Guild Wars 2

No this is not a “cus anet sucks!” I think I have a legit reason why Charr and..well.. any non humanoid race is so difficult to put design into. If you think about it when you think of building something you think about.. how would this object look and you compare it to a human design. Look at robotic designs from sci fi movies and even real ones. Most of them are designed to look like humans! Two legs, a face, arms, legs etc. Why are we automatically driven to design like this? Because we are use to it, it is something that we can relate too. Same thing with Charr and Asura, they are not a human thus people have a hard time designing an armor for them or a weapon, because it just isn’t natural thinking to …well.. think like that. You have nothing to base it on except you own imagination.. and that right there is why I think it is being neglected or being fixed very very slowly. It is a combination of lack of imagination, drive to do it. If you ever look at like.. say Halo. That game took off like a rocket why? Because it had thought behind it, story, really good design for aliens. Nearly everything in it was imagination. So when you are designing an armor for Charr it is difficult to design a look or even a variant of another armor for a race that does not relate to humans. Horns, tails, claws, hunch back, we don’t have this(at least I hope none of you have these features!). It takes real skill to think in 3d for something that you have no real life experience with despite what people would think. All in all what I am trying to say is, the design for Charr is hard to relate to for designers or they just don’t want to put the effort into it thus designing the armors for Charr based on what the humans look like in it and just slapping it on the Charr. This is just my opinion on it. Have fun.

Because less people play them.

Being non-humanoid hasn’t got anything to do with it, their artists aren’t amateurs.

You don`t need imagination to add frikkin tail holes and visible horns to every armor.

Ben K.6238:

Because less people play them.

Being non-humanoid hasn’t got anything to do with it, their artists aren’t amateurs.

How about not treating the 10% of people with very fatal but easily curable diseases because there are less of them?

You realise that no-one’s dying of bad charr art, right?

(Yet.)

Ignoring charr armour is still inexcusable for a company of that size, and the argument can certainly be made that the reason why less people play them is specifically because the art isn’t up to scratch. You’d figure that if 10-15% of people play them, they might actually make 10-15% of new armour skins – at least – work properly on charr.

The current figure is 0%.

That was a comparison. Something vital to MMO survivability that anet needed to work on a year ago (polishing) has not been even touched upon.

The example I posed reflects that.

http://i.imgur.com/ygwTZGS.jpg

Enough said. They better fix that. Why the kitten MAKE A DARN CHARR RACE if you are not even going to bother making the armor actually COVER the body.

I think they’re being ignored because Everquest Next is on the horizon, and with the obviously superior treatment of beast races within that game, a lot of the charr players are just goint to simply leave. I feel betrayed by ArenaNet, so I’ll be the first there playing a kerran.

And superior? Look at that handling of a tail flap! And that’s actually an in-game model, too. Plus, I honestly prefer the face, proportions, and upright stance. I feel they went too aesthetically grotesque with the charr to avoid lip from certain insecure minorities.

So the comparison I have to make is a butt ugly critter in armour that clips everywhere, or a good looking beast race designed by people who clearly care about doing a good job. It’s not a hard choice. I’d pick an Everquest: Next kerra over a charr any day.

@OP

First of all, please write in paragraphs. Otherwise it’s this wall of wordspew that’s hard to parse and horrible for the people who decide to click on your thread. It’s just common decency. When reading off a monitor, it’s helpful to have whitespace between the text.

“[…] any non humanoid race is so difficult to put design into.”

Balderdash.

Every piece of armour in Everquest II has a properly defined tailhole or tail flap — and not even just a texture, but modelled. You can start up the latest EQ II client for yourself, as it’s free to play, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

This obvious care for designing beast races properly will obviously carry over to Everquest Next, given that everything we’ve seen of it indicates they understand why people liked the beast races of Everquest II.

“[…] Most of them are designed to look like humans!”

Yes, so are most beast races. Your point? The morphology of robots beyond that though can vary as much as beast races tend to. Haven’t you seen Short Circuit? I’d hardly say Johnny 5 looks exactly human.

“[…] they are not a human thus people have a hard time designing an armor for them […]”

Gee. Funny how Everquest II never had that problem. And frankly, the design of the frogloks is even more strange (yet more aesthetically pleasing) than the charr. I see this as weak apologism for laziness.

“[…] You have nothing to base it on except you own imagination […]”

And an imagination can be an amazing thing. You act like we’re all clerical numbersmiths with no capability to envision the strange or novel, which really isn’t the case. Even just looking at Harryhausen’s stuff, you can see how obviously far off the mark this is.

“[…] So when you are designing an armor for Charr it is difficult to design a look or even a variant of another armor for a race that does not relate to humans. […]”

Since we’re repeating points. Care to tell me why this isn’t a problem for Everquest II and Everquest Next?

