Feel the Wind Beneath Your Wings with the Aerakyn Player Race!

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by Afista_DG, Nov 4, 2014.

  1. Covic Developer

    We all watch the threads as much as we can, our costumer opinions are very important to us. We enjoy making the game and enjoy making our players happy. On art we usually look for broken issues and fix them as fast as we can if possible. Some devs may not respond in the forums but are definitely fixing issues they see.
    Tom is a little more outspoken and enjoys the relationships he has built with our players, so you will see him much more here. He is a great voice for the art team.

    Dave
    Xirena and HaphazardAllure like this.
  2. Covic Developer

    For the Aerakyn we clamped down some on the amount of bone customization to keep the characters from becoming crazy ugly but allowed a huge range of color for scales, hair and skin. They also have multiple horn patterns and hair combos. We wanted the customization to be noticeable from a distance, what would give us the most variety during normal game play.

    They are the most complicated characters we have tech wise. They have separate heads that allow for higher res maps and horn patterns that look part of the skin. They have two tint channels on the base character for skin and scale, other races are a flood of color through the whole body. The Aerakyn have more color variety in the base skin from light skin to dark skin, to some purplish and green skin. Then the scales have a full color wheel, as do the eyes.

    They have unique animations like the freeblood, but also have wings that have been animated with other base animations. They are easily our most customizable characters although we did limit the range you can make the nose or cheeks bigger compared to some characters. You will also get other wing geo as you level the character, that can be used in the appearance slot.

    Overall we wanted our new race to use everything we have learned over the years that will work within our current engine, and the job that our artist, Chris Atkins along with animations by Tom Tobey is amazing. And that is just the art side, the number of hours that code and design put in to make these guys work with what we wanted to do is crazy. Getting automated code to fix 10 years of armor assets to work on a new model makes my brain smoke.

    Dave
  3. Faery Member

    With a little bit of work , i managed to get a very pretty noble Aerakyn ( yay ! cute long pink hair ! )
    But ....Why this ugly voice ? :(
  4. Raistlyn Active Member

    Yeah when you go into more detail I guess the customization is there, I just wanted to change the face a bit more =). I pretty much always played fae/arasai before this but prefer more human-sized/bigger characters. Since Aerakyn have awesome looking wings and proportion, I really love it and will be making them from now on haha.
  5. Pixilicious Well-Known Member

    They can sit.
  6. Pixilicious Well-Known Member

    But i been looking everywhere for the aerakyn mentor .... no luck yet
  7. Pixilicious Well-Known Member


    haha mine have long pink hair too :)
  8. Tierisch Well-Known Member

    Yeah I removed that right away from my monk. It just looked awkward IMHO.
  9. Sapphirius Well-Known Member

    I really like the customization of the aerakyn... but I'm not so much in love with the human-model body. There's no SOGA option to retreat to if you don't like the human model either.

    SOE was going to get $67 of my money for the noble race, a race change, and a name change, but instead, I stopped at $20 for the standard race. I shouldn't have after I heard a lot of um unpleasant critiques about their appearance and human bodies with "glued sokokar wings" I think was the expression used? (I wanted a better look at them, and I couldn't find any aerakyn nearby to study.)

    After buying the standard race, I saw that they're not the sleek, elegant aerakyn of ToV. These are larger and stockier, and they're just not very appealing to me. I'm on the fence as to whether or not I'll upgrade to noble. I dunno. I paid for the standard race, so I'll keep the alt, but I'm thinking my main will remain froglok.

    These new aerakyn that don't much resemble their cousins in ToV just aren't for me.
    Tierisch likes this.
  10. Finwen New Member

    I love the new race. Thank you so much for it. They are looking awesome.
    Great customization, very beautiful, and all animations so far are gorgeous.
    It all feels so smooth, considered and well done.
    Wing Attacks looks great. I hope there will be no changes.

    I am, for once, a very happy customer. Amazing Job you've done there!
    Just love them Aerakyn!

    I think its the mounted stance when they won't sit down for camping.
    ttobey likes this.
  11. Finwen New Member

    Wings take over the color from hair/scale and skin (lower part)
  12. Pixilicious Well-Known Member

    yeah, well too bad :(, but even if skin is really dark the bottom of the wings still kinda orange to me .. /sigh
  13. Tierisch Well-Known Member

    Very well said. My main beef is that no matter how hard you try you can't get the look of the ToV Aerakyn.
    Sapphirius likes this.
  14. Pixilicious Well-Known Member

    If I put Valorous wings in cloak slot and hide the cloak it hides the wings, and also if flying it looks like I'm flying without any wings or a mount hehe :)
  15. VicariousExp New Member

    I don't really like the human model body either, but if we're going to talk aesthetics, you might want to do something about the character creation screen LoD for male Aerakyn.

    I'm not sure if it's meant to be some sort of sexist aethestic standard, but male Aerakyn look positively haggard and wrinkly (check out those eyebags and forehead wrinkles) - unlike other older models, there's no age slider, so you're stuck with all male aerakyn looking 50+ while the female aerakyn are disturbingly smooth skinned and look like they're in their early 20s. It's not easy to wave away with dimorphism when there's already a huge bias in fantasy/gaming against the representation any woman over the age of 30. You do realise that females can also be old and unappealing, right?

    Maybe you could explain it away lorewise by making them sequential hermaphrodites like reverse clownfish (i.e. they all start out female and then turn male when they age), but it wouldn't really hurt to have some sort of consistency with age or adding back the age sliders if you absolutely have to go with the old models (and make them age more gracefully than the non-SOGA shriveled-prune female barbarian faces).
    Tierisch and Sapphirius like this.
  16. Sapphirius Well-Known Member

    That should be looked at, yes. I looked at the male model tonight and cringed. Beyond the aesthetics (and how disconcerting I find the human models to be) the animations themselves are very nice. I ran around on my baby aerakyn and rather liked how she moved and the way her wings interacted. I mean that I really really liked it.

    I just can't get over the shape and size of her body. She's big and stocky and not very elegant. It's very jarring after the ToV aerakyn. Perhaps I'll get more used to it in time.
  17. Xirena Member

    Perhaps they might have looked better if the Freeblood had been used as a base. I have a couple of them and think they'd look fantastic with horns. Their bodies are neither super-skinny nor old-model human lumpy.

    Oh well, it is what it is, and right now, it's keeping my money in my pocket on this one.
    Pixilicious and Tierisch like this.
  18. Sapphirius Well-Known Member

    Perhaps, yes. There's never been a whole lot of positive feedback about the original human models, male or female. I myself don't mind them. I played a human for years, in original model even. I've learned which looks flatter human females and which do not. It's just that cognitive dissonance sets in. We've been seeing those sleek, elegant aerakyn with their elven-styled bodies... and now we have big, stocky aerakyn with their human-styled bodies.

    Ah well, I've said my piece, more than my piece. Their animations? Love it. Their customization? Love it. Their appearance? Uh, like the top, not the bottom.
    Tierisch likes this.
  19. Tierisch Well-Known Member

    Ohh I wonder if that works with other wings too. I will have to try that out.
  20. Tierisch Well-Known Member

    I actually play quite a few human characters. I've found just the right look for my gals now, that I just love them. When I heard of the Aerakyn race, I immediately thought of making myself a copy of that sexy beast Daeron Ashenwing. Well I didn't even get close. And yes, the males look ridiculously old and worn out.