'Body type' customization?

[rjshae]

Another candidate for contributions by the modding community...

[Lephys]

Well, yeah, the thing is, you can be big/wide/sizeable/not-lean and still be on good shape. You just won't be a sumo wrestler. You won't literally be mostly fat. You can have a lot more fat on you than another person, or a lot less. You can have a tiny frame, or you can really be "big-boned" (it's not that your bones are "bigger," per se, but that YOU'RE bigger because of your inherent bone structure and musculature).

 

You're just not going to be a big squishy person who's "out of shape" (not so much literal shape, but fitness "shape") and still be anywhere near capable of being a level 1 any-class. I mean, MAYBE a Wizard? But then, that still doesn't quite cover the whole "you don't really have plentiful food available to even eat enough to maintain body fat unless you just sit around in a noble house all day long, every day, forever" thing.

 

*shrug*

 

Anywho, yeah, I think it's dumb when everyone's a friggin' Ken doll, and the only difference between people is the bulge of muscles. There should feasibly be size differences (width, height, length of limb, etc.) between characters, and that is one of the few things that's most noticeable when you've got smaller models and a fixed camera like we'll have.

Edited February 20, 2014 by Lephys

[Helz]

I just want to chime in that I hope they rethink adding variable body types.  Height and weight differences add a lot of variety to the way characters look.  I always notice when games feature NPCs wih variable heights, it adds something to the world.  They've already got the tech for morphing clothing to the different sized races anyway, so I'd hope they'd be able to apply it to variations within the same race.

 

Most of the strongest people in the world are fat.  This isn't a new development, its always been this way.  I've always thought it'd be cool for an RPG  to make it so if you max out your strength, your character's weight would increase.  Increasing stamina would make you leaner.

[J.E. Sawyer]

 

They did say in one of the updates though, what a timesaver it is having scalable armour.

 

 

During January, we've developed a new system to allow our human bipedal skeleton to be shaped and morphed into the other playable races and have armor be shaped and morphed along with the skeleton.

 

 

To clarify, this produces new (scaled) assets.  It's not a dynamic adjustment of proportions in real-time.  That's a lot more work and beyond the scope of the project.  Sorry.

[Helz]

Oh well, it would have been nice.  Thanks for taking the time to let us know.  I mainly commented in this thread to stick up for fat people anyway. 

[Tsuga C]

With a fixed isometric viewpoint I don't see this as terribly significant, unlike NWN2 in which adjustable bodies were a good feature.

[Lephys]

With a fixed isometric viewpoint I don't see this as terribly significant, unlike NWN2 in which adjustable bodies were a good feature.

To be clear/fair, slider adjustments and the like would be pretty pointless. However, a handful of distinct character shape options would be pretty significant, in the sense that it'd be one of the most still-visible distinctions in a fixed isometric viewpoint.

 

It would basically be one of the least-subtle things you could possibly allow variance in, in terms of visual character customization.

 

That being said, is it "terribly significant" that we be able to choose from multiple body shapes? No, not really. It would just be nice, and is feasible (in effect, not necessarily in implementability). As Josh has pointed out that adjusting the armor/equipment model components to various body types actually requires a lot of work, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they don't put in multiple body type options at character creation, and don't really think the game is suffering because of that.