“[…] It takes real skill to think in 3d for something that you have no real life experience with […]”

Hahaha. No, no it doesn’t. You’re clearly not an artist. Hop on over to deviantART and browse the stuff people draw on a regular basis. I think you’re projecting your lack of imagination onto other people, since from your perspective it’s apparently hard to concoct a beast race.

But we’ve been imagining and dreaming them up since the dawn of time. Are you at all familiar with ancient Egyptian or ancient Greek culture and mythos?

“[…] or they just don’t want to put the effort into it […]”

Yes, because they’re lazy and they’re doing the absolute minimum they need to do to pull in money. Thanks to apologist schmucks who never question lazy work, they’ll continue to do that.

Being a fan is one thing, being a mindless sycophant or yes-man is another. As a paying customer, you really should expect better.

We all should.

@Ben K

You realise that that still accounts for 15% or more of their playerbase, right? And whilst that might not sound like a lot, consider that’s of their overall playerbase. So that could be thousands of players. Then consider that there are people who’re willing to pay over the odds on the cash-shop for a good beast race experience.

Just consider the aforementioned EQ II and the ridiculous amount of beast races that game now has. SOE saw where the money was, and it wasn’t in short humans, tall humans, humans with pointy ears, and so on. The people who were putting out the most money were statistically those who played more fantastic races.

So you’re losing thousands of players who pay more than the average player.

That’s financially stupid.

The thing is is that SOE will be more than happy to pick up the slack with Everquest Next, by giving us what we want. And us beast race players will show our appreciation by buying lots of things from their store. That’ll be money going to SOE when it could have gone to ArenaNet.

So many companies don’t really look at who gives them money enough, really.

They’re ugly as most would say :P

That Kerran looks bloody awful. Probably won’t stop me playing one, but the appearance sure isn’t an improvement over charr.

EQN mainly sounds interesting because it’s trying to give players more of an active role in the world. Whether they’ll succeed, I couldn’t guess. It does look promising. That said, with Sony’s record on personal security I’m certainly not going anywhere near any cash shop.

I really disagree with the perception that Charr are “aesthetically grotesque.” Leaning toward the feral side more than the humanoid side is by no means the wrong choice. In fact I love pretty much every design decision that they made for the race itself. But that has relatively little to do with the amount of attention being put towards armour adaptations.

Modern charr are actually LESS feral than their gw1 ancestors, yet gw1 charr never had armour clipping issues. Why? Because gw1’s aNet actually put in the time to model the armour properly for charr bodies.

What a novel concept.

Charr footprints still show up backwards when you are moving forward, but correctly when you are moving backwards, its been doing this since the late beta.

I find it hard to believe fixing issues like this will take even a slightly noticeable amount of valuable development time.

This has been going on for a while and while I’ve seen many people complaining about it on the forums, I’ve little evidence of anyone trying to do anything about it.

While it’s a small step, I sent a couple of e-mails to Daniel Dociu, who I’m assuming essentially has the final say in whether or not charr get armor that is actually okay to look at and has thus far been saying “no”. If things don’t go favorably, I’m planning to draft a form letter for others to write their names on and send in en masse, as the voice of many unhappy customers weighs much more than that of just one.

I’ve been keeping track of charr armor fixes update-by-update and, while we got precisely one in the previous update, this most recent one does not appear to have improved things on that front. All armor with horrendous clipping and floating pauldrons, I bug report under Armor > Art/Visual because well…that’s exactly what they are. I do the same with the backwards footprints after every update until they’re fixed. I do wish more people would join in rather than throw in the towel.

Making a bunch of noise once or twice can be pretty much ignored by ANet, but it’s persistence that’ll make them so sick of hearing us that they eventually start fixing the armor just to shut us up.

So if I could make one humble request to everyone who cares even a little bit about the charr, or even just about the integrity of Guild Wars 2 in general, it would be to start gently poking ANet about the issues that concern you and don’t stop until they just can’t stand it anymore.

The best way to ensure that nothing is done is to do nothing yourself.

Silavor.6257:

Modern charr are actually LESS feral than their gw1 ancestors, yet gw1 charr never had armour clipping issues. Why? Because gw1’s aNet actually put in the time to model the armour properly for charr bodies.

What a novel concept.

I’ve only played a little bit of GW1, but didn’t the Charr only have a few clothing types that were more a part of the models themselves rather than interchangeable pieces like we use in GW2? In GW2 we can change each piece of our armor from multiple sets as well as types. I don’t think that was somthing they had to worry about or do in GW1, but again I only played it a little so I might be wrong.
If I am wrong, that would surprise me considering they were enemy NPCs rather than a playable race.

GW1, the clothing for Charr was indeed a part of the model. The only one where that might be an exception was Pyre, because he was literally the only charr in the game where the armor could change appearance.

