Does the player character still need to work this way?

[Professor Paul1290]

This is a bit on the trivial and nitpicky side, but it's been bugging me a bit for a while so I guess I might as well bring it up.

Does AVWW 2 still need the choice of several main characters?

Considering how long we're going to end up sticking with the same character and how set the stats are now, it seems a bit unnecessary in this game, at least to me. It seems like most of the customization is going to come from mage class or perks, so the character choice and rolls at the beginning of the world seem even less necessary than in AVWW 1

Also, because the portraits are the same as those used by the NPCs, there's also the possibility of having the talking NPC be the same portrait as yourself. That's not really a significant issue really, but it looks jarring and corny as heck.

It seems like the game wouldn't lose much if there was just a male and a female named character to choose from. If there were only a couple choices of main character they could be separate from the pool of characters used as NPCs (avoiding the above mentioned "I'm talking to a guy that looks like me!" weirdness), and maybe you could do a little bit more with the dialogue and story. It also seems like it would be easier to get two possible player characters to look better portrait, sprite, and animation-wise.


I dunno, this is a bit on the picky side so consider this low priority I guess.

[madcow]

Eh, I like being able to pick a look for my character - though it isn't really vital if it was felt there were better uses of resources. At this point, I'm not sure it would save much of anything to do that depending on how far along development is on the other characters.

I do agree about it being jarring to have survivors with the same portrait as you. I hope once we get more survivor portraits done there's checks so none of them look like you - or even possibly each survivor portrait only spawns once.

[primordialthought]

Are you seriously complaining about having options?

[Professor Paul1290]

Are you seriously complaining about having options?

I'm not really complaining about the options themselves. I'm just wondering whether there are possible gains if they didn't need to be there.

As it is, we have a choice of characters, but none of them look that good and they get a lot of screen time. Animation is still a common complaint with this game.
Also, having random characters means the dialogue needs to be rather generic so it don't seem awkward with any one character.

Even if the number of animations each character can have is limited, the current pool of characters have some frames that look odd or awkward for the sake of being different from the others, which would be ok if they weren't the main character and didn't get so much time on screen.

I guess to ask a better worded question:
Could there be a better looking main character if the need to have multiple possible main characters was removed?

[maaltan]

i was thinking about this the other day.  I was wondering if it would be better to create a "point buy" system instead of random character.  you could customize your avatar as well (chose timeperiod, body, and hue tinting?)

I end up having to hit reroll half dozen times before i get someone that i like.  only thing I'm not  sure how you could balance are the supplemental stats (+x% jump, etc)   i suppose you could just give each time period a list of 3-4 fixed bonuses and let the user choose 2 of them.