Apologies if this has been suggested/discussed elsewhere. I looked, but didn't find.
CoX of course had three basic body types: Male, Female, and Huge.
I'm not asking for a fourth body type -- Female Huge -- but I **DO** want to see the ability to adjust the female form such that she has a muscular-looking body. I could never make a female tanker that actually looked like she could smash through a brick wall or throw villains into the next city zone. I guess the best way would be via sliders, but perhaps the base female form could start out a little tiny bit bulkier, then one can adjust sliders upward for Amazon and downward for supermodel (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
What say you?
I think this is a logical request. I often wished I could make a female avatar with a more powerful frame. To be honest I sometimes wished for a male and female body type that was a little less physically fit. A chubby guy with a bit of a belly on him or an otherwise fit looking guy with a bit of a pooch 'cause he's let himself go. Maybe a more voluptuous girl with larger hips and stronger legs, broader shoulders.
The more variety and options, the better.
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Also, I know a lot of people who played young girls and bemoaned the fact that they couldn't endow them with any less than a decent B cup, which seemed incongruous on a twelve year old. As we all know, girls don't start at B's and go up. There are a large variety of cup sizes, and it would be nice to see more of the spectrum.
City was one of the first games that let you adjust height, build etc. In the decade following, other games have taken this and vastly added to it. Champions Online is good in this respect, as is Saints Row 3. We may not even need a "Huge" frame if the character editor is good enough. And I'd expect a good range of presets would not be a problem.
"Male" and "Huge" did have different animations for running and jumping, though that could be incorporated into a "stance" setting like CO has rather than baked into the body frames.
I was one of those who wished I could have created "realistically modest" chests for at least some of my female CoH characters. Don't get me wrong - I had plenty of hugly-racked characters and had no problem with that when it made sense. But not every superheroine (regardless of age) is going to have Power Girl sized assets. A spectrum of chest sizes would be fine as long as the lower end could effectively be "flat-chested" or at least barely A-cup sized.
Yes I would hope that we will no longer be locked into "Male, Female and Huge" body types at least as far as overall animations go. Hopefully we'll have many sliders to handle body size/shape and then have separately defineable "stances" that will allow us to define the general type of animations we want. This way we could have anything from huge, hulk-like moving women to nerdy, timidly-stanced men or anything in-between.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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DCUO did do something that the other 2 didn't, and that's adolescent-teen body frames. CO absolutely is horrible for this and they always end up looking like starved, small adults. I mean hey, there's always that strapping young sidekick that runs with heroes!
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
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The main concern with doing a single body type boils down to animation issues. The male and female human bodies have fundamentally different proportions, and that happens in ways and places that do actually affect animation pretty significantly. Yes, they overlap, and in that overlapping portion the two animations will ideally look fairly similar, possibly identical. But as you move outside that region, the proportions affect nearly everything -- including the mass of some parts of the body, and I'm not talking about just the chest area -- which means it then affects the physics asset, and anything that has physics blended with the animation. Which ideally will be "almost everything". Which is, so far as I understand (and certainly so far as I can see any indication of in current approaches), why "Huge" is also a separate body type. The differences run a *lot* deeper than just the walking and running animations, and if you mostly didn't notice that fact, it is because the animators did a good job of making things appear natural.
Now, with that said...
A lot of the points in question are entirely valid. A lot of them will *hopefully* be addressable by a sufficient variety of controls, and the list of things we want to support in this sense is fairly significant. But also very untested. We may end up being able to do some, none, or all of the sliders we want. Well, okay, 'none' seems pretty unlikely given that I have seen proof that the engine can do at least some of them. But a lot of it also depends on the character model artists being able to find a good set of compromises on shape to drive some of the sliders (including 'not distorting horribly when combined with other sliders'), and I'm not going to say anything to commit them at all.
Because if I do, they'll make *me* do it. And *nobody* wants that. I can't even draw stick figures well.
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All arguments for "average" looking people, females with small breasts, etc., being said...
I want to see wheelchair-bound heroes. It's not just wanting to play Professor X -- there was a hero made up by Stan Lee in the very early 2000's who was a paralyzed lawyer who could transform into a super-powered (unparalyzed) form. It was part of a flash webcomic thing Stan was doing at the time. Unrelated to Marvel.
Plus I'd imagine having the ability to create wheelchair-bound heroes would be empowering to the handicapped community.
I'd like to see fat heroes -- not just chubby, I mean [b]fat[/b]. Like many people I'm obese. Why aren't the obese allowed to be super-powered too? There's plenty of powers that don't require physical effort. And there's even some that aren't just fat, but with a lot of muscle under that fat -- like Kingpin or the Blob from Marvel, and Chunk from DC.
I'd like to see females with small bra sizes -- and I'd like to see females with friggin' [b]HUGE RACKS[/b]. I'm talking put-Power-Girl-to-shame bosoms. Because there are people who like that.
I'd also like to see male heroes who are "obviously packing". Now, before people start screaming "ECCHI!!!" at me, keep in mind that a lot of shots of Burt Ward from the old 60's Batman show couldn't be used, because Burt was "quite obviously packing", so there's some precedence for superheroes with large packages. (And what the hell, ya know? If people want to have sexy fun times with their characters, let 'em. Give the parents a toggle so they can keep their kids from seeing the slightly adult things.)