It is indeed far more difficult in GW2, due to not only the vastly increased number of armor skins, but also the variance in body shapes of the charr themselves.

I don’t excuse ANet for their current lack of progress on the matter, but it is significantly more difficult than in their first game.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

GW1, the clothing for Charr was indeed a part of the model. The only one where that might be an exception was Pyre, because he was literally the only charr in the game where the armor could change appearance.

It is indeed far more difficult in GW2, due to not only the vastly increased number of armor skins, but also the variance in body shapes of the charr themselves.

I don’t excuse ANet for their current lack of progress on the matter, but it is significantly more difficult than in their first game.

Thank you for confirming that, and yeah it doesn’t excuse the current state of things for charr, but it’s still a whole new ball park.

Ewwww Kerra on EQ. Yuck. Its the Charrs attitude and machinery that make me play them and their ferocious look. I enjoy playing one. And that feeling you get when one looks amazing.

What really sucks about all the armour issues is that every single piece of new gear has been hideous. Rather than spending the extra time now to make decent armour they will have to go back and spend a huge amount of time fixing the plethora of problems piling higher and higher with each update.

It’s looking less and less likely with every update that anything will ever change

Henge.3907:

Ewwww Kerra on EQ. Yuck. Its the Charrs attitude and machinery that make me play them and their ferocious look.

That just sounds like biases, but I’d like to address some things.

Ferocious Look

You can make something look dangerous without making it look grotesque. The kerra in the image looks like it could smack you through a wall, and it doesn’t need a face that not even a mother would bring herself to love in order to do it. My main issue with this kind of base apologism is that it doesn’t take aesthetics into account.

There’s a difference between ferociousness and plain bad aesthetics. You have bad taste, that is a truth, and I’m sorry to say but it is. As an artist, I know better, and I’m very familiar with what makes for bad art. The charr constitute bad art — in their anatomy especially, which has always been appalling. If any such creature actually existed, the posture and anatomy the charr have would leave them doubled over in pain.

So yes, this is either apologism or simply pure obliviousness.

I feel that Skyrim had this problem, too. It was appealing to a minority of people who were vehement in insisting that certain elements of the game be grotesque, even though they have no interest in playing them. What happened is that we ended up with an aesthetically bad werewolf in Skyrim that didn’t look dangerous at all, it looked like a grotesque mockery, it was a laughable pantomime creature rather than a bulky, dangerous werewolf.

See the comparison here with a mod and hopefully you’ll understand.

I bet you really don’t even play beast races commonly, but you’re insisting on grotesque things because that’s what you want to see, that’s your poor taste. But what you have to think of is the people who want to play beast races. Who want to actually look good. We don’t all want to look like pantomime mockeries, we don’t want to represent poor aesthetics, we don’t want armour with crazy clipping.

You can just look around the threads on these forums past and present. There have been countless threads complaining about the anatomy, proportions, posture, aesthetics, and armour of the charr. It’s all wrong.

Everquest Next gets it right.

Technology

Yeah, technology that exists only in a few spots, an anachronism in a fantasy world. Where are their roads? Where’s their infrastructure? Where’s all this industry outside of the Black Citadel? Where, pray tell, is all of this technology? Where, outside of the Black Citadel, are the cars? Where are the trains? Where’s anything that even hints at the charr being advanced. In only a few spots do we even see any hints that they’ve come beyond their tribal stage seen in Guild Wars 1.

The representation of charr technology in the world is a joke. Example? Here’s a piece of concept art by their lead concept artist, Daniel Dociu. That looks amazing! That suggests that the charr will have helicopters, but we only see one of them in a prototype stage before the end of the game. And the in-game model for it is atrocious. It’s just bad art, it’s grotesque in really unappealing ways, it’s like someone really wanted to demean the charr as a species as much as they could.

Why don’t people play charr, ArenaNet? Look to your own art, design, and writing for the answer.

So, yes, the ‘technology’ is a joke. I’d rather the race not be technological at all, rather than being a kitten -take of technological advancement. It’s worse than the Goblins in WoW, and I never thought I’d ever have to say that about anything. Nothing should be worse than WoW.

So yes, it’s just bad art, through and through. I’m sick of seeing people being apologists about this. If we’re mindless sycophants, witless yes-men, and we just bend over to take it up the rear without ever raising a complaint, then ArenaNet will never bother fixing anything. So I’m going to continue complaining and advertising Everquest Next as an alternative.

They could fix things. That’s up to them. But as it is now I’m appalled by the state of the charr. People should have more self-respect. If this is a product you paid for with the intent of playing a charr, you should feel disgusted, that’s your right, as it is mine.

Frostflame.5314:

Charr footprints still show up backwards when you are moving forward, but correctly when you are moving backwards, its been doing this since the late beta.

I find it hard to believe fixing issues like this will take even a slightly noticeable amount of valuable development time.

