Daniel Erickson On Player Species

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Daniel Erickson

Hey folks,
No, I'm not going to confirm or deny whether there are still playable species you haven't seen yet. I will, however, clarify a couple points to help facilitate this healthy discussion:

--First, anything you've seen of the character creation process is not from an official release. Why do we know this? Because we don't show things until they are done and character creation is not final. We have never released a single screenshot, video or anything else on the character creation process. Not one part of the UI or the system that's been seen will be in the shipped game. Our artists are, as we speak, doing some amazing things on this front. First you have to establish the tech and the pipelines, then you can expand.

--Second, adding a new player race is exponentially more complicated than adding a new NPC. Even for a fairly common alien NPC--let's use Duros as an example--we might create less than half a dozen heads that are full, solid state objects. In other words they are one complete piece with no way to change them. We would never give players three or four head options with no variety to say "Look, we have Duros!" We'd have armies of identical Duros running around.

Instead, we would need to pull the heads apart, make hundreds more variations (eyes, skin tone, facial features and shape, etc) and give players the ability to mix them all up (and the tech to support it). Then we would have to go through and solve any technical issues with all of the armor and helmets in the game. You might not think it, but the Twi'lek lekku are a nightmare - collars, backpacks, helmets and a dozen other things you might not expect to be a problem suddenly are when you have a couple of head tentacles bouncing around everywhere.

For a cinematic game with plenty of close ups, this stuff matters far more than if we were always fifteen feet away from the characters. I'm not saying this changes the debate about what should be in or out but hopefully that answers the question of "I see a BLANK standing right there! Why can't I play it?"

Hope that helps!

Daniel

Kai-Sun wrote:

Quote :

Daniel Erickson


...and a dozen other things you might not expect to be a problem suddenly are when you have a couple of head tentacles bouncing around everywhere.

thats what she said...

mmmm "Head Tentacles"...


/whisper "Um...Mong', what ARE "Head Tentacles"??

With this logic all Duros NPC's will look identical. So we'll have an entire army of Duros standing around, instead of running.

Daniel Erickson wrote:

I will, however, clarify a couple points to help facilitate this healthy discussion:

Wait...There's healthy discussions on those forums? I guess I just haven't been able to find it amongst all the bitch-fests.

Horeon wrote:

With this logic all Duros NPC's will look identical. So we'll have an entire army of Duros standing around, instead of running.

That struck me too. Presumavly we won't be running into too many Duros NPC's. I think even Bioware acknowledged that one of the problems in their previous games was the repeated NPC models and they were going to correct that in SWTOR.

Godric_Barbarosa wrote:

Daniel Erickson wrote:

I will, however, clarify a couple points to help facilitate this healthy discussion:

Wait...There's healthy discussions on those forums? I guess I just haven't been able to find it amongst all the bitch-fests.

Horeon wrote:

With this logic all Duros NPC's will look identical. So we'll have an entire army of Duros standing around, instead of running.

That struck me too. Presumavly we won't be running into too many Duros NPC's. I think even Bioware acknowledged that one of the problems in their previous games was the repeated NPC models and they were going to correct that in SWTOR.

I think you'll still see variation in Duros (or any other non playable) but nothing like if they were an actual playable PC. They can limit which armor or body styles an NPC (to avoid the lekku problem with Twi'leks,) can use of a specific species while still having them be different skin colors/etc, just no where near the customization and gear wise as an actual player. A lot less work while still offering aliens that don't look the same like in KoTOR.

Godric_Barbarosa wrote:

That struck me too. Presumavly we won't be running into too many Duros NPC's. I think even Bioware acknowledged that one of the problems in their previous games was the repeated NPC models and they were going to correct that in SWTOR.

To be fair, all Duros look identical to me. Unlike Kel'Dor, which have different height on their eyes, extra-sensory organs, tusks aligned differently, different mask shapes, different wrinkle patterns etc etc... subtle differences for some, but at least differences. Go to the wookieepedia page on Duros and tell me if you find any difference between the pictures.

It seems as if the Human and Near-human species will be the ones open for PC's.
I hope there is more variety though because I wanted to play a Duros, Ortolan, and Geonosian.

I think what Erickson was getting at was that if they make a species playable there will be not only a full suite of NPCs of that species, but all the player characters of that species as well. Thus for any playable species there must be more customization options than for any purely NPC species by default.