my point still stands. It would be really freaking useful and fun to be able to give players holoemitters or costumes to use for missions, as long as it doesn't break the game or something.
Thoughts?
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My character Tsin'xing
+1 epic idea
Prison Outfit / Generic Klingon / G.Romulan / etc. (The sum of what has been in campaigns and is available in holograms).
This way it gives us options AND limits us at the same time for all the right reasons.
Episode Four - Head Of A Needle Episode Five: The Duality of Men Episode Six - Redemption Earned
Episode Seven - Shattered Universe Episode Eight - The Gepetto Condition Episode Nine - One Room, Two Officers
Episode Ten - Beyond The Farthest Star Episode Eleven - It's OK, It Won't Hurt Episode Twelve - A Protracted Officer
Episode Thirteen - Somewhen Episode Fourteen - The Boy Who Lived Episode Fifthteen - Empathy
Bugs aside, I'd like to see this idea implemented. I'd also like to see more variables under our control. Like how we can say [ship name] and it fills it in with the player's ship name, I think it'd be cool to have some NPC values take on player-set conditions. Again, like Temporal Ambassador, your bridge crew is sitting around the facility, not remembering you, but still there. (That said, I'd like to also have the control to say how many bridge officers you're allowed to bring along.)
Another variable is to utilize the captain, themselves. Like, let's say you want the main villain of a mission to be the Mirror Universe version of your own captain. That would be cool. Or utilize a story about clones or time travel or something. So, head/upperbody/lowerbody=[Current player]. Outfit=Terran Antares. So whether you have a hulking Gorn or a pint-sized alien, the game knows to take those parameters and assign it to the NPC.
I'd like to control other variables as well. The way the holo-emitter works, like Night of the Comet, we can pick an appearance for the ship (also whether the ship gets the holo-shimmer or not). But, variables to be considered: If the player flies an escort, they get Ship A, if they fly a cruiser, they get Ship B, a science ship, Ship C, and so on.
The Night of the Comet - this reminds me that Scotty's dialog needs to be updated when he utters "Funny looking costume you are wearing" since my characters are all attired in TOS 23rd Century uniforms the same that he and everyone else on the station is wearing.
Also having the system detect if you have the proper uniform with the proper color would be way too much work for a minor issue for 99.9% of the player base and that's assuming it's even possible with STO game engine.
Updating the Foundry simply isn't a priority to the Dev team(because it's not profitable) and we haven't gotten new features in ages with the exception of assets.
At least that's my understanding, but that's why I stopped requesting new features ages ago.