54 réponses à ce sujet

[prosthetic soul]

Skinny legs that look like they would snap in two from a slight breeze? Don't let the elves skip leg day. 

Shoulders of a ten year old girl on both males and females?  Program the shoulders to be normal sized, like a human's.  Please.

 

As for the hair, for the love of Fen'harel do not give the elves the same hair styles as any of the other races.  That was easily the first and biggest mistake you made concerning the design.  These are ELVES.  They have a different culture, different way of thinking.  That should be reflected in their hairstyles too.  By homogenizing the races like that, it cuts down on the role playing immersion. Not to mention their skull structure clearly didn't work with many of the human hair options in the CC.  It just ended up looking weird. 

 

Here is my biggest suggestion to you Bioware.  Please, I am telling you this out of love for elves and role playing.  You're concentrating too much on trying to differentiate elves from the other races from the neck down when it should be the other way around.  Plus, this would save time and money on meshing outfits to particular race body types in the future.  Which I know was a bit of a struggle for you in this game.  It is quintessentially a win-win. 

 

The face, the hair, and the ears are literally the only things you should be concerned about from a design perspective.  If the formula ain't broke, don't fix it.  As much as I hate to use Sera as an example on how best to do anything, she is basically how you should be doing elves from now on.  Because unlike the other elves in the game, Sera was only an elf from the neck up.  She had normal human-sized proportions for some inexplicable reason.  And she looked the better for it. 

[Jaron Oberyn]

10/10 would read again.

[tehturian]

I like the 'humans with pointy ears' design from DAO best. Elf wardens actually looked like they could handle themselves or more to the point two handed swords. 

[actionhero112]

We should just rename them wendigos. So horribly proportioned. 

 

It's a jumpscare when Briala shows up. 

[SetecAstronomy]

I prefer my elves like I prefer my hamburgers...non-human. DAI has done the look the best for my tastes.

[pdusen]

I liked the way that they looked in DA2 best, but DAI was a good compromise. DAO was pretty awful in this respect. Elves are not humans and should not look like humans.

[devSin]

This is easily solved by not letting the protagonist be an elf in the next game.

All the NPC elves were fine.

[NoForgiveness]

I like the elves in DAI. Male elves had problems with their arms, so maybe go with Solas's model.

I would like it if there were elf specific hairs but... it seems unlikely. Especially since there wasn't even gender specific hair this time.

[prosthetic soul]

I prefer my elves like I prefer my hamburgers...non-human. DAI has done the look the best for my tastes.

Yeah, that's why they have the pointy ears. 

[sandalisthemaker]

The elf girl at Haven still freaks me out every time I see her. 

[WildOrchid]

The elf girl at Haven still freaks me out every time I see her. 

 

That one in Josie's office?

[sandalisthemaker]

That one in Josie's office?

 

No the one who is in the room at the beginning when the Inquisitor wakes up in Haven for the first time after fighting the Pride demon. 

 

Her proportions are unbelievable.  Her head is tiny and her arms and legs are sooooooo long and sooooooo thin. It looks like she's even more extreme than the standard fem elf body. 

[Darkly Tranquil]

The elf girl at Haven still freaks me out every time I see her.

Wait. That was a girl?

[duckley]

Briala's hair should actually bowl her over.....

[thats1evildude]

I liked the DA2 elves the best.

[JJDXB]

The elves in DA:4 will have the same hairstyles, because they won't be Dalish.  Or, rather, it's very unlikely that they are Dalish since we know they don't wander that far North.

 

I would prefer if they didn't do the whole humans-with-point-ears thing.  They're supposed to be more elegantly "constructed", else there would be no reason for the Orlesians to be so obsessed with their appearance and for so long.  As for the whole wirey thing they have going on, I'm goint to chalk it up to probably being a little of the old magic left in all of them.  Besides, they aren't the only ones who don't look strong enough to carry weapons. 

 

Nobody except the Qunari should be able to handle those huge metal great-axes 2H-ers swing around.  Dwarves absolutely shouldn't be handling the same bows as everyone else considering the length of their arms*.  For that matter, neither should anyone who isn't a Qunari or human male in game.  It takes a ridiculous amount of force to draw a (long)bow (especially the ones made of fricking metal), but everyone else has these spindly little arms with minimal muscle mass.

 

If you can look past these glaring issues, you can look past the Elven skeletal structure.

 

*Even if they use a scale model, the game should have punished them in terms of damage, because it shouldn't deal the same damage, but the game doesn't.

[Awkward Octopus]

The only thing that bothered me about the elves specifically were the very narrow shoulders. And even then, I'm not sure how much of that is a model issue and how much is a rigging issue. Some armor designs hid the issue, some exacerbated it. But in general, I like that the elves are visibly not-human. I wouldn't be opposed to them changing it, but I think I would be a little disappointed if they decided on pointy ears on human models.

 

Other things that bothered me I think were more universal, but more obvious on elves. For example, human women, and both genders of elves were very, very, thin. They can be slender and proportioned differently, but maybe not sooo thin. Also, some of the animations in cutscenes didn't suit the narrower frames (knees wider than hips in certain walk cycles so they look bowlegged). I would be in favor of animation sets that were in "narrow model" and "wider model" sets rather than "female" and "male" sets. The hip swing on the women was a little much (or maybe I just felt like the rotation was on the wrong joint? I don't remember, I need to look at it again...). But with "narrow" applying to women characters as well as male elves, and "wide" applying to male characters of other races (and possibly lady dwarves? I haven't played a dwarf character yet, so I don't know what I think of the proportions, here...). This way, it's not requiring additional animation work - it's still two sets of walk/run cycles.

 

That said, I imagine it would be a lot of work to have to go in and edit the mo-cap library they use for cutscenes. But, I've been a proponent of them expanding that library for a while now, so I don't feel that bad for suggesting it...

 

Well. My 2 cents, anyway.

[Ryzaki]

You don't want unique hair OP. That's how you end up looking like the qunari. *shudders*

[Guitar-Hero]

I just want them to look like they could actually handle themselves and not like anorexic urkel. They look really unhealthy   

[They call me a SpaceCowboy]

I agree on elves. Even if they look less like humans the thin thing is too much.

As an aside did anyone think they changed the approach to dwarf design? Stubby arms and legs, tiny hands. Waddle when they walk. Like they were trying to make them look like rl dwarfs

[Annos Basin]

Thin looks quite good to me!

 

These conversations about what a normal body should look like feel somehow kinda unfortunate. People around the world have different facial and body structures, and some are jerks about it. Though I can't compare people who speak about character designs directly with actual racists, so don't worry about that, these are different topics and designs is actually fun one. It just makes me wanna backlash a bit with people are allowed to look whatever they look like without complaints.

 

It's like these threads serve as extension to the playing as elf experience for getting some weird looks.

 

It's nice to have an alternative to sturdy body type, and elven lore is so interesting (for both good and embarrassing parts) I like at this point playing as an elf regardless looks (if it still will be an option in future). I think my fave designs were in DA2, I overall enjoyed bit stylished look of the game, and think continuing with that might had provided interesting possibilities for animations without getting so graphics heavy. But whatever, since DAI looked even better on many parts. Elfquisitors had maybe surprisingly long arms and legs (weren't they as tall as humans? - but as I said elf made easily the best playthrough). Then again I didn't have to see the mashed arm bug with my male elf, even while having other problems with my PS3 version. Elves in DAO were just mundane looking. Not bad otherwise but you could mistake them for human teenagers.

[WildOrchid]

No the one who is in the room at the beginning when the Inquisitor wakes up in Haven for the first time after fighting the Pride demon. 

 

Her proportions are unbelievable.  Her head is tiny and her arms and legs are sooooooo long and sooooooo thin. It looks like she's even more extreme than the standard fem elf body. 

 

Oooohhhh that one. Yeah.

 

Wait. That was a girl?

 

Seriously? Didn't you see it was a girl? Come on.

[Serza]

*gets drunk*

[Darkly Tranquil]

Nobody except the Qunari should be able to handle those huge metal great-axes 2H-ers swing around.  Dwarves absolutely shouldn't be handling the same bows as everyone else considering the length of their arms*.  For that matter, neither should anyone who isn't a Qunari or human male in game.  It takes a ridiculous amount of force to draw a (long)bow (especially the ones made of fricking metal), but everyone else has these spindly little arms with minimal muscle mass.

Bioware, (and videogames in general), are notoriously poor at accurately representing medieval weapons, so complaining about the historical accuracy of fantasy weapons on fantasy races seems fairly redundant. In the end, gameplay mechanics invariably trump historical accuracy, so there's not much point in trying to introduce realism where it really doesn't apply.

[The Oracle]

To be fair, considering the different types of metal used in their construction, we don't know how much these weapons actually weigh. Maybe Silverite weights as much as aluminium but is stronger than steel? We tend to lean towards our real-life knowledge but we can't really do that when our weapons are made of metals not present in our world.