Something Champions did that ended up being much more limiting than necessary was to only provide a single vague emanation point for the head/face area. This made it difficult to convincingly turn a power into eye beams unless you wore a Cyclopes-type visor. It ended up looking like the beam was coming out of your forehead or face instead of one beam from each eye.
Champions has MANY animations that would make amazing looking eye beams if they just doubled the animation and put a separate side-by-side emanation point for each eye. There could of course be a different emanation point for the forehead/face area for, say, mental powers or some kind of third eye emanation. But any beam or small pulse animation would look amazing as eye beams. Everyone loves a good eye beam--it's a superhero classic! And some really creative sort might make, oh, say, a robot with dual-mounted guns instead of a head, etc...
Now, I know this is more work and presents some problems, but I would think that a couple more emanation points shouldn't be that bad, and any animations that just logistically don't work from those two points could be flagged and the "eye beam" option grayed out. They do that in Champions.
I really think this should be doable and would be worth the moderate amount of effort for a substantial increase in potential power customization creativity.
I did do a search and looked at the Kickstarter, and while it was said that there would be many emanation points, I didn't see dual points, one for each eye, specifically addressed anywhere that I looked. If I missed something I apologize.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I could see it being interesting for Auras to affect one eye or another.. but actual power Cast FX? I don't see the value. The animation sets for each power will have their own emanations, but even if the animations were able to switch on the Y axis for left handed vs right handed animations, why do powers need to come out of the forehead instead of just the head? That makes the FX Portion of the Animation sets very difficult to predict. Unreal does have tracking of its assets to say .. put the animation on the end of a staff or sword but when creating the animations, you'd like the FX to be interchangeable.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
I understand what you are saying, but from what you've said, I think I haven't made myself clear. I think I've obfuscated things by bringing up the head/forehead emanation point in CO.
Let's take the whole forehead/head thing out of it.
What I'm proposing is "eyes" as an emanation point so that if an attack is, say for simplicity's sake, a simple single beam of light, then the "eyes" emanation option would make that beam come from both eyes at the same time--not one eye or the other--so that you get a "Superman heat vision" type parallel beam effect.
In this way, many ranged attacks could be customized at will to be eye beam attacks, rather than just having only certain designated attacks have an eye beam animation. One common complaint back in CoH, and currently in CO and DCUO, is the limited number of eye beam attack options and the lack of any truly powerful feeling eye beam attacks. This would solve that quite handily.
Imagine energy-blasting someone across the room from your eyes. That would feel powerful enough.
I would think that a community that values customization as much as we do would see value in this--unless it's just not doable logistically, or so difficult that it's just really not worth it. If that is the case, so be it, but, if not, this would ad a significant layer to customization in a style that is very classic in comics.
Edit: Changed the title of the thread to get the whole confusing and irrelevant "head/forehead" emanation point out of it.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Eventually, over time, I would like to see these options:
1. A single, ribbon-shaped cyclops-esque visor beam that emits from the vision slit of a certain visor costume piece, or from one of many visor costume options that have that same feature.
2. Both eyes emit separate parallel laserbeams at the same time.
3. One eye emits the laserbeam, the other doesn't (monacle, etc). You can choose left or right somehow.
4. Several different visor costume options have different cross-sectional beam shapes based on the visor itself.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising