Is there any plans of making individual skins for each class and/or hybrids? It’s been a while since I’ve been around so I don’t know if it’s something that is still talked about.
Personally I’d LOVE it. I mean, it might seem like a small detail, but it just makes the characters come into their own, and gives you that very important feeling of being distinct, which unfortunately is one of the areas in which GD is lacking. I know the end game gear kinda has made up for it over time, but it’s still not the same.
Movement attacks and more interactive skills (which it seems we are getting with the expansion, go WW!) and individual class designs would put GD over the top.
Why would you need class skins? Your character is either male or female and then you’re going to cover them in armour. And there’s always the Illusionist to change your looks with as well, if you have the Ashes of Malmouth expansion.
Well, it’s a preference that’s appealing. As I said, it might seem like a small detail to you, but it can make a big impact in reality. Think about it.
There is a reason why the Necromancer looked like it did in D2, or the Barbarian, or any of the other characters, and why those characters became iconic. Having distinct character designs is one of the staples of the genre. I understand why it has not been on the top of priorities for the devs, although I think that it very well could have been, but handwaving it away with “well you have armor” is a poor argument and a failure to understand the nature of the roleplaying aspect of (A)RPG’s. It makes the characters you create feel alive and different from the rest, and it gives them a personality. It’s all about feeling immersed.
GD is such a great game that it has managed very well while opting to “neglect” that aspect of character creation, but I’m sure it would bring even more people in if that was included down the road. I don’t know how feasable it is now, or how much work it would be, but I’d be interested to find out.
In D2/3 you have one fixed class and use items of that specific class only. That does not really work with TQ or GD, as your class is not as strict (and there are a ton more combinations than there are classes in Diablo).
You could just as well ask when D3 allows the Sorceress to use the Barbarians weapons… it makes no sense the way the game is designed
If you want to look a certain way, use the Illusionist.
Exactly this. A pet Conjurer isn’t going to look or play the same as a poison/acid damage dealing Conjurer.
In D2/3 your class is pre-determined and there’s nothing much you can do to change it. In GD the many variations you can have in a class makes a set skin irrelevant. And the devs certainly aren’t going to make dozens and dozens of skins to match every possible type of character class just for comestic reasons which what this is really as far as GD is concerned. D2/3 has how many classes - 9 or so? Currently GD has 36 including the single masteries and the new Oathkeeper mastery will add even more to that total. And that’s without considering the many variations each class can have.
If you want to look a certain way the Illusionist is the NPC to talk to.
Says who? You? I’ve already laid out what I think is attractive about the idea, if you disagree then make an argument instead of getting your panties in a knot.
Thanks for the first somewhat reasonable response. I’ll address it in the response to medea underneath.
I see your point, the masteries are adding up now. I disagree with that a pet conjurer would need to look different than an acid dealing one, in order for this to work. The conjurer skin could be the same, the items and skills would change the expression of the type.
I looked back in my post history and saw that I’ve suggested this before, including back in 2015. This was my comment in regards to skins:
“Again, back to the blandness. It’s quite obvious that the higher tier items you get, the more distinct the character will look(I absolutely love the antlers on the helmet for the Wildcaller Shaman set. We need more of that!! More character pieces) but personally I feel that it would be awesome if each class and hybrid class had their own skin. Now, now, I know it’s not a priority, but I feel it would add a lot and make characters more unique and different from each other. Perhaps you could choose a class as soon as you made a new character, each class with a different skin. Then, after choosing a second class, the skin would morph somewhat to the hybrid. Perhaps customizing your characters as has been suggested would suffice. Whatever happens, I really do not think that a single default man and woman skin is cutting it.”
And this was medierra’s graceful response:
[i]"See above about classic budget excuse. I’m actually about to email another animator about doing some contract work because our full-time guy probably can’t finish everything on his list by the end of development. While this sort of customization would be awesome, it’s just way out of scope for a project this size (at least, unless we cut a lot of other stuff that I think is a much better payoff for players). It’s also a ton of work for what I think is not a huge payoff. If you think it’s low-priority, than there are probably a lot of other things we could invest money in before this, assuming we had more to throw around.
To give you an idea, the budget for just art, animation and design, on TQ was about 4x the entire project budget for GD and TQ didn’t even have that level of customization."[/i]
So with GDs scope getting bigger and bigger, and the budget improving, the question is, is it feasable to make skins now or does the number of masteries simply make it too time consuming? I would still love to see it.
I btw, also suggested voice overs, movement skills and movement attack skills (including WW and others), auto pickup of certain components, variety in skills and animations, not having to let go of attack to weapon switch, casting traps in place even if they are targeted out of range instead of the character forcably walking to the area (which completely slowed down the gameplay) and so on. A few of them had simular pushback as the responses in this thread, however they all made it into the game.
I love GD, I have played it since the beta before act 1 was finished and I have over 2600 hours of gameplay in it. No need for the fans to get defensive.
Personally I fail to see the benifit of spending the amount of time required to create (and design in the first place) the sheer number of skins required for this, not only because Crate are a very small team and thus working on this means other things get delayed/dropped, but my main reason against it is basically, your char is hidden under armour after the first few minutes of playing, so I consider this concept to be a waste of Crate’s time.
