Thought for the day.

Let’s all close our eyes…

Hmm, on second thoughts, I probably should have put the rest of the post first, because now half of you are sitting there in front of your PC screen with your eyes closed.

We’ll just wait for them to realise their mistake. Won’t be long I’m sure. In the meantime, I want the rest of you to absolutely, categorically not picture Gordon Brown outside the front door to Number 10 dancing naked to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.

Ah the rest of you are back, jolly good.

Let’s all – after having finished reading the rest of this post – close our eyes and just try to picture for a moment the developer meeting that first came up with “You know what players would really like in a character creator? They’d absolutely love it if we chose that as the moment to show off our character animation system! I know, we’ll have the characters jive around as though their most sensitive erogenous zones are being fed upon by fire ants! Oh! Oh! And if the player zooms in on the character’s head, well that’s the perfect time to have the character demonstrate the ‘Trying to Follow A Fly Around the Room’ animation”.

It was probably the same people who thought that having quest-giving NPCs run off on an escort mission as part of their quest chain would be fun for all the family. Five times I tried to hand in a quest as other people clattered in and set the NPC running off down the hill to get slaughtered for the umpteenth time.

In entirely unrelated character creation news, I added Normal Girl MkII to the bottom of my previous post.

Also, does anyone know which circle of hell was full of people forever making characters in an MMO? I need to know how much rope I shall require to climb out of here.

4 thoughts on “Thought for the day.

  1. Ysharros

    Your skill at metaphor is unparalleled. I bow to your awesome greatness. Fire ants! Hah!

    Oh and don’t even bother trying to get to that Circle (it’s the 17th, btw). It’s kinda full these days. I should know, I’ve got a flat with views of the lava-spews and special extra char slots.

  2. Magson

    /agree that it’s really annoying to be trying to get that character slider in a place where it actually looks good and then the character animates and you suddenly can’t see what you’re doing.

    EQ2’s guilty of this. The humanoid characters aren’t too bad, but the Sarnak’s twist all the way off the viewing area. But I’ve got all my slots filled now and therefore won’t be making any more so it’s a moot point for me there. We’ll see what the future holds with other games, though.

  3. Melmoth

    @Ysh: 17th?! Blimey it seems to have sunk a bit since I was last there in City of Heroes. I’m going to need a lot of rope. Oh, Rope Man, now there’s a good character concept…

    @Magson: It’s certainly not ubiquitous yet, but it does seem to be a rising trend. I’m just not sure who was the first to think that it was a good idea. Trying to adjust facial features whilst the character randomly switches between looking over its shoulder and up at the ceiling is rather frustrating, to say the least.

    @pjharvey: I have encountered many MMOs which animate whilst you are adjusting the sliders, and so your sensible option does not seem to be a standard as of yet, alas. To be honest though, any animation is frustrating, even when not specifically adjusting options, because I might be trying to get an overview of the character to check proportions and such, and I can’t do so when it starts jiving around. I can already view various angles using the interface, so I don’t need it to animate. If they want to show-off animations on that screen then perhaps a button to trigger them would be preferable to random bouts of fidgeting.

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