This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say it’s a kitten -take. They don’t care. They never did. The charr were thrown together, cobbled together, and not much effort was put into them outside of perhaps the Black Citadel. You can see how true that is with the charr copter.

The charr copter looks like someone spent half hour on it and just wanted to get it done, no matter how bad it looks. This is just the feeling I get from ArenaNet. They promised us proper handling of beast races, they promised us tail flaps, no clipping, and a huge variety of faces (not just grotesque), and they promised us that we’d see the technological advancements of the charr.

They haven’t delivered on any of those things. At all. And we’ll just happily roll over and accept it. This is exactly why I stopped playing GW2. I like spending money at the cash shops of the games I play and I have plenty to spread around, I’ve bought pretty much every cash shop item in Champions Online. I won’t give ArenaNet that money, though, because they just don’t deserve it.

Also, I wish people would stop making excuses for how many more pieces of armour GW2 has. Let me illuminate you…

GW2 has one beast race. One. Everquest II has five. And EQ II has at least four times the amount of armour available than GW2 does. Thus, you’d think that the handling of beast races would be worse in EQ II, right? The logic is that because it’s more work, it’s going to be hard to do.

Let me give you a rundown:

• None of the beast race armour in EQ II has clipping.
• Every piece of armour has been redesigned to fit the proportions of the beast races, and they’re all very different from each other.
• Every piece of armour (every single one) has a tail flap or tail hole designed to fit the shape of the tail of that race.

Huh. That doesn’t seem right, because EQ II has more, the quality must be less, right? That’s the rule, is it not?

The rule is wrong.

It’s all about how much a developer cares about quality and polish. And ArenaNet doesn’t really care about either. It’s just a job to them, just money, and they’re not at all passionate about what they do. They did just enough work on the charr to make them barely serviceable, and that’s it. Whereas SOE went above and beyond with Everquest II.

Don’t believe me? Everquest II is free to play. Grab the client, sign up, and try it for yourself. Every piece of armour, right down to the armour you begin the game with, is fully designed for a beast race.

There is no excuse.

Khalic.3561:

I really disagree with the perception that Charr are “aesthetically grotesque.” Leaning toward the feral side more than the humanoid side is by no means the wrong choice.

Straw-man. I said nothing about them looking more human. I’m talking about how they look more like bad halloween suits than a believable creature*. They don’t look like something that’s alive, they look like something you’d expect to find in a horror house. They look too pantomime, their grotesqueness makes them cartoony. It makes them less scary because they’re so much of a visual mockery. And the funny thing is is that this makes them look more human rather than less, because it looks like a guy in a cheap monster suit (so cheap that the mouth can’t even close). Think Godzilla.

Take a look at this dragon, or this tiger. Would you say it doesn’t look dangerous? I think it looks very dangerous. Now, use your imagination to add huge jowls, have its mouth explode with teeth from every angle, give it a ridiculous humpback, give it a gigantic brow above its eyes, and then tell me if you still think it looks dangerous. That’s the problem with being aesthetically grotesque — the creature stops looking dangerous and starts looking… well, hilarious.

I don’t want the charr to look hilarious, I don’t want them to be a laughingstock, I want them to look dangerous. Maybe it’s the perceptions of an artist who’s spent time looking at different animals, maybe that’s what it is, and you’ve not ever really done that. So your perceptions are very limited. Perhaps that’s why you don’t see it.

The charr are just bad art, they’re the tween perception of ‘kewl.’ I don’t appreciate it.

Four posts in a row? Seriously?

I’ll grant you that the male charr look a bit weird – teeth everywhere is the primary reason only two of my 12 charrs are male. It’s still far, far better than that abomination from EQN though.

Skyrim almost got it right with the Argonians. The heads looked plausible, which is what you see most of the time. Problem is, once again, they got lazy with the rest and slapped a tail on a reskinned human body – same as they did in Oblivion – and still had the gasping-for-air sound effect when you leave the water. For a water-breathing race.

Arenanet has still done a pretty good job compared to other recent games with comparable detail in their characters, but it seems more by accident than good management. They put together a few good NPC clothing skins early in the piece, and from then on it’s just been a rush of stretched human armour skins that don’t fit the aesthetic at all. The running animation doesn’t really make sense, but most games wouldn’t have even attempted one. Yet footprints are still backwards or sideways.

I’m not going to read too much into the layout and infrastructure in charr territory since to be honest the entire world map has serious problems with a lack of continuity. The walls between every zone should never have been there – they turn a world that could have made sense into a bunch of disjointed chambers with only a veneer of realism. It’s pretty hard to make a convincing ‘living world’ when the environment was never lifelike to begin with. The whole place feels like a theme park.