[i](In fact I'd love to see an "official" nude patch for the game, possibly as a cheap moneygrubbing ploy. Charge people $50 for their nude costume DLC. I promise you, the perverts among us will pay that amount gladly so they can see their hero or heroine nude.)[/i]
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I am all for a variety of sliders so you can make your character the way you want to and I can make mine my way. I would be dissatisfied if my opinion were to eliminate someone else's character image, and likewise.
For some characters, being "well endowed" is part of their concept. For some characters, this is purely cheesecake and silly. But what is and isn't is not for individuals to just decide, because that is their bias. Provided all fits within the wants of the community and legal issues (keeping in mind the "Teen" desired rating of the game), then the rest should be nearly fair game -- big, small, obese, thin, endowed, "average", young, and old.
While the superhero genre certainly has a lot of latitude in the area of acceptable dress, body sizes and shape, I wouldn't hold your breath - I don't think the devs are going for that style of game at all (you know - the ones that show up in gaming site ads that beckon "male gamers only" and such?). They want something a little more - mainstream/family friendly I imagine.
Imagine trying to play a female cat (*not* catgirl) and having a 36C bust (which was with the slider all the way to the left)!
No wonder the boy kitties kept offering me the choicest prizes from their dumpster dives!
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I would agree that it probably makes sense for there to be a very few select animations that would be defined as "male only" and "female only" just because of fundamental center-of-gravity anatomical type differences. But I hope that this new game could avoid (at least as much as possible) having to hardwire all animations based on a character's size, shape or sex.
I'd like there to be a way to define a character's basic "animation/stance style" as independently as possible. I'd want to be free to have an 8 foot tall female "Brick" that moves like a huge beefy Hulk just as much as a 5'10" femme-fatale with slinky sexy moves. And if I decide I want a 4 foot tall, 50 pound girl to lumber around with the animations of a 300 pound male linebacker I should have that choice as well - a character's size, shape or sex should not dictate "baked-in" default animations that work against our character concepts.
I understand that the Devs will likely need to make animation groupings that are internally consistent; I'm just saying that the Male/Female/Huge body type animation equivalents of CoH don't actually have to be hardwired to body types in this new game. Instead they can be selectable via player choice. This way there could ultimately be like 5 or 6 animation styles for males and 5 or 6 for females that only differ in minimal ways as needed.
The same could be said for trying to create almost any kind of animal-based female character. It always looked really weird to me when I tried to create a female lizard/dragon type character with unavoidable mammalian bulges on their chests. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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CO has the tools to pretty much shape anything you want, but has pretty ordinary presets.
You *could* get fairly flat chests in City if you really tried and were happy to have a very skinny chick. But that's not the point. You want to be able to have all sorts of options to match the all sorts of body types out there. Small boobs and wide butt if that's what you want.
Selectable animations should be a target, including idle animation sets as per DCUO.
A lack of properly powerfully built female characters was one of the few things in CoH that disappointed me. From the way my brain is wired, when given the task of designing a character it defaults to female for some reason. I tell it "Make a male character" and it just goes "Wait, what? But you could make that character a girl instead!"
My most commonly played (and damn near breaking the game like so over her knee) character and her heroic equivalent were as large as I could possibly make them, but they still looked pretty waif-like to my eyes.
Though I did get a great deal of compliments on the both of them because the costume pieces I used added greatly to their perceived size.
I supposed that's why in CoH I tended to use the Imperial Defense and Omega costume pieces a lot, and the Dragon-style wings.To further bulk up my characters.
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I have had a few characters I never bothered to make because of a lack of monstrous sized female avatars.
All be it I would love to see some warhammer 40k inspired costume designs for both genders. (I'm thinking sisters of battle)
Even if it was a temporary fix until a full model could be fleshed out, having a few chest pieces that had cleavage that were linked to selecting a female face would work on the same monstrous body. So basically I select 'monstrous', then 'female face 4', then 'female tankertop'. Where if I had not selected a female face the female tankertop would be unavailable.
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I hear you mate. One of my own go-to characters was Big Girl, who I'll cheerfully admit was an orange skinned, blonde version of the Savage She-Hulk, as big and powerful as I could make her. While BG would never be a flat chested lady, I was never happy with her lack of muscles. I managed to get her CO version looking pretty much spot on, her DCUO version not so much (though probably slightly better than City's). Best thing about City Big Girl was the local tell generator I designed that had her yell things like "Big Girl Smash Puny (target name)" and "Aaargh! That make Big Girl mad!" now and then (well, okay, fairly often... :)
I think the thing that irked me the most about female sizing was the upper arms. Yeah, that's really the thing I'm kicking about, above all others. Max out sliders, layer on bulky costume pieces, but the upper arms always had an absence of muscles--they stayed just a pipe-cleaner arm, even if that arm was thicker. No definition. Even the biggest setting on the overall body slider seemed to make no real difference there, and THAT'S where you want difference in a character based on muscles. :(