Yeah minor quibble, cant play aliens in a star wars game. Let's make sure we get the homosexual romance story lines in though, top priority.
There's a lot more that needs fixing, especially in terms of content, before I would say that playable aliens need to be on the front-burner. You do know why they likely won't even bother right? I'll give you a hint... the 4th pillar.
This isnt going the same way, its way past WHO already. WHO missed its chance for a breath of new players through F2P, at least TOR dared that step so the few people still paying a sub have players to group with.
See, that's the thing that gets me. I could really understand if it was a smaller studio that decided to cut some corners with the races, but tens of millions of dollars were sunk into this. The best they could come up with were a bunch of bland, recolored humans? No Bothans, Ithorians, or Wookiees? I think they would've even benefited by havinglessraces since blue, red, grey, etc. just makes the laziness even more apparent.
I do have to wonder who was responsible for what decisions. There was a lot of talk after the fact about LucasArts being one of the big driving forces behind NGE in SWG. You'd think they'd learn from their mistakes after WoWifying that game didn't turn out to be the massive success they'd hoped, but it's not like LucasArts has proven themselves to be great at making games in recent years. Then again, despite the BioWare name slapped on the box, it wasn't really BioWare's A-team, but a team built specifically for this project (with several people from SWG, oddly enough). And, of course, EA doesn't have the best track record when it comes to MMOs.
Except that's not the real reason why the races are limited to humanoid-with-different-head syndrome. It's all of the reasons outlined above in that making different looking races requires more animation/art work. Once you decide that element X isn't going to be in the game for budget reasons, it's not hard to bullshit 100 other companion reasons as to why it's not in the game.
very is the answer to both how hard and how expensive if we're talking about Bioware especially since they've managed to find a way to make the least amount of content that can be made for the greatest price. I doubt that Bioware has anyone employed that could properly model, rig, texture or have the competence to code a non-humanoid character for the shit-box that is the Hero engine. They only included humanoid playable characters because the engine supports that out of the box, you actually have to put a bit of effort in to make an alien one work.
It's not necessarily a point of making them playable. That's easy enough. It's the sustainability thereof. Anytime they add new armor, it becomes an additional set they have to create since one usually can't just be copied to a different shaped body and still look right. Animations generally would also require additional work due to problems with clipping. Basically, any race you create increases the work artists and animators have to do. I would speculate many of those alien NPCs you see in the game have a very few number of sets of armor they can wear and animations they use. It's likely some of the lesser used ones were even modeled with the armor on.
Thats a pic from a Special MTV Drug Dealers Cribbs show I saw.
When your putting out content now that looks as well done as Heriotze's avatar pic, and charging 18 bucks for it... It's game over.