Again, I’m afraid the answer would be no. Crate Entertainment is still a small team (13-14 people) and their priority atm is getting the new GD expansion done and also the new town building game they’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Zantai has also said that unless Forgotten Gods sells extremely well, it’s probably the last big expansion for the game. They will probably add some smaller new content after release and will of course continue to support the game, but the team has been working on GD for around 6 years now and would like to try their hand at something different too.
As for the rest, auto-pickup of components (no), as far as I know you can’t switch weapons until the animation is finished or did that change somewhere along the way again. Iirc the devs deliberately changed it from TQ’s instant change to a delayed one. Can’t remember if hold shift and cast was always a thing or not.
Each mastery has already access to at least one specific blue items set and one specific legendary set (the five-pieces set that gives +2 to all skills from one mastery), and there’s nearly one specific legendary set for each combination of masteries. I’d say that all of these count as “skins” (although you’d have to acquire them first, but that’s another topic). Frankly, what more do you want?
At some point people will realize they don’t need to respond to posts.
I think Crate can figure out for themselves whether they can implement a suggestion, though the suggestion needs to be fairly detailed/specific. Otherwise, the devs won’t have anything to decide on and it will die with the thread.
Just a thought as I see this thread going in a bad direction.
The time constraint at this point is a fair argument for not doing it. The armor thing I would still disagree with, because by that logic making character models in any RPG game would be obsolete. If you you take that line of thinking to the extreme, you could just have a single model for all enemies in the game, which I’m sure you wouldn’t want.
GD has amazing artwork, which goes to show that a lot of thought is already put into other aspects of the visual worldbuilding.
I think Forgotten Gods will do very well, but even with that I can understand the need to move on. These guys have been doing this for a LONG time now.
Isn’t auto pickup being toggled for the new expansion? I thought I saw that in a preview video. Yeah weapon animation for a single attack still needs to be finished before you can switch, but a few years ago you had to let go of the attack button or it just wouldn’t switch before you released it and initated the attack again with the other weapon slots. The deliberate change to remove the instant switch that was in TQ, I was not a fan of, but I understand why they did it and I think this is a decent middle ground.
I was expecting the backlash. As long as there’s a reasonable discussion and exhanging of ideas then that’s alright. We have different priorities and may appreciate things differently. I do find the “attacks” with “NO!” and “what more do you want” a little bit ridiculous though.
I also get that a more detailed suggestion would be approriate, but I haven’t been around for a while and I didn’t know if it was already talked about. In my qoute I posted earlier in this thread, which medierra answered, it was a bit more concrete.
The classes are fairly generic in what they do. So I don’t know how one would design class specific skins (gear?).
Besides that, the devs have already designed and created lots of items to help players customize their character’s look. Then, they added the Illusionist which allows people to easily make their character look like what they want.
The player has to play the game in order to unlock more illusions. This gets to the “experience” factor of being able to look cool at later levels, i.e. improving.
All of what you want already exists, except for it being based on the class.
IMHO, based on the above, it seems the current system is far more flexible in allowing players to customize how their character looks - at least as gear goes.
Edit - After having read the posts after mine and re-reading the thread, it improved my understanding that your request is for a skin of the character and how it looks without gear. To me, I was thinking of skins for the gear that was based on the character’s class. That’s what I was interpreting, which apparently was wrong.
Auto-pickup is limited to iron and health/mana potions, that’s it and has been for a long time. Zantai’s said in several streams they’re not adding it for anything else. You’ll find his stream replies to this in these threads:
just to clarify my initial response, I am not opposed to the idea, but GD’s design makes this prohibitively expensive, so I do not see this ever happening
I’m not sure how class skins would fundamentally fit into the game given the way you learn masteries.
Would your character suddenly transform at level 2 and again when you select a second mastery? Seems a bit jarring. :undecided:
Having unique class skins makes more sense in a game where you select a class at character creation (ex. Diablo 2). What would probably be more appropriate for us is if we had character customization at creation in a Grim Dawn 2.
As has been brought up, we’ve elected to offer customization through a massive selection of unique gear and the Illusionist, features that have a larger impact in the end since any character customization quickly ends up hidden underneath gear.
We do understand though that players want to make their characters look a certain way as it makes them more personal, so that is certainly something we’ll be discussing if/when there is a Grim Dawn 2. It is simply too late in the game’s cycle to be considering it now, especially given how many characters players have rolled at this point.
Yeah the implementation of skins would be a little tricky with the way the game is set up. Maybe choosing a mastery with its own skin when creating a character, and then transmorphing when choosing a second mastery, or transmorphing both times (although that would make the initial skin VERY redundant). I understand where you are coming from however and character customization at creation does sound more reasonable.
I remember back when the GD beta was starting up and it was discussed a lot that it would be a great feature to have, but that it was something that would be considered further down the road. I’d love to see it in GD2 if that gets made, which I hope it does. You guys do great work.
I’m a newbie so maybe I’m missing something here… if I play with friends, will all the characters look the same (eg all male characters look exactly the same, all females look the same?)
I’ll look up the illusionist comment above, as I’m hoping I can customise my character.
Update - Illusionist is a transmog NPC, so maybe no character customisation in game. I don’t mind when playing solo but may be a bit weird with a group.
Your character is either male or female and then you’re going to cover them in armour. And there’s always the Illusionist to change your looks with as well, if you have the Ashes of Malmouth expansion.