Now that I’ve fleshed out the basics of what the first pass of the newly-restructured CSO is going to look like (which I will detail later) in more detail, it is time to go back and refo­cus my efforts in a cou­ple of areas, namely on char­ac­ters & weapons.

(con­tinue reading…)

Now that I’ve fig­ured out ‘what’ i want to do with the char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem, the next fun part is fig­ur­ing out exactly ‘how’ it’s going to be done from the artis­tic side. The basics are essen­tially the same as the mod­u­lar weapons sys­tem that I’ve dis­cussed pre­vi­ously, with the obvi­ous added com­pli­ca­tion in that all of the var­i­ous com­po­nents are not only mod­eled but also rigged appro­pri­ately for the char­ac­ter model.
(con­tinue reading…)

So the more that I play Fallen Earth, the more that I am utterly con­vinced that I need to flesh out the char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion com­po­nent of the game even fur­ther than I have already.

(con­tinue reading…)

How impor­tant is the abil­ity to cus­tomize the look of an in-game char­ac­ter to you? Per­son­ally for me it’s a major deal. Saints Row 2 does an extremely good job of this, both in sim­ply allow­ing you to cus­tomize your char­ac­ters but also in how they have inte­grated the abil­ity to mod­ify your char­ac­ter later on in the game.
(con­tinue reading…)

So now that I’ve given up the ghost on how the char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion sys­tem is going to work in C:SO, I’d like to get some feed­back on what you as a gamer would like to see in the char­ac­ter cus­tomiza­tion system.

Now, remem­ber, in C:SO you are not craft­ing a sin­gle ‘uber’ sol­dier that will serve as your alter ego in the game (unlike most other games), what you are doing is essen­tially build­ing a cus­tom ‘clan’ or ‘fac­tion’ (to use ter­mi­nol­ogy from other games), the style of which all the sol­diers in your Unit will use as the base start­ing point through­out the game.

First, a cou­ple of caveats:

1) there are two lev­els to the cus­tomiza­tion, first is the gen­eral appear­ance (camo / insignia etc), and the sec­ond is the indi­vid­ual MOS defaults.

2) yes you can cus­tomize or oth­er­wise mod­ify these defaults dur­ing the game — so if you are going on a mis­sion that you feel will require dif­fer­ent kinds of weaponry than your MOS defaults, you will have the abil­ity to over­ride them dur­ing the mis­sion brief­ing. In addi­tion, you will be able to mod­ify the over­all makeup of your deploy­ing squads if desired. So if you think that the hostage res­cue mis­sion doesn’t require any heavy machine gun­ners, then sim­ply swap out team mem­bers as desired.

What kinds of cus­tom visu­als do you think should be included in C:SO? I’m look­ing for sug­ges­tions about any­thing from over­all style of uni­form to spe­cific details about a cer­tain type of equip­ment. Hit me with your best shot ;}

Some ideas to get you started:

1) should char­ac­ters be able to have shorts or t-shirts or should they have to wear the full BDU out­fits? What about civil­ian type cloth­ing (jeans, etc). Many spe­cial forces units adopt fairly stan­dard civil­ian cloth­ing in order to blend in.

2) what about hair­cuts — do you want to have the option for ‘non-military’ style hair­cuts (longer hair, mohawks etc) or should things be kept within the ‘mil­i­tary norm’ — ie short / box­top etc.

3) what about equip­ment — what are your thoughts about get­ting the char­ac­ters in your unit to deploy with things like water or rations / food? In a real-world spe­cial oper­a­tions mis­sion, sim­ple things like find­ing enough water to stay func­tional are cru­cially impor­tant. How­ever, in a game, this might be a lit­tle too ‘low-level’ in order to be worth it. Should this extra level of real­ism be included?

What are your thoughts? Every­one seems to have a uni­form dis­like as to how the ‘other’ recently released mil­i­tary shoot­ers have been cre­ated — let’s hear your ideas / thoughts.