Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else get the feeling they didn’t even bother to playtest the Charr?

They had to make custom textures/models for armor, but playing for less than one minute would immediately reveal the major clipping issue with tails.

Start as a medium armored class like the engineer, and the moment you have control of your character you notice that your trenchcoat doesn’t account at all for your tail. How could this have been missed? That’s a horrible first impression for anyone choosing to start their GW2 career with a Charr!

I would have thought that your STARTING ARMOR would not have these issues, since the first minute of playtesting would have shown the tails phasing through your coat.

The Heritage armor clips as well, and since they deliberately made them as a reward from the HoM, I would have expected them to check that one.

How can this have gotten past QA?
“Hey guys, why don’t any of the early, easily accessed armor models you made for this tailed race account for their tails?”

I kind of expected it. It’s a little detail that most MMOs already miss when it comes to ‘beastman’ races, so it’s not surprising that ANet missed it or simply decided it wasn’t worth making a specific mesh/texture for every single piece of leather chest armor. It’s only surprising in the context of all the other little details they got right.

I wish the charr still used the first char models with them standing straight
I said this before but both body types should be in game since both body types were in gw1.

And yes the clipping can be a bit much but i don’t really pay much attention to it.

I’m really glad they do NOT stand straight. I love having a non-human silhouette on a character for once. I don’t want to just play a human in a fursuit :-/

That being said, they really needed to build specific meshes and skins for the charr armor. They shouldn’t be wearing all that human-y crap.

In terms of standing straight, only Flame Legion Shamans and other casters did that in GW1. If you look in GW2, Flame Legion casters still stand straighter then other Charr—it seems to be a Flame Legion exclusive mutation. If a Charr went around the Black Citadel with such bad posture, they’d probably accuse him of heresy.

Yeah it is rather annoying. Especially when some of them look like they only need very minor tweaks to fix such as moving the split in the coat up a little bit. I suppose they had many other more important things to worry about than making sure armour fit the non human races properly.

Quit saying “non-human” races. The charr is the ONLY race that looks bad in leather armor because of it’s shape.

And my problem with the medium armor isn’t that the tails clip through the coats, it’s that the coat-tails always seem to explode out to the sides, almost as if charr wear those weird Victorian dress-scaffolds. I still don’t understand why they didn’t just do a cloth simulation for the coat-tails. They’ve already got cloth in the game(on some weapons/backpacks)

I think at some point marketing just took over and the charr became less of a priority.

If you look at the earlier days of GW2, you’ll see that the charr had a lot of priority, in the art and the writing. You had Daniel Dociu creating art for fantastic things that never ended up in the game, and the writers coming up with some pretty brilliant ideas. You have some of the NPCs talking about making the things that never got in (so that’s almost like the writers telling us that they haven’t forgotten), but…

It’s almost like they realised that the asura and humans would be the most popular races. So they shifted their focus to them. If you look at the early marketing, they were all over their love of the charr. But if you look at some of their later stuff, they go on about how great the asura and humans are, and it feels really forced.

One instance I can think of is the article where an animator talked about how great asura animations were, and it sounded like they that person was trying to convince him or herself more than they were the reader. Then Ree had to talk up the asura in one video and it felt really forced, you could almost hear it in her voice. The passion that was once there had gone. She sounded bored and disinterested.

So there was clearly a shift somewhere in the middle of development. And I think the charr just got shifted to a lower rung of priority simply because they wouldn’t be as popular as other races. And that’s a shame, because we all know (truly know) that the charr are the most unique and original race they have. The other races have clear fantasy analogues, but the charr don’t.

This is why they were so nuts about the charr, and originally they made a big deal about the charr being their race, it was their creation, and they were proud of it.

I think at some point down the road, that pride stepped aside and made way for money.

I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them at all. The game has to sell and be popular, I understand that. But sometimes it just makes me sad with how much of the short end of the stick the charr have. We were clearly the favourites of the artists and the writers, obviously, but the artists and the writers weren’t calling the shots as to where resources should be allocated.

I can’t help but wonder if this was one of the reasons why Kekai Kotaki left the studio. As he was one of the main charr artists. And of all the races, the charr ended up being the least true to the original concept art pieces.

As with the Asuran, I’d like to see Charr females in female armor – just my aesthetic.

This is one thisn eq2 did well with the Iksar eventually. Originally the tails all clipped through armour/mounts ala Charr tails, but they fixed it and now the armour either has holes or sorta sticks to the top of the tail looking much more natural.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=490135&post_id=5450444

The Iksar on the left is how some of the armour looks with tails, the Iksar on the right isn’t actually a bug but the tail curling down and between the legs to be more realistic with the cloaks and not clip through.