EQ2 really isn’t better in terms of beast race design. It’s got more of them, for sure, and maybe they don’t clip. That’s not really a high bar. Problem is, where they’ve succeeded in those areas they’ve thoroughly dropped the soap in the main issue, which is not making them look stupid. Only the Iksar don’t look like lame cuddly toys, and even they are pretty hit-and-miss in appearance.

Exactly how EQN’s versions can look even worse is beyond me, but they managed it. Thankfully GW2 hasn’t backpedalled quite that far since getting it pretty well right with Pyre in EotN.

A variety of faces that more closely resemble him might get more interest in the makeover kit than the hairstyles did.

I’m not making any apologies for the armour design, and I’ll grant that the teeth on some of the male faces is over the top. Other than that I don’t really see it.

The brow on all of my characters looks fine.

The “hunch back” is plausible on a race that alternates between quadrupedal and bipedal motion. If you take a look at the skeletal structure or musculature of something like a wolf, you’ll notice that there’s a good bit more mass in the shoulder region.

No, that dragon doesn’t look particularly scary. Those spikes on the wings would make it impossible for them to fold properly.

I’m still trying to figure out why you think this looks less cartoony than this

The Charr look like the most believable beast race in any game I have ever seen. By far. Their skeletal structure makes sense including the always overlooked detail of how the spine attaches to the head with a beastial jaw. Normally, the jawbones and muscles for the race would take up the space for the windpipe and voicebox (other beast races). Charr have the spine attaching to the skull from the back instead of the bottom, leaving them plenty of room for things like being able to breathe. The four ears are arranged in a logical pattern as well. This arrangement also allows them to easily run on all fours and not crane their necks to see where they were going. The quadrupedal running, which I’ve never seen anyone attempt outside of werewolves in the Elder Scrolls series, was done very well. The animation is smooth and doesn’t break the skeleton or muscles (armor is another story, but that’s the actual subject of this thread).

My complaints as a zoologist about charr anatomy are actually with the horns. Not their presence, but their ridiculous variety of shapes. Teeth can be adjusted to not be ripping the male mouth to shreds with a slider, but given that most of the time they are still reasonable, I will give that a pass. The horn variety though…no.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

My complaints as a zoologist about charr anatomy are actually with the horns. Not their presence, but their ridiculous variety of shapes. Teeth can be adjusted to not be ripping the male mouth to shreds with a slider, but given that most of the time they are still reasonable, I will give that a pass. The horn variety though…no.

I tend to think a lot of the horn shapes are caused by the charr themselves shaping them as they grow. More a result of culture than nature. That should be possible, yeah? Similar to the way some tribes elongate the neck or the skull.

Khalic.3561:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

My complaints as a zoologist about charr anatomy are actually with the horns. Not their presence, but their ridiculous variety of shapes. Teeth can be adjusted to not be ripping the male mouth to shreds with a slider, but given that most of the time they are still reasonable, I will give that a pass. The horn variety though…no.

I tend to think a lot of the horn shapes are caused by the charr themselves shaping them as they grow. More a result of culture than nature. That should be possible, yeah? Similar to the way some tribes elongate the neck or the skull.

Possible, but not to the extent of Legionare Steelbane’s, for example (the “longhorn steer” style). Definitely not the ones that curve up and around in front of the face (which have more mass than any other horn style).

Lol “as an artist” well. Join the Anet team and tell them how dumb they look and make sure they re-do everything to get it in good taste.

Everquest nexts art style is horrid. Its more cartoon like than wow. Look how skinny the character is vs the bulk of the arms. you cant shoot down charr anatomy without devalidating the kerra also. Its a game, not real life. Things dont need to be anatomically correct. EQ kerra look kittenty. No I don’t play a lot of beast races in games because I don’t play games to be a beast race. That sounds ridiculous! Looking for a game just to be a man cat!? Seriously ridiculous, and no matter what features EQ offers, I hate that art style and the stupid lion face cut and pasted on a WoW humans body. The time I stopped playing EQ1 was when they introduced cat people. The game got too stupid.

Because you personally do not like the Charr aesthetics does not give you the right to decide if someone else has poor taste. Its a game after all. Maybe you’re a terrible artist with terrible taste? That happens all the time. The statement “as an anything” has no weight. if you want to play EQ then go for it and live out your furry dream.

Henge.3907:

if you want to play EQ then go for it and live out your furry dream.

Hilariously, all the furries I’ve brought up the subject with prefer Charr appearance over other beast races. They’re just cooler and better designed.

And yeah, Kerra are a joke when it comes to good design. No understanding of anatomy is apparent on them.

The kerra in Everquest Next looks ridiculous in my opinion. It’s anatomy is far worse than the charr and if the charr looked like that, I would not be playing as one. I think that if Anet would fix the armor problems and that problem with the footprints the charr would look amazing.

