I've started to write a lengthy rant about the many failures of Elder Scrolls Online, but threw it away because everything had already been said by before? and because I'm not exactly qualified to comment on the details since I haven't even played ESO myself - I'm just a disappointed potential buyer. However, there's one thing I have rarely seen mentioned, if at all:
ESO's character creation/models is widely praised, but it is not worthy of praise at all. It is lazy.
Sure, there are plenty of options to customize your character in all sorts of ways (up to your buttocks size), which is nice [although not without problems [footnote] Having many sliders for just about every body feature, and thus an infinitely large number of different body meshes, means that armors & clothes have to be stretched and warped, automatically, in order to fit all those different meshes. That tends to give armors a very elastic, neoprene-suit-like look. Armors tend to look less like the somewhat heavy, bulky, rigid pieces of equipment they (often), less like items that are worn, and more like a thick layer of paint applied to the bodies. It doesn't help that even heavy armor visibly expands and retracts with breathing in and out either. And that's exactly how armors often look in ESO too. It often doesn't feel authentic, real, it feels cheap. I would assume that you could mostly avoid this cheap spandex look if you put enough effort into it, but ESO apparently did not.[/footnote], but many other MMOs and RPGs offer that too, even cheap F2P cash grabs like Neverwinter, so it's nothing really exceptional.
The thing that stands out about ESO's character models, however, is how lazy they are. All playable races share the same male & female body. It's literally a human body with a different head slapped on top (and sometimes a tail too) and wrapped in a different texture. You'd think that for example cat people would look somehow feline, more svelte, and have cat-like feet, but nope, in ESO, it's all the same. Khajiit, Orc, human, Argonian - makes no difference. In other MMOs, you get giants and dwarfes, cows and plants, orcs, and all sorts of other weird, unique creatures; in ESO, you only get white humans, black humans, green humans, humans with pointy ears, and humans with cat and lizard heads & tails.
Sure character creation was exactly the same in Skyrim in this regard, but is there some law stating that ESO mustn't improve upon previous Elder Scrolls titles in any way? And, compared to Skyrim, even the heads of the humanoid races look more alike in ESO as well. Less disctinct, more generic, less like Elder Scrolls.
Judging from watching gameplay footage, I couldn't notice much, if any, difference in the animations of the different races either. They all seem to move in the same way. And poorly on top - the animations look pretty clunky in general. So not only does ESO have only one skeleton to animate (at least by the looks of it), no, they're not even putting any effort into animating this single skeleton. ESO's animations look like they belong into much older games.
All in all there's just no real effort put into character models. What does it matter if you can customize your Khajiit in many different ways if you always be a human with a cat head at the end of the day? It's just lazy, disappointing, and not worthy of a game coming out in 2014 asking you to pay 60$ upfront and then 15$ every month.
ESO's character creation/models is widely praised, but it is not worthy of praise at all. It is lazy.
Sure, there are plenty of options to customize your character in all sorts of ways (up to your buttocks size), which is nice [although not without problems [footnote] Having many sliders for just about every body feature, and thus an infinitely large number of different body meshes, means that armors & clothes have to be stretched and warped, automatically, in order to fit all those different meshes. That tends to give armors a very elastic, neoprene-suit-like look. Armors tend to look less like the somewhat heavy, bulky, rigid pieces of equipment they (often), less like items that are worn, and more like a thick layer of paint applied to the bodies. It doesn't help that even heavy armor visibly expands and retracts with breathing in and out either. And that's exactly how armors often look in ESO too. It often doesn't feel authentic, real, it feels cheap. I would assume that you could mostly avoid this cheap spandex look if you put enough effort into it, but ESO apparently did not.[/footnote], but many other MMOs and RPGs offer that too, even cheap F2P cash grabs like Neverwinter, so it's nothing really exceptional.
The thing that stands out about ESO's character models, however, is how lazy they are. All playable races share the same male & female body. It's literally a human body with a different head slapped on top (and sometimes a tail too) and wrapped in a different texture. You'd think that for example cat people would look somehow feline, more svelte, and have cat-like feet, but nope, in ESO, it's all the same. Khajiit, Orc, human, Argonian - makes no difference. In other MMOs, you get giants and dwarfes, cows and plants, orcs, and all sorts of other weird, unique creatures; in ESO, you only get white humans, black humans, green humans, humans with pointy ears, and humans with cat and lizard heads & tails.
Sure character creation was exactly the same in Skyrim in this regard, but is there some law stating that ESO mustn't improve upon previous Elder Scrolls titles in any way? And, compared to Skyrim, even the heads of the humanoid races look more alike in ESO as well. Less disctinct, more generic, less like Elder Scrolls.
Judging from watching gameplay footage, I couldn't notice much, if any, difference in the animations of the different races either. They all seem to move in the same way. And poorly on top - the animations look pretty clunky in general. So not only does ESO have only one skeleton to animate (at least by the looks of it), no, they're not even putting any effort into animating this single skeleton. ESO's animations look like they belong into much older games.
All in all there's just no real effort put into character models. What does it matter if you can customize your Khajiit in many different ways if you always be a human with a cat head at the end of the day? It's just lazy, disappointing, and not worthy of a game coming out in 2014 asking you to pay 60$ upfront and then 15$ every month.
