King Customization

[:1]I believe the king (your in-game avatar) should be customizable, for instance, I don't want my king to have a beard the size of that of a dwarf, I don't want him to carry a stupidly oversized sword or his mount have spikes on the head like a god damn unicorn.|||That sounds like a cool idea. i hope they put it in the game.|||northwestcore|||OrangeKnight|||VakarisJ|||OrangeKnight|||But Orange has a point. Having a little programming experience of my own, even the simplest of features take a lot of time and code to bring to reality. Time is money. It won't take just a week to do make a customization system, it would take in my estimate at least a month with several employees working on it. Remember, it's not just the framework, but also the customization items, the art, the balancing, gameplay considerations, all that stuff. Then it has to be debugged, which if my experience is any indication, is a terribly stressful task, especially with thousands of lines of code to check for bugs.|||I definitely agree with Orange here. I too have some coding experience, and the things that you'd logically think would be simple are usually the exact opposite. You have to consider things you'd never have imagined until you try it, such as how do I give each face texture a different blend of skin color without making 30 seperate textures of it, how will the UI for customizing the character be designed, how will the specific configuration of character features be transferred to everyone in an MP game, things like that.|||Funny how everyone's claiming this a bad idea, only after a mod posts. Want to get in good graces or something? In every other strategy game in-development ideas forum I posted this, everyone said that it is a must-have feature, thus I bet if the mod hadn't posted, there would be a lot more people who would express their admiration of the idea.|||No.
He was just the first one who bothered to say what everyone else was thinking.|||Mazrix|||You see, Orange actually knows about the process and the costs involved. A great idea means nothing if it's too costly to implement. And king customization, despite being a cool idea, would take far too much time to implement, especially since GPG has already gone into production for the game (meaning it is mostly feature-complete).|||You haters need to read posts more carefully.
I never said it was a bad idea or that I hated it. Just that it shouldn't take precedence over things that actually affect the game experience, things like balancing or QA.
As far as people trying to get into my good graces, 3 things;
A) they only seem to be doing such because I happened to be the 3rd poster in this thread, due to my being around a lot due to me being a Mod, had I not posted right away it would just look like I was agreeing with someone else, this whole situation is just coincidence, nothing more.
B) it could also be because I'm a mystical GPG Prophet, along with BulletMagnet, and as such I'm always right![\sarcasm]
C) If you really want to get in my good graces.........I only take cash! ;p
Mike|||King Customization could be a good idea. it would add a lot of personal feel to our king avatars. however, making such a system takes time and money, and if it means cutting corners in other aspects of the game in favor of an "ok" system then forget.
if given the choice between funding and time between creating a mod support system or a King Customization system, i'd take the mod system(note im just using this as an example, probably not a good one but whatever)|||OrangeKnight|||VakarisJ|||There is nothing wrong with king customization (except if it is completely botched). It can add a lot of replayability and individuality to the game. In games where I can customize a character, I like to play through the game multiple times with different customizations each time. It's not a bad idea.
But how much will it cost? How long will it take? Creating such a system is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. KnC is already in the production phase. The main brainstorming part where new features are incorporated is already over. I do know that KnC will include an item shop of sorts as well as items dropped from in-game creeps. So I think there will be an aspect of customization.|||I think that you should expand your original idea a bit. Are you talking purely aesthetic changes? Or do you mean gameplay affecting changes, for example less armour horse is weaker but faster etc, like an RPG style customisation. You seem to be given you mention beard, sword type and horse armour type, which would suggest the former.
Bear in mind we already know that equipment and items can be given to the monarch, though I don't know if this will change the physical appearance or not. I don't think it will though, simply too much work. Furthermore we're at "maybe" for swappable mounts, such as changing to a dragon from the horse once you reach high enough tech level, if you want them to have a lot of different armour types as well, then that's just more work.
If after this (or before it) you want facial hair customisation you get yet more work to do.
Having said that I think that it would be nice, as someone has invariably already suggested (probably me if I got ever round to posting it, can't remember), to have an "armoury" where you can switch out different armour/weapon sets for purely aesthetic purposes, and to give the community tools to make their own armour/weapon meshes, then make the best ones of each month into the official patch, if the mesh was truly exceptional it could be added as an ingame item and not just an alternative mesh.|||OrangeKnight|||northwestcore|||electro2|||OrangeKnight|||OrangeKnight|||VakarisJ|||Key words here people:
All we've seen is of Pre-production stuff.
Quote: "Almost everything you see here currently is going to change in production."
Though this is mostly in response to the person who doesn't like the "current" king.
Perhaps there can be different king/queen models for each faction?