They even made it so tails curl over backs of the mounts instead of sticking right through, though that isn’t an issue here.

One thing I’ve always admired about SOE is their dedication to quality, it’s more important to them than most MMO developers, despite the flack they get. You wouldn’t see that in a Turbine, Blizzard, or Cryptic game. But SOE does it.

They’re passionate about their stuff in ways that I’d hoped ArenaNet would be.

Come on, ArenaNet, pick up the slack. If a decade old MMORPG can do this right, then why can’t you? There’s no excuse, it’s just cheap and lazy. And cheap and lazy is something that I really don’t want to associate with ArenaNet. But cheap and lazy is something that many parts of GW2 smacks of.

Is that what they set out thinking their end result would be?

It’s never too late to clean up and make things better. EQ II is showing the way in that regard.

I don’t think it’s an issue that is just for charr medium armor. It’s for all 3 armor types. I would almost go as far to say that I would rather have the tail cut off than have it poke through the armor. But…what is sad is that for some of them they made work properly, heavy Arah dungeon armor and heavy T3 cultural quickly come to mind as these are both high end armor sets.

Hopefully one of these days when things calm down a little more and they have all the serious stuff like broken events fixed they can make the appropriate changes to armors so they fit the tail as they should.

Side note: the heavy t3 cultural armor for charr has a pretty glaring problem of it’s own. When wearing/previewing the pants there are sections near the waist where you can see clear through your character. Everyone go report this bug so it can hopefully be fixed! Sorry for the off topicness of this.

If the Charr suddenly got discarded from their priorities, that’s a shame. I hadn’t touched GW1 for a while (though I owned the whole thing), and all I remembered were the humans and Charr.

It wasn’t until I went back to GW1 so that my HoM would recognize me that I even remembered the Asura and Norn, and that was only because Brain is mandatory in the EotN and tells me to find the Norn.

You’d think that at least the cultural armor wouldn’t have issues, ugh.

This isn’t a problem isolated to Medium armor only. My hope is they eventually hack away at fixing this over time. Fix the bugs and broken stuff first, but someday I would just love to look back at today and say “Remember when tails and horns used to clip really badly on the armor? I’m so glad they changed all that!”

EQ2 certainly does do a lot of things nicely. This issue, and housing to name a couple.

AuldWolf.7598:

I think at some point marketing just took over and the charr became less of a priority.

If you look at the earlier days of GW2, you’ll see that the charr had a lot of priority, in the art and the writing. You had Daniel Dociu creating art for fantastic things that never ended up in the game, and the writers coming up with some pretty brilliant ideas. You have some of the NPCs talking about making the things that never got in (so that’s almost like the writers telling us that they haven’t forgotten), but…

It’s almost like they realised that the asura and humans would be the most popular races. So they shifted their focus to them. If you look at the early marketing, they were all over their love of the charr. But if you look at some of their later stuff, they go on about how great the asura and humans are, and it feels really forced.

One instance I can think of is the article where an animator talked about how great asura animations were, and it sounded like they that person was trying to convince him or herself more than they were the reader. Then Ree had to talk up the asura in one video and it felt really forced, you could almost hear it in her voice. The passion that was once there had gone. She sounded bored and disinterested.

So there was clearly a shift somewhere in the middle of development. And I think the charr just got shifted to a lower rung of priority simply because they wouldn’t be as popular as other races. And that’s a shame, because we all know (truly know) that the charr are the most unique and original race they have. The other races have clear fantasy analogues, but the charr don’t.

This is why they were so nuts about the charr, and originally they made a big deal about the charr being their race, it was their creation, and they were proud of it.

I think at some point down the road, that pride stepped aside and made way for money.

I don’t blame them. I don’t blame them at all. The game has to sell and be popular, I understand that. But sometimes it just makes me sad with how much of the short end of the stick the charr have. We were clearly the favourites of the artists and the writers, obviously, but the artists and the writers weren’t calling the shots as to where resources should be allocated.

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I can’t help but wonder if this was one of the reasons why Kekai Kotaki left the studio. As he was one of the main charr artists. And of all the races, the charr ended up being the least true to the original concept art pieces.

Man, if this is correctly interpreted, it’s a very sad story.

If you look at the NPCs wandering around the Black Citadel you will notice that their armour is beautifully tail-adapted.

The unfortunate issue concerning Charr medium armor is – I’m pretty sure most pants are tail compatible(ie they have holes). It’s just the addition of the chest piece – which are mostly trench-coats(all medium armor) – that’s the real culprit.

Only in armor designed and adapted specifically for Charr – cultural and dungeon sets – is the whole armor set cooperative with tails. I consider a serious oversight, but what’s to do.

Then they should have shrunk them into jackets rather than stretch them into hoopskirts that phase through our tails.