Monday, December 29, 2008

Character Reconstruction

Blizzard introduced character reconstruction a few weeks ago. This is the paid service to change all the cosmetic details about your character even the ones that can't be performed in a barber's chair. To the point that even the gender, facial features and piercings/tattoos can be changed. For me, this is not a service that makes sense. When I build a character, I think carefully about the gender of the character, the name and even the hairstyles and faces. I've made only a few changes to select characters at the barber shop. For me, this service isn't necessary.

I mean, I have a pretty recognizable theme going on as far as naming conventions goes. I started with the root of *brem* and modify spellings, add suffixes, add infixes, add prefixes (although I've not done this yet) and have a new name. The sad truth, here are my characters: Bremm, Brem, Brehm, Bremagorn, Bremette, Bremador, Bremstar, Bremmie, Bremma, and Bremtanica. That's 10. If there's a "brem" online in my guild -- It's me. And I've chosen genders (only two females) very carefully. Bremette (the gnome warlock) is female because I wanted the poofy pigtails and Bremma (the draenei shaman) is female because the male draenei just turn me off. So that's that.

And if Blizzard is truly going to offer gender reassignment, shouldn't they make the characters live for a year as the opposite gender?

2 comments:

neshura said...

"...characters live for a year as the opposite gender?"

Seriously. Snorting painfully hot coffee is NOT GOOD for my sinuses.

Thinking of my ex-roommate as a preop wow toon just made my head explode. So now, there's a fountain of hot coffee and braaaaains all over Panera. Thanks, Brem!

Ironhelm said...

On the other hand, I think they have done a wonderful thing by offering this service. One day you can be a hot little number and the next (month) a solid wall of muscle.

No seriously, it allows folks to make changes to things you grew out of or did not really ever grow into.

Also, often the shading on the skin tones is different in the light of the character gen screen and the 'white light' of the in game -- Tauren dark tones and Troll blues come to mind.

They could seriously take it one step further and allow a race change (not class). Race changes would not change what gear or weapons you can use. Just what racials you have. Not at all imbalancing. Of course, you could only change to a race that your class can be.

This would allow folks to change races within their own faction and even switch factions - hence you would have the pvp server constraint of not changing faction unless it was the only toon on the server.