I hate to be a downer but I really doubt it has anything to do with armor clipping, stretching or minor bugs at his point.
Statistically speaking, people tend to roll with what’s familiar or attractive to them in MMOs, namely humans, elves or just more human-like races in general. This is fact and explains why so many people prefer rolling a Norn or a boring human then something aesthetically unique or different like an Asura, Charr or Sylvari.

Meanwhile the Charr themselves aren’t exactly majestic or aesthetically pleasing to look at, instead they’re beastly and ugly with those over-sized fangs and claws and hulking, hunched bodies. When it comes down to it, the average MMO player wants something that looks sexy or relatively aesthetically pleasing – not something ugly, unusual or vicious. And its because of this that races like the Charr are becoming rarer and rarer to come by in MMOs.

While the clipping and texture-stretching on armor has become a seriously nuisance for Charr players, Anet probably doesn’t want to bother improving the issue because they know at this point in time that the payoff simply wouldn’t be worth it due to the small percentage of Charr players already involved. Which is a real shame, because I really appreciated Anet’s efforts to step out of those generic boundaries with fantasy races. But if your own player base is ignoring the fresh new races you worked so hard to develop in favor of something far more boring and familiar, then why continue to bother? I can kinda understand where they’re coming from here.

Someone earlier mentioned that the Charr should’ve looked more like EQN’s Kerra, and I’m gonna have to disagree with that. I’m really happy that Anet took and kept the feral and brute approach with them, not turning them into generic furry #13234346 you’d find on deviant art or a human covered in fur or scales with a beast head plastered on top (I’m looking at you Skyrim.)

As for the Kerra we’ve seen so far, it looks like a bad cross between a WoW ripoff, generic Deviantart furry #13234346 and a Lion King backdrop character. While it’s certainly more pleasing or acceptable to the eye, it’s also equally generic and bland. If that’s their final design, then it’ll be something that I won’t remember a few years down the line to say the least.

Maybe if Tengu becoming playable down the line then Anet will feel a need to improve those armor issues, since the GW2 Tengu already share the same basic proportions and skeletal rig as the Charr. But for now it just isn’t happening.

“When it comes down to it, the average MMO player wants something that looks sexy or relatively aesthetically pleasing – not something ugly, unusual or vicious.”

I think all charrs look sexy and aesthetically pleasing ._.

Kagusaki.3176:

“When it comes down to it, the average MMO player wants something that looks sexy or relatively aesthetically pleasing – not something ugly, unusual or vicious.”

I think all charrs look sexy and aesthetically pleasing ._.

Yep! Love the way the Charr look. They just need to have textures for their armors that don’t look like they were stretched out like a fruit rollup. And the clipping issue should be dealt with quickly. Honestly, that’s just laziness and a lack of pride in one’s work there.

AuldWolf.7598:

I think they’re being ignored because Everquest Next is on the horizon, and with the obviously superior treatment of beast races within that game, a lot of the charr players are just goint to simply leave. I feel betrayed by ArenaNet, so I’ll be the first there playing a kerran.

And superior? Look at that handling of a tail flap! And that’s actually an in-game model, too. Plus, I honestly prefer the face, proportions, and upright stance. I feel they went too aesthetically grotesque with the charr to avoid lip from certain insecure minorities.
.

Errrr did you just link to concept art of how the kerran will ‘look’? I mean that’s no different than linking charr concept art. I don’t want to pass to many judgments yet on the overly lion king looking kerran before we see more customization but I wouldn’t want to say they are going to be the greatest thing either. I will at least give them credit in managing to do what only Blizzard and ArenaNet do by actually giving them digitigrade legs and not taking the human model and throwing a animal head and tail on it (like the poor khajiit and argonians in ESO).

I for one love the Charr, as I do beast races ever since I played Morrowind. From the first time I watched the intro video I knew I’d be rolling a few. I play my three Charr more than my one human thief, and I LOVE my thief. Still I find their current state saddening, and almost shameful. I also have to admit that I too find the lack of armor fixes to be unacceptable. This has been an ongoing issue for some time, longer than I have been playing from what I can gather from these forums. I would be willing to forgive them if these graphical error affected only a few select pieces of armor, like I was able to do in World of Warcraft with my Worgan characters, however that is not the case here.

These graphical errors affect nearly all of the available armor pieces in-game, and worse still they are also present in their Cultural armor sets. How I wonder can a developer claim to be proud of their work when armor designed specifically for a race has clipping errors, floating pieces, and pieces that appear to be completely disconnected? I will grant them that not EVERYTHING looks horrible on Charr, and or has the above issues, the Flame Legion armor is a good example of a appealing armor set that looks good. Still the Charr should not be the only race limited to their Cultural armor sets and a few select sets or pieces used to mix and match. Every single armor set that is being designed or worked on should go through intense testing to ensure that not a single piece conflicts with another piece of the same set, and is at least some what appealing on ALL races. That means Humans, Sylvari, Norn, Asura, and yes CHARR.

I find it hard to excuse this, and even harder to understand why so little has been done. The developers at ArenaNet have proven themselves to be a capable team with a lot of potential. The fact that they are one of the few companies to actually make a successful free-to-play MMO says that, however they can do better and should want to do better by both their community and themselves. We know and they know that they have the ability to do it, it just requires them to reallocate some of their resources. Better now than later after more and more armor designs have been released, thus increasing the time needed to do such a fix.

I for one would be willing to wager that the player base as a whole would gladly forgo the release of new content of any kind in favor of a large update that would address this ongoing issue along with others. I know the team at ArenaNet prides itself on being able to release new Living World content regularly. I also know that each release brings with it the promise of new events, characters, story lines, and of course Gem Store items, which means more revenue. But I think that it is time to put that aside for now in favor of some polishing. After the next release they should dedicate all their resources to bug, glitch, exploit, and graphical error fixing. Show us that they care and appreciate our time spent in their game and most of all the money spent. When the community is happy, not just the 85%, or the 15%, or the 0.00009 %, the whole community when happy spends more money.

AuldWolf.7598:

Henge.3907:

Ewwww Kerra on EQ. Yuck. Its the Charrs attitude and machinery that make me play them and their ferocious look.

That just sounds like biases, but I’d like to address some things.

Ferocious Look

You can make something look dangerous without making it look grotesque. The kerra in the image looks like it could smack you through a wall, and it doesn’t need a face that not even a mother would bring herself to love in order to do it. My main issue with this kind of base apologism is that it doesn’t take aesthetics into account.

There’s a difference between ferociousness and plain bad aesthetics. You have bad taste, that is a truth, and I’m sorry to say but it is. As an artist, I know better, and I’m very familiar with what makes for bad art. The charr constitute bad art — in their anatomy especially, which has always been appalling. If any such creature actually existed, the posture and anatomy the charr have would leave them doubled over in pain.

So yes, this is either apologism or simply pure obliviousness.

I feel that Skyrim had this problem, too. It was appealing to a minority of people who were vehement in insisting that certain elements of the game be grotesque, even though they have no interest in playing them. What happened is that we ended up with an aesthetically bad werewolf in Skyrim that didn’t look dangerous at all, it looked like a grotesque mockery, it was a laughable pantomime creature rather than a bulky, dangerous werewolf.

See the comparison here with a mod and hopefully you’ll understand.

I bet you really don’t even play beast races commonly, but you’re insisting on grotesque things because that’s what you want to see, that’s your poor taste. But what you have to think of is the people who want to play beast races. Who want to actually look good. We don’t all want to look like pantomime mockeries, we don’t want to represent poor aesthetics, we don’t want armour with crazy clipping.

You can just look around the threads on these forums past and present. There have been countless threads complaining about the anatomy, proportions, posture, aesthetics, and armour of the charr. It’s all wrong.

Everquest Next gets it right.

Technology

Yeah, technology that exists only in a few spots, an anachronism in a fantasy world. Where are their roads? Where’s their infrastructure? Where’s all this industry outside of the Black Citadel? Where, pray tell, is all of this technology? Where, outside of the Black Citadel, are the cars? Where are the trains? Where’s anything that even hints at the charr being advanced. In only a few spots do we even see any hints that they’ve come beyond their tribal stage seen in Guild Wars 1.

The representation of charr technology in the world is a joke. Example? Here’s a piece of concept art by their lead concept artist, Daniel Dociu. That looks amazing! That suggests that the charr will have helicopters, but we only see one of them in a prototype stage before the end of the game. And the in-game model for it is atrocious. It’s just bad art, it’s grotesque in really unappealing ways, it’s like someone really wanted to demean the charr as a species as much as they could.

Why don’t people play charr, ArenaNet? Look to your own art, design, and writing for the answer.

So, yes, the ‘technology’ is a joke. I’d rather the race not be technological at all, rather than being a kitten -take of technological advancement. It’s worse than the Goblins in WoW, and I never thought I’d ever have to say that about anything. Nothing should be worse than WoW.

So yes, it’s just bad art, through and through. I’m sick of seeing people being apologists about this. If we’re mindless sycophants, witless yes-men, and we just bend over to take it up the rear without ever raising a complaint, then ArenaNet will never bother fixing anything. So I’m going to continue complaining and advertising Everquest Next as an alternative.

They could fix things. That’s up to them. But as it is now I’m appalled by the state of the charr. People should have more self-respect. If this is a product you paid for with the intent of playing a charr, you should feel disgusted, that’s your right, as it is mine.

You are an artist so you know what bad art is? I would blow my nose on the Mona Lisa but the works of H.R. Giger are awesome in my opinion. Art is subjective. Have fun in EverQuest.

AuldWolf.7598:

Technology

Yeah, technology that exists only in a few spots, an anachronism in a fantasy world. Where are their roads? Where’s their infrastructure? Where’s all this industry outside of the Black Citadel? Where, pray tell, is all of this technology? Where, outside of the Black Citadel, are the cars? Where are the trains? Where’s anything that even hints at the charr being advanced. In only a few spots do we even see any hints that they’ve come beyond their tribal stage seen in Guild Wars 1.

The representation of charr technology in the world is a joke. Example? Here’s a piece of concept art by their lead concept artist, Daniel Dociu. That looks amazing! That suggests that the charr will have helicopters, but we only see one of them in a prototype stage before the end of the game. And the in-game model for it is atrocious. It’s just bad art, it’s grotesque in really unappealing ways, it’s like someone really wanted to demean the charr as a species as much as they could.

Why don’t people play charr, ArenaNet? Look to your own art, design, and writing for the answer.

So, yes, the ‘technology’ is a joke. I’d rather the race not be technological at all, rather than being a kitten -take of technological advancement. It’s worse than the Goblins in WoW, and I never thought I’d ever have to say that about anything. Nothing should be worse than WoW.

So yes, it’s just bad art, through and through. I’m sick of seeing people being apologists about this. If we’re mindless sycophants, witless yes-men, and we just bend over to take it up the rear without ever raising a complaint, then ArenaNet will never bother fixing anything. So I’m going to continue complaining and advertising Everquest Next as an alternative.

They could fix things. That’s up to them. But as it is now I’m appalled by the state of the charr. People should have more self-respect. If this is a product you paid for with the intent of playing a charr, you should feel disgusted, that’s your right, as it is mine.

I think you doesn’t understand than the helicopters in Orr are Charr’s helicopters .
All the Pact’s zeppelin are Charr’s technology , and what are you doing from all the tanks in Black Citadel ?
Except Orr the charrs do not need to use their technology because they are not at war. Moreover during the PS there are several missions where the Charr’s technology is present .

arthurobenzi.2619:

AuldWolf.7598:

Technology

Yeah, technology that exists only in a few spots, an anachronism in a fantasy world. Where are their roads? Where’s their infrastructure? Where’s all this industry outside of the Black Citadel? Where, pray tell, is all of this technology? Where, outside of the Black Citadel, are the cars? Where are the trains? Where’s anything that even hints at the charr being advanced. In only a few spots do we even see any hints that they’ve come beyond their tribal stage seen in Guild Wars 1.

The representation of charr technology in the world is a joke. Example? Here’s a piece of concept art by their lead concept artist, Daniel Dociu. That looks amazing! That suggests that the charr will have helicopters, but we only see one of them in a prototype stage before the end of the game. And the in-game model for it is atrocious. It’s just bad art, it’s grotesque in really unappealing ways, it’s like someone really wanted to demean the charr as a species as much as they could.

Why don’t people play charr, ArenaNet? Look to your own art, design, and writing for the answer.

So, yes, the ‘technology’ is a joke. I’d rather the race not be technological at all, rather than being a kitten -take of technological advancement. It’s worse than the Goblins in WoW, and I never thought I’d ever have to say that about anything. Nothing should be worse than WoW.

So yes, it’s just bad art, through and through. I’m sick of seeing people being apologists about this. If we’re mindless sycophants, witless yes-men, and we just bend over to take it up the rear without ever raising a complaint, then ArenaNet will never bother fixing anything. So I’m going to continue complaining and advertising Everquest Next as an alternative.

They could fix things. That’s up to them. But as it is now I’m appalled by the state of the charr. People should have more self-respect. If this is a product you paid for with the intent of playing a charr, you should feel disgusted, that’s your right, as it is mine.

I think you doesn’t understand than the helicopters in Orr are Charr’s helicopters .
All the Pact’s zeppelin are Charr’s technology , and what are you doing from all the tanks in Black Citadel ?
Except Orr the charrs do not need to use their technology because they are not at war. Moreover during the PS there are several missions where the Charr’s technology is present .

To be fair, Pact weaponry and vehicles came as a result of the combined effort of Asura, Charr and Human engineers. The designs, however, appear Charr-inspired.

@AuldWolf

Yeah sorry no, you’re just throwing your opinion around like it’s fact, when it’s not.

The armor is definitely bad and could be better.

My opinion on those kerran is that they look stupid, especially the face, sorry but that does not look ferocious at all, it makes it look like a cartoon lion that is more likely to want to play with you than kill you.

I also love the Charr as they are (armor aside), and wouldn’t want anything about their physical appearance (not armor) changed. Although an option in character creation to allow your Charr to choose between standing up straight (GW1 caster style) and the current hunched pose would be really nice.

Complain about the armor, sure. Don’t go shouting around that your opinion is fact and everyone else has bad taste, it makes you look like an